Trump needs to be called out on his Nazism
He knows exactly what he's doing
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On Monday, one of Donald Trump’s social media accounts posted a video which said that after he is elected, he plans to deport 15 million people and create a “unified reich”. Outcry ensued, some low-level staffer got blamed, and the post was deleted. But this as hardly the first time that Trump has promoted straight-up Nazi language, including his recent references to immigrants “poisoning the blood of the people”. At the same time, he keeps saying he intends to govern as a “dictator” and create mass deportation camps into which millions of people will be herded. Subtle it is not.
It is reflective of the level of insanity which has come to be the norm in American politics that this sort of thing doesn’t get you drummed out of public life altogether, but rather allows you to post a modest lead in national polls. On the one hand, I think this reflects the lack of seriousness that people have come to expect from Trump. We’re supposed to believe that he is at the same time a titan of intelligence and strength who alone can “make America great again” and a doddering victim of verbal diarrhoea whose words are largely meaningless. As the old saying goes, we’re supposed to take him “seriously but not literally”. If he echoes the language of Nazism, it must just be a mistake.
The problem is that we’re far, far beyond the point where it was possible to believe this. I recently got done reading Border Wars, a journalistic book about Trump’s immigration policy. Readers of that book can learn all kinds of interesting things about Trump’s views on race - such as that he said all Haitians have AIDS, that he attended a fundraiser for the white nationalist politician Steve King, that he likened migrants coming over the southern border as “vomit”, that he wanted to end birthright citizenship, and that he said Nigerians all live in huts.
And that’s just one book. I’ve read many other books about the Trump presidency, and they have dozens more similar anecdotes. You don’t even need to read books - if you’ve been paying just minimal attention to the news over the past few years, you will probably remember Trump retweeting a video of a supporter yelling “white power”, telling non-white congresswomen to “go back to where you came from”, saying he wanted immigrants to come from Norway or Denmark rather than “sh*thole countries” with black populations, and much more.
Each time Trump gets called on something like this, his response is to claim ignorance of the very idea that such comments could be racially charged. He does the same thing when he is associated with white nationalist groups, as the AP recently pointed out. After Trump was endorsed by Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke in 2016, he said he had no idea who he was despite Duke running for president multiple times. He told the white nationalist group the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during the hot summer of 2020, then claimed to not actually know who they were. He even said he didn’t know anything about QAnon, the violent conspiratorial group who sees him as their champion and which is regarded by the FBI as a violent extremist threat.
The identity of David Duke, the Proud Boys and QAnon are pretty basic facts about American politics - something that a president would obviously know about and which are frequently discussed in The New York Times, which Trump reads. The idea that Trump has no idea who they are is utterly ridiculous. He retweets QAnon content! Yet this is what we’re supposed to believe - Trump is just a doddering out-of-touch figure somehow completely unaware of the political context in which he operates and who randomly retweets and says stuff which just happens to be virulently racist.
Meanwhile, in the 2024 campaign, Trump’s rhetoric has been getting more and more openly fascist. Take these remarks from a November 2024 rally in New Hampshire:
And today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left. And it is growing every day. Every single day.
The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.
Our threat is from within.
These are words which would not have been out of place in 1930s Germany, or 1920s Italy. But here they are coming from the Republican candidate for president, a man who has taken a strategic decision to echo Nazi tropes and propagate the themes of white supremacist rhetoric.
This is a five-alarm fire. It’s not a joke, and it’s not just a doddering old geezer who doesn’t know what he’s doing. It’s a call for the left to put aside their differences over everything else and unite to stop the rise of fascism in the United States.
The alternative could be a “unified reich”, with everything that entails.