Trump's openly fascist, Hitlerian campaign

He's trying to make Biden's strongest argument--democracy---into a weakness. It underscores Trump's gravest fears. And we've got to make sure it does not work.

Donald Trump is desperate and clearly believes desperate times call for desperate measures.

Trump knows he’s going to prison unless he can win this election and quash the cases against him—at least the federal ones. He knows that current polls are not predictive of what will happen in November, and he knows he’s weak within the GOP, as evidenced by the strong showing of those voting against him in the primaries. He knows he lost in 2020—his Big Lie be damned—and that January 6th has buried him even further.

He also knows that President Biden’s strongest issue and most overpowering asset in the election is the threat to democracy. And that’s in the broadest sense of the term, from the January 6th insurrection and abortion rights to voting rights and freedom of speech.

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Judging by his rally in Ohio over the weekend, which kicked off the general election campaign, Trump is taking a page from the playbook of George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove, whose winning strategy was to attack your opponent’s strengths, not their weaknesses.

Up against decorated war hero John Kerry challenging him in his 2004 re-election, Bush was sinking as public approval of the Iraq War plummeted. The Rove strategy was to tear down Kerry’s greatest asset with the scurrilous “Swift Boat” veterans campaign, which used lies to raise questions about Kerry’s war record and allowed the smears to propagate through our sensational media.

As the Associated Press wrote in covering the Ohio rally, “Trump is making the Jan. 6 attack a cornerstone of his bid for the White House.” Trump, who saw President Biden’s stirring and energetic State of the Union address, which opened with Biden comparing his urgent message about Trump to FDR’s warnings to the American people about the threat of fascism in 1941, began his rally with a grotesque salute to the January 6th insurrectionists.

“Please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages,” an announcer told the crowd, as a recorded chorus of January 6th prisoners sang the national anthem, after which Trump recited the pledge of allegiance and then said, “They were unbelievable patriots.”

It was stunning, and it was a vicious desecration.

Trump clearly believes that, rather than run from January 6th, he’s got to diminish it, having pushed a distorted version of history for the past several years about it, and brazenly play right into that distorted history. The goal is to attack Biden’s strength as a defender of democracy by claiming that he, Donald Trump, is the true defender of democracy.

But Trump is clearly taking a page from more than just Rove and turning to authoritarians in history, like Adolf Hitler. This wasn’t just evident in the tribute to the treasonous, anti-American criminals who stormed the Capitol. It’s evident in his threats of violence—warning of a “bloodbath” if he loses—and rounding up millions of people he deems “vermin.”

At every rally now, Trump repeats his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants as he demonizes all immigrants, pushing the racist great replacement theory—the white supremacist conspiracy theory that Black and Brown immigrants are being allowed into the country to “replace” white people. He focuses on Mexicans and South Americans, but also on Haitians and people from Congo, knowing that his followers will think of images of Black people from Africa upon hearing of that.

And he promises to round up all these people and deport them. His chief advisor on immigration, the white supremacist who worked for Trump in his administration, Stephen Miller, has openly discussed the plans Trump has, as outlined in the authoritarian Project 2025. Trump has openly discussed them as well. Per the New York Times:

Mr. Miller said a new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once.

To make the process of finding and deporting undocumented immigrants already living inside the country “radically more quick and efficient,” he said, the Trump team would bring in “the right kinds of attorneys and the right kinds of policy thinkers” willing to carry out such ideas.

Miller describes the camps further:

Because of the magnitude of arrests and deportations being contemplated, they plan to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progress and they wait to be flown to other countries.

Mr. Miller said the new camps would likely be built “on open land in Texas near the border.”

He said the military would construct them under the authority and control of the Department of Homeland Security.

When Trump speaks of deporting millions of undocumented immigrants—there are over 11 million undocumented people in the U.S., but some estimates are much higher—he gets huge applause. He usually makes the promise after pushing the lie he’s pushed for years: that countries are releasing people from prisons and mental institutions and sending them to the U.S. (There has never been any evidence that any country is doing that, and our media has been lax at pointing out the truth every time Trump recites this lie.)

