In September, seeking the presidency again, Trump said: "We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store."
In November, it continued. Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:
"Four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump declared on Truth Social (on Veterans Day weekend, no less) that 'the radical left thugs ... live like vermin within the confines of our country.' He repeated the invective during an appearance in New Hampshire. As Forbes pointed out, 'The former president’s incendiary rhetoric invokes a term frequently used by Nazis to dehumanize Jews, including a 1939 quote attributed to Hitler: ‘This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies.’'"
In response to people who pointed out the comparison with Hitler’s rhetoric, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said: "Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome...their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House."
Our sad, miserable existence will be crushed? That rhetoric is also supposed to demonstrate how Trump's not a Nazi?
This too is what I hear when the MAGA folk refer to "trans activists," "trans extremists," or "radical trans." There is no such thing. It's a synonym for "radical left," "thugs," and "vermin," which is to say it attaches to nothing whatsoever in the real world. It is a language hammer of dehumanization. The more specific the speaker gets, the more precisely they're telling you exactly who they want to kill.
This is explicit. Below, "globalists," "Communists," and "Marxists" mean Jews. Donald Trump and Elon Musk embolden each other.
Here's another place to see Trump's November 19 post (quoted in Salon.com): “2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!”
"We have a political party that sees value in division and hatred, even when it is unjustified or ridiculous, like Trump’s description of anyone who disagrees with him as vermin." — Martin Edic, The Witness Chronicles (Substack), November 22, 2023
No one is actually vermin. Vermin is how people are treated when they're stomped on. MAGA tells you whom they plan to stomp.
In November 2023, at a Florida rally, "Trump painted a picture of a hellish (predominantly white) America overrun by serial killers and other human monsters frlm foreign (and predominantly nonwhite) countries, insisting that only he could save (white) America from the death and contamination caused by Democrats and 'the left.'" (Salon)
Under the Insurrection Act, U.S. presidents have authority to use the military to stop civilian protests, and the courts can't interfere. Trump has said he will call the military if he wants.
On December 5, 2023, at a Fox News town hall, Sean Hannity asked Trump: "Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever if reelected president to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?" Trump responded: "I’m going to be, you know he keeps, we love this guy, he says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said, ‘No, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling.’ After that I’m not a dictator." (emphasis mine)
The same day, Kash Patel said on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast:
“We will follow the facts and the law. We will go out and find the conspirators — not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.
We’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice, and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators.”
Here's someone who believes "dictator" means benevolent paternalist and that Trump would only briefly use his power to make the nation more beautiful and liveable:
“I love it,” said a woman in her 50s from northwest Iowa who spoke on the condition that she be identified only as Sue. “My kids call me a dictator, I thought my parents were dictators … He said he was only going to do it for a day. Like if you had a home that was in disrepair and your parents came in and they were firm and they wanted to get it done, and when you got done you had this beautiful home, how could you be mad?”
— Trump backers laugh off, cheer ‘dictator’ comments, as scholars voice alarm, Marianne LeVine and Isaac Arnsdorf, Washington Post, December 13, 2023
[Update: In January 2024, a YouGov poll asked whether Trump being "a dictator only on the first day of his second term" sounds like "a good or bad idea for the country." Three-quarters of Republicans said it was "definitely" or "probably" good.]
On December 16, 2023, Trump "approvingly quoted autocrats Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary," once again used "dehumanizing language targeting immigrants that historians have likened to past authoritarians, including a reference that some civil rights advocates and experts in extremism have compared to Adolf Hitler’s fixation on blood purity," and referred to Capitol rioters (who are facing criminal proceedings for their violent crime) as "hostages." (Washington Post, December 16, 2023)
Jason Lyall on Bluesky, @jaylyall.bsky.social:
"You can literally see CNN bending over backwards to avoid saying "fascism" when they describe Trump's speech as using 'language condemned for its ties to White supremacist rhetoric'
FFS, he said immigrants are 'poisoning the blood of our country.' That's the center square on the Fascist bingo card"
Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained on CNN on December 16:
"'...they’re not going to stop with immigrants,' she said. 'I’m quite concerned that he is mentioning what he calls mental institutions and prisons so often. In another speech he actually talked about the need to expand psychiatric institutions to confine people and he mentioned special prosecutor Jack Smith as someone who should end up in a ‘mental institution.’'
