Heather Digby Parton
Mon, November 20, 2023
Donald Trump Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The Iowa caucuses are right around the corner and even Donald Trump has deigned to appear in the state recently despite his obvious belief that it's beneath him to have to compete for the nomination he, and everyone else, knows is already his. But he does enjoy his rallies. So he's clearly decided that it's time to gather the flock just to make sure they all know what's expected of them.
Here's a sample of what he's talking about on the campaign trail these days:
Hannah Knowles of the Washington Post reported from this weekend's rally:
Children wandered around in shirts and hats with the letters “FJB,” an abbreviation for an obscene jab at President Biden that other merchandise spelled out: “F—- Biden.” During his speech inside a high school gym in Fort Dodge, former president Trump called one GOP rival a “son of a b——,” referred to another as “birdbrain” and had the crowd shrieking with laughter at his comments on Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who he called “pencil neck” before asking, “How does he hold up that fat, ugly face?”
He brought the house down while mocking Biden, at one point baselessly suggesting Biden is using drugs and can’t get offstage “by the time whatever it is he’s taken wears off.” ... And outside the packed venue, vulgar slogans about Biden and Vice President Harris were splashed across T-shirts: “Biden Loves Minors.” “Joe and the Ho Gotta Go!” One referred to Biden and Harris performing sexual acts.
Yes, they're all just letting their freak flags fly, no holds barred. Not that this is entirely new. Republican gatherings like CPAC going back decades used to feature racist and misogynist merchandise, and there were many speakers who made crude comments about their Democratic rivals. But it is unprecedented for the candidate himself to wallow around in the gutter with them.
He's also been posting more Nazi-esque statements on his social media platform. This weekend he seemed to be proposing a "final solution" for his enemies:
Meanwhile, in another town in Iowa, Trump skipped out on what would have been required attendance in Iowa GOP presidential primaries in the past: A meeting with Christians to talk about the issues that are important to them. This one was called the Family Leader's Thanksgiving Family Forum. Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy were there to go through the motions and pretend that they might have a chance to win. (A recent Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa poll found 43% of likely Republican voters choose Trump compared with 16% each for Haley and DeSantis.) The forum convener, Bob Vander Plaats, was once considered an Iowa kingmaker but he's broken with Trump and it doesn't appear that he has the juice to bring anyone else over the line. He opened the forum by beseeching the candidates to "raise the bar" — and by comparison to Trump, they managed to do that.
Mostly, they talked about their faith and abortion with both Ramaswamy and DeSantis discussing their wives' miscarriages and Nikki Haley making news by saying that she would happily sign a 6-week abortion ban. (She issued her standard disclaimer that she doesn't think that's possible on a federal basis right now, as if that somehow qualifies as a moderate position.) It was all pretty standard Republican evangelical pandering.
But it's quite clear from the polling that most conservative evangelical Christians like the libertine, gutter-snipe Donald Trump even more than the rest of the Republican Party. They are the strongest pillar of his following. So attempting to pry them loose with appeals to decency is a waste of breath. There have been billions of pixels spent trying to figure out why they like him, and I suppose there are many reasons. But recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute found that one-third of white evangelicals favor political violence so Trump's insurrection obviously holds major appeal to a lot of them. And no doubt they love his commentary about barring people who "don't like our religion" from entering the country:
“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants. If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion (which a lot of them don’t), if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in.”
And, as we know, Trump has lately taken to vowing to demolish, expel, drive out, cast out, and evict all the people they don't like from America as well. Apparently, it's all music to their ears.
Trump's recently been getting some big endorsements from important office holders and there's one in particular who represents conservative evangelicals in an extremely powerful position. That would be the new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, whose affiliation with the most extreme forms of Christian Nationalism is only now coming into focus. According to NPR, Johnson is a leading member of the far-right New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, which seeks to dissolve the separation between church and state by “any means necessary.” Johnson has spent his entire career as a lawyer and an elected official in service of that goal.
Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, took a look at his litigation history to see what it says about how he applies these beliefs to the constitution and you won't be surprised to learn that his legal principles are entirely inconsistent. In fact, the only thing consistent about his position is the idea that America is meant to be a Christian theocracy.
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For Christians like Johnson, Trump is just a blunt instrument to be used to advance his cause which he believes must be attained by any means necessary. Whatever else he represents is of no consequence.
It's actually a little different for the MAGA rank and file. The Post's Knowles spoke with some of them at Trump's Iowa rally:
“Joe’s gotta go,” said Lori Carpenter, 59, as she left the Fort Dodge event.“And the ho shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” The “ho” was Harris, she clarified, before offering another nickname for Harris that was even more vulgar. “It doesn’t bother me,” she said of Trump’s insults and crudeness.
Her relative, 71-year-old Marsha Crouthamel, agreed. "It doesn’t bother me either because his policies are strong,” she echoed, adding that Trump got a lot of laughs and added, “Sometimes you just gotta excite people a little bit.”
“We’re Christians, and we can look past that,” Carpenter said. “We see the good that he did our country when he was in.”
To these Trump-loving evangelicