He’s talking like a fascist. He’s planning fascist policies. He’s staffing up with fascists.
Historically, the erosion of American democracy has happened subtly. In a country where democracy is basically a civic religion, politicians generally don’t announce their intention to attack it when running for office. The past decade of voter suppression laws, state-level rules explicitly designed to limit access to the ballot box, have been sold as tools for combating voter fraud. Many proponents of Jim Crow-era voting regulations — a nakedly racist attempt to ensure white political dominance — described them as a restoration of Southern democracy after the alleged Northern tyranny of Reconstruction.
Donald Trump is currently testing the limits of that unwritten rule by all but openly campaigning on a platform of tearing democracy down.
Perhaps the clearest sign came in a speech on Veterans Day where he vowed to “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.” Calling one’s opponents subhuman and vowing aggressive action against them is a hallmark of classical fascist rhetoric, so much so that the Washington Post’s headline — on a news article, not an opinion piece — described it as “echoing dictators Hitler [and] Mussolini.”
They’re not wrong: Anyone familiar with Nazi propaganda can tell you that it commonly dehumanized Jews by describing us as rats or diseases. Trump has used such language more than once: Just last month, he claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
. Anyone who cares about American democracy — regardless of whether you side more with Democrats or Republicans on more “normal” issues like taxes, pollution regulations, or Israel-Palestine — should understand that its health is on the ballot. There has simply been too much business as usual, in which America’s political class treats 2024 as if it’s just another hotly contested election in a long line of them.
It isn’t, and the Trump campaign is making it clear that it isn’t on a regular basis. We in the press need to convey this to our readers as clearly as we can, a commitment which does not require abandoning the media’s core values of accuracy and fairness. On the contrary: It would be a betrayal of those values to shirk from reporting what the Trump people are telling us about themselves.
When the Washington Post asked Trump’s campaign for comment on claims that his “vermin” language echoed fascist rhetoric, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheungresponded like this: “Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House,” Cheung told the Post.
In a way, the denial confirms the charge. There’s something funny about Cheung vowing to “crush” the “entire existence” of anyone who dares call his boss a fascist. But there’s also chilling reality. Trump’s spokesperson is either convinced he won’t pay a price for such authoritarian rhetoric, authoritarian enough that he’s unable to tell how thuggish he sounds, or convinced that this is the way Trump expects his underlings to talk.
This is the operation that, at present, is beating President Joe Biden by about 1 percent in the RealClearPolitics poll average. It is past time to wake up.