Trump's Hitler moment
These are killers that… At a level that nobody’s ever seen. Not even your great law enforcement has ever seen people like this. They got a dose of it, though, recently. They got a dose of it. Their jobs have become a lot tougher. And you remember when they say, “No, no, these are migrants. And these migrants, they don’t commit crimes like us. No, no.” They make our criminals look like babies. These are stone-cold killers. They’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.
This is the hopeful message which Donald Trump has been spreading for the past few weeks.
Yes, he was bad in 2016. But now that he sees his life about to end in defeat at the ballot box and then incarceration for his multitude of crimes against the Republic, he has decided to throw caution to the wind.
In 1940, Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry released Der Ewige Jude, "The Eternal Jew". In one infamous scene, the camera shows legions of rats scurrying down a sewer. The shot transitions to one of a mass of ostjuden, or Jews from Eastern Europe, in their traditional dress, to one of German Jews in their Western finery, indicating that they may seem to assimilate, but in the end Jews are nothing but vermin. That is nothing different than what Trump and his running-mate, JD Vance, are doing with their rhetoric. "Poisoning the blood of America" is the same concept (no irony intended) employed by the Nazis, in which Jews poisoned the countries in which they lived.
The language is all too familiar. The Nazis employed it. Southerners in the United States employed it against Black American. The Hutus used it to foment the Rwandan genocide. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot; all dehumanized groups to more easily exterminate them and maintain power.
The key to totalitarians and those who aspire to it is this: There must be an out-group against which you can rally and which you can target to build solidarity in the rest of the population. This is exactly what Trump is doing.
However, what Trump is doing is even worse. In all likelihood he will be beaten by Kamala Harris in just over a month. He will then face the wrath of the law which he has held at bay for the past four years. He won't have the power to execute his dark vision. But the vision will still exist. The words, once said, cannot be unsaid. What he is doing is issuing a political Nero Decree; he is hoping that his followers scorch the earth of American democracy, and destroy the country if he can't have it. His life will be over; he won't care what happens after that. Proud Boys launching random terror attacks? It's what the country deserves for not bowing to him.
I want to make this clear: He will be defeated. But his defeat does not mean we will be out of the woods. The cancer will still be in the body politic, and will require a harsh treatment before it is repelled. And repel it we must; just this weekend, a party founded by an ex-SS officer won the Austrian elections. Trump's rise has inspired parties like Austria's Freedom Party, and Germany's AfD. We, the country which defeated fascism, has given fascism a second life. It is incumbent upon us to defeat it again, here and abroad. This recrudescence of hate and terror is our doing in part. We must win here so we can serve as an example to other countries suffering the same problems, and so that those actors take no succor from one of their own as the world's most powerful man.
When I end a piece like this by saying "we have a world to save", I mean it. It is in our hands. The Horseshoe scoffs at this. But America is the world's indispensable nation. If we fall to the dark, all the lights will go out.
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