Like Trump, Hitler And Mussolini Were Dismissed Until It Was Too Late
Make no mistake about it, trump cares nothing about immigrants and his escalating, increasingly violent rampages against immigrants have nothing to do with concerns about the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. or bolstering immigration laws.
His actions have everything to do with fear mongering and falsely demonizing immigrants as dirty, disloyal, lazy criminals who are flooding the nation because of the Democrats. Trump’s comments are about normalizing and burnishing his self-described reputation as an authoritarian who would ignore laws to rid the nation of undesirable immigrants.
In a recent interview with PBS NewsHour, New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat warned about failing to heed trump’s words.
“In all cases of history that I have studied in my book ‘Strongmen,’ people did not take the various Hitlers and Mussolinis seriously until it was too late,” Ben-Ghiat said.
In a recent interview, trump said that if he is reelected he would be a dictator “on day one” so that he could have his often criticized border wall built to keep immigrants from entering the U.S. and so that he could “drill, drill, drill.” He later claimed on his social network site that he was only joking.
He also has called for creation of camps to hold millions of immigrants while the government prepares to deport them. Trump also has said he might call out federal troops to stem civil protests and would prosecute political rivals.
Trump has brazenly referred to compliments exchanged with a number of 21st century dictators. One was Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As president, trump was investigated for possible collusion with Russia but an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller did not find sufficient evidence that Trump’s campaign had coordinated with Moscow to influence the 2016 election in which he defeated Hillary Clinton. Trump has long decried the investigation into his alleged ties with Russia as a “political witchhunt.”
In February 2022, trump praised Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as
“genius” and “savvy.”
At a recent campaign rally in New Hampshire, trump referred to Putin’s comments at a forum in Vladivostok on Sept. 12. Putin said the federal and state charges against trump “shows all the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.”
“Everything that’s happening with Trump is politically motivated persecution of one’s political rival, that’s what it is. And it’s being done before the eyes of the U.S. public and the whole world. They’ve simply exposed their internal problems,” Putin said.
Trump went on to praise Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of Putin, with whom trump has had a positive relationship. During an interview in October with Tucker Carlson, Orbán said that trump’s leadership is the key to ending the conflict in Ukraine.
“The Russians are far stronger, far more numerous than the Ukrainians,” said the prime minister. “Call back Trump. That’s the only way out. Call back Trump. Trump is the man who can save the Western world. You know, you can criticize him for many reasons. I understand all the discussion. But the best foreign policy of the recent several decades belonged to him.”
Trump has said he would end the war in Ukraine in one day, if he is reelected. Orban offered the same opinion, and just like trump, offered no facts.
“And if he would have been the president at the moment the Russian invasion started, no, it would not be possible to do that by the Russians,” Orban said
Finally, trump bragged about what he claims is his positive relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. In August 2019, trump described his friendship with the dictator even with North Korea continuing to test missiles. Trump said that even though the short-range missiles North Korea had been firing violated UN resolutions they did not violate an agreement between him and Kim.
And as trump exploits and repeats his vile commentary, he brings a certain level of normalcy for his MAGA crowd to his xenophobia about immigrants. Trump has long used immigrants as a dog whistle but his comments have grown increasingly violent, apparently as he sees the national sentiment turn more strongly against undocumented immigrants.
At a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, Trump used the words of Hitler when he said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Without any evidence, trump said that immigrants have “poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia.”
“It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, people are coming in with disease,” trump said in a September interview.
Trump is using an old strategy of calling for the formation of a united front against a common enemy (real or imaginary). He did it in 2011 with his constant erroneous, racist claims that President Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen. It was the same method he employed to call for the execution of a group of young African Americans who were charged with the 1989 rape and assault of a woman in Central Park. Their convictions were all reversed in 2002 when another individual confessed to the attack.
Once again, many supporters are minimizing trump’s language and his comments, as they did infamously during trump’s time of White House rule.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Sunday refused to criticize trump’s comments on immigrants “poisoning in the blood of our country,” in terms like past Nazi rhetoric.
