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On Veterans Day, Donald Trump could’ve used his social media platform to honor those who’ve served in the military. Instead, the former president published a missive in which he vowed to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country.”
The phrasing had unsettling historical antecedents. Indeed, Hitler and Mussolini used eerily similar dehumanization rhetoric, though that didn’t stop the Republican from echoing his message soon after at an event in New Hampshire.
It’s against this backdrop that Trump has also repeatedly argued that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing similar phrasing used by Adolf Hitler.
But as breathtaking as it is to see the Republican Party’s likely presidential nominee publicly echoing “Mein Kampf,” it’s worth appreciating why Trump is doing this.
Part of this, of course, is an extension of the former president running on an overtly authoritarian platform, complete with ambitions of a “Day One” dictatorship. But just as important is coming to terms with the political implications: Trump echoes fascists with the comfort of knowing that such rhetoric will work. The Des Moines Register published this report over the weekend:
Many likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers have no issue with several of Trump’s recent controversial statements, a new Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll has found — and more often than not, they say the same statements make them more likely to support the former president.
According to the survey results, 42% of likely GOP caucusgoers said Trump’s “poisoning the blood” rhetoric makes them more likely to support the former president’s candidacy. The same poll found that 43% of likely Republican caucusgoers are more likely to support him because of his fascistic references to American “vermin.”
The data dovetails with a national Fox News poll that asked respondents: “Some people say things in the U.S. are so far off track that we need a president willing to break some rules and laws to set things right, while others say the president should always follow the rules and laws. Which comes closest to your view?”
The survey found that 30% of self-identified Trump voters — nearly a third — were on board with a president who operates outside “rules and laws.”
I hope you caught Rachel’s A block from last night, because it helped clarify the GOP front-runner’s motivations.
In theory, pointing out that Trump is echoing Hitler ought to be enough to discourage him, based on the norms of contemporary American politics. In practice, that obviously isn’t working: When the former president is told his rhetoric is reminiscent of notorious fascists, he repeats the words and phrases anyway.
But dictators and authoritarians have long used this rhetoric because they’ve found it to be effective. The words are toxic and dehumanizing, but they work with much — too much — of their intended audience.
If GOP voters were repulsed by disgusting and divisive rhetoric, Trump would know not to use it. Indeed, the former president is afraid to use the word “vaccine” out loud precisely because he has heard his own followers boo him.
But as Republican politics becomes more radical, the party’s voters don’t boo words like “vermin” and “poisoning the blood”; they applaud such language and want to hear more of it.
“It’s not just a bad and dangerous thing he’s doing that you can stop him from doing by pointing out that it’s bad and dangerous,” Rachel said. “This kind of rhetoric — trying to turn Americans not just against each other but to the idea that some people among us are so dangerous that they must be exterminated, that some threats to us justify terminating the Constitution, that justify being a dictator if only for a day — this is the sort of thing that has a political point.
“It is designed to make you believe that a democratic system with checks and balances, and the constraint of the rule of law, and elections where people are voted out sometimes, and divided power within government, those things are not up to stopping these terrible evils that threaten us — the terrible threat that some people among us pose to the rest of us.
“This stuff is tactically efficient. It’s designed to make us think that we need a strong man. We need a tough man. We don’t need a legal system in all its constraints. We don’t need a court system. We don’t really need a political process. We don’t need politicians. We don’t need Congress. We need strength, will, action, revenge, broken rules, maybe even violence.
“These statements are not just supposed to shock you, they’re supposed to work on you, to make you believe we need something new and extreme to deal with our terrible problems, if only for a little while — maybe just a temporary dictatorship. And these tactics have a terrible history of working really well.”