And in the same context, as he did at the Ohio rally, he describes migrants as “not people” and as “animals.”

There have been comparisons of Trump to Hitler and the Nazis over the years. In the early part of the Trump administration, people in the corporate media were wary of making the comparisons. That all changed last year when Trump began using Mussolini and Hitler language, calling his enemies “vermin.”

Still, people rightly make a distinction between Trump’s actions and Hitler’s genocide of millions of Jews, and of course it’s important not to diminish the horrors of the Holocaust. But I can’t help but view the raids on people’s homes that Trump and Miller envision, or arresting people at their workplaces and even in playgrounds, as Miller describes it—millions of people—and putting people on trains or planes and sending them to massive camps as eerily reminiscent. Does any of us believe the conditions at these camps would be humane under Trump, as he calls migrants “animals” and “not people”?

Trump is trying to conjure up those visions for the people in his base, whose worst instincts and biases have been emboldened by him. He may or may not know or care, however, that this rhetoric doesn’t play to the independents and suburban voters he will need. But certainly there are those in his campaign who know it, as they try to downplay what Trump says.

Trump hasn’t made any attempt to win over Nikki Haley’s voters. He’s said he doesn’t need them, even though they made a strong showing in the primaries even after Haley dropped out of the race. Not only did Haley get 22% of GOP primary voters in Washington State after she dropped out, she got 20,000 voters in Georgia who turned out on election day alone (while 50,000 others in Georgia voted for her early).

That was a clear protest vote against Trump, as Haley is not in the race any longer. And Joe Biden, remember, won Georgia by just over 11,000 votes.

That’s why it was very telling when Trump, his campaign, Republican defenders, and Fox News pundits whirled themselves into a frenzy defending Trump’s use of the term “bloodbath” at the rally over the weekend, saying it was only meant to describe what would happen to the economy if Trump lost, referring to car imports from China, and not meant to incite violence.

Trump posted on Truth Social:

The Fake News Media, and their Democrat Partners in the destruction of our Nation, pretended to be shocked at my use of the word BLOODBATH, even though they fully understood that I was simply referring to imports allowed by Crooked Joe Biden, which are killing the automobile industry.

Of course the hair-splitting was ridiculous, and of course Trump meant it literally and was inspiring violence. He’s inspired violence over and over in the past, saying, for example, that there would be “death and destruction” if he were charged in the hush money case in New York. And he made the “bloodbath” comment in the larger context of a speech saluting violent criminals who stormed the Capitol and bludgeoned police officers and calling migrants “animals” who need to be rounded up.

But the fact that Trump went into a defensive crouch, furiously protesting that the claims about his use of “bloodbath” weren’t true—which caused the right-wing industrial complex to follow suit—was very different from what he does usually. He rarely, if ever, defends his rhetoric, and certainly his violent rhetoric, as being misconstrued. In fact, he very much wants people to be left with the impression that there will be violence and “bedlam” if his followers are angered by his treatment.

Part of that defensive posture this week was because the corporate media jumped on the bloodbath comment—and other frightening aspects of the speech. It was a reminder to Trump that he’s in the general election now. He and his campaign clearly saw that this rhetoric was damaging, and he needed to activate Fox News and the right-wing pundits, worried that those suburban voters would think he meant it the way he did.

This gives me hope that Trump’s strategy of trying to turn Biden’s strength into a weakness is dead on arrival. The strategy may work in other cases, in other elections. But the more Trump tries to execute it in this case, the more he makes Biden’s argument sharper. Indeed, the Biden campaign had an ad circulating within hours, lambasting Trump and pointing out all the other times he condoned or called for violence.

So, again, it’s very desperate—Trump is very desperate—and likely self-defeating, even if it’s horrifying, enormously concerning, and shouldn’t be taken lightly. We all just have to speak out loudly and make sure the media and the Democrats are on top of it.