“If you’re talking about the language Trump uses rather than trying to fix it (immigration), that’s a losing strategy for the Biden administration,” Graham said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Graham wouldn’t criticize trump’s racist and authoritarian words but he did compliment trump’s immigration policies.
“I’m worried about an outcome,” Graham said. “He (trump) is right. He had the border secured, the lowest in 40 years, in December of 2020. You know, we’re talking about language. I could care less what language people use as long as we get it right.”
“If you think you’re going to win the debate on illegal immigration by picking a line out of the Trump speech,” Graham said, “most Americans understand the game has to change, that we’re under threat, that we’re going to get attacked, that our border has completely been obliterated.”
Fact checking by Newsweek in January 2021 showed that the number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border from migrants who wanted to enter the U.S. has fluctuated over the past four years. Overall, during Trump’s time in office, there were fewer interactions between migrants and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol than at its peak earlier in the millennium. However, the number of interactions is higher than during the 1960s and closely mirrors numbers in the 1970s. There isn’t data to determine whether the border is the safest it has been in the 200-year history of the United States, Newsweek reported.
Trump’s strategy is to scapegoat immigrants, a tried and true method of authoritarians through history, most gruesomely with Hitler’s persecution and murder of millions of Jews.
Political leaders have long exploited and fueled ethnic hatred in the service of their politics. Examples include the animosity towards the Romani people in Europe. The Romani, also known as Gypsies, are one of the most marginalized and persecuted ethnic groups in Europe. A current example is the Palestinians, who have been dehumanized in what has been described by some as the creation of an apartheid state in Israel.
Ben-Ghiat was interviewed on a Nov. 13 segment on PBS News Hour and was asked about trump’s Veterans Day comments in New Hampshire in which trump said, that if reelected, “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 will do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
Ben-Ghiat said that since the fascists came to power in Spain, Italy and Germany, authoritarians have used dehumanizing language in order to reach two results.
“They want to change the way that people see violence, making it into something necessary and patriotic and even morally righteous, and they want to change the way people see their targets,” Ben-Ghiat said.
She said that since his rallies in 2015, trump has tried to “shift the idea of violence into something positive. And now he’s starting to use dehumanizing rhetoric, all these groups who live like vermin.”
She said the original fascists used similar rhetoric as Hitler started talking about Jews as parasites in 1920. By the time Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Germans had been exposed to this dehumanizing rhetoric for 13 years.
“And Mussolini literally talked about rats. After he had become dictator in 1927, he said, we need to kill rats who are bringing infectious diseases and Bolshevism from the east,” Ben-Ghiat said. “And so this matches up with trump talking about immigrants bringing disease and other such things. So this is very dangerous rhetoric with a very precise fascist history.”
In similar ways, trump has been changing the public view of violence.
“He started saying, oh, in the old days, you used to hurt people. The problem is, Americans don’t hurt each other anymore,” Ben-Ghiat said about trump. “So now he’s going into a new phase of openly dehumanizing his targets so that will lessen the taboos in the future. And we see that, in 2025, he’s got plans for mass deportations, mass imprisonments and giant camps. So you need people to be less sensitive about violence, either committing it themselves or tolerating it.”
In a March 2016 rally in St. Louis, Mo., trump spoke about his opponents whenhe told a crowd, “Part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long [to kick them out] is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.”
Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election are another part of his effort to brandish his reputation while disparaging the democratic form of government. The result of trump’s drumbeat of lies is that the majority of Republicans say that Biden’s win was not legitimate.
“This is part of being much more overt about becoming an authoritarian and transforming America into some version of autocracy, because the endgame of election denial is actually to convince Americans that elections shouldn’t be the way they choose their leaders, they’re too unreliable,” Ben-Ghiat said.
She said the campaign is winning over allies, with disgraced, former national security advisor Michael Flynn questioning if elections are necessary and Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., saying that democracy doesn’t work.
“All of this is part of a campaign of, you could call it mass reeducation of Americans to want forms of authoritarian rule that Trump will give,” Ben-Ghiat said.