'This is what fascists and especially communists used to do to critics,' Ben-Ghiat added. 'They used to put people who didn’t believe in the propaganda of the state or who were troublemakers into psychiatric institutions.'"
The next day, December 17, Kristen Welker on Meet the Press asked Sen. Lindsey Graham: “Are the president’s comments representative of how you and other Republicans feel? ... Just on the language, though. ... You have endorsed former President Trump. Are you comfortable with him using words like that?” Graham replied: "You know, we’re talking about language? I could care less what language people use as long as we get it [immigration policy] right."
A.R. Moxon on this (No Beliefs, Just Intentions, The Reframe (Substack), Dec 17, 2023):
"Trump has openly announced his intention to become a fascist dictator if he re-achieves the presidency, promising to use the military to crush dissent, vowing to use his standing army of fascist judges and police to seize power and disband large swaths of the government, and swearing to purge the courts and the government and the nation of undesirable elements. Last night he literally quoted Adolf Hitler, telling his pink-faced crowd that immigrants were poisoning the nation’s blood. The language he’s used to marshal his support among mostly white, mostly Christian Americans can only be described as dehumanizing and eliminationist, the sort of talk that usually precedes mass killings."
As per this CNN analyst, on December 17, "in Reno, Nevada — the third GOP-nominating state — Trump claimed, without evidence, that migrants are largely coming from prisons and mental institutions." Trump proposed that Chinese immigrants are militarized invaders, and he furthermore
"promised to reorient the US government to purge migrants. Claiming the US is now a 'haven for bloodthirsty criminals,' he said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law, to remove migrants from the country. The former president also promised to divert the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration to border actions."
On December 19, Sen. Tommy Tuberville egged on other Republicans to be yet more racist: "I’m mad he wasn’t even tougher than that."
In December, CNN reviewed the history of a few of Trump's related comments. According to WSJ reporter Michael Bender in his 2021 book Frankly, We Did Win This Election, Trump told John Kelly, regarding Hitler's economic policies: “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things.” According to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s 2022 book The Divider: Trump in the White House, Trump said to Kelly: “Why can’t you be like the German generals?...The German generals in World War II.” In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Ivana Trump “told her lawyer that Donald Trump occasionally read from a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he supposedly kept in a cabinet by his bed. And a friend of Trump told the magazine on the record that he had given Trump the book, saying he thought Trump would find it interesting.” (See VIDEO: "1990 report: Ivana Trump told her lawyer Donald Trump kept Hitler speeches beside bed," CNN, December 18, 2023)
On December 19, Trump continued, saying that immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally are "destroying the blood of our country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country." (CNN)
On December 20, CNN anchor Jake Tapper "cited a 'shocking' Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom poll that shows 42% of the state’s likely Republican caucusgoers saying the GOP presidential frontrunner’s comment makes them 'more likely' to support him..." — HuffPost
He just makes stuff up
On February 5, Trump appeared on Fox's Sunday Morning Futures show, speaking to Maria Bartiromo:
"'We’re letting 18 million people in,' Trump said at one point, offering a wildly inflated estimate of the number of immigrants allowed to stay in the United States under President Biden. 'I think the number is going to be 18 million people by the time he gets out.'
'Wow,' said Bartiromo."
— "One of Trump’s biggest political assets is his mundanity," Philip Bump, Washington Post, February 5, 2024
Please raise the bar
Prepare
We must prepare for possible outcomes:
‘Dictator’ Trump Plans to Deploy Massive Number of Troops on U.S. Soil: In his first term, Trump’s plans to send troops to “war” on the southern border were thwarted. This time, he’s talking about sending up to 300,000 there. Adam Rawnsley & Asawin Suebsaeng, Rolling Stone, December 14, 2023
"National news media are sanitizing Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan: Broadcast news shows and top national newspapers have largely ignored the Republican front-runner's extreme policy proposal. Harrison Ray. Media Matters. Feb. 26, 2024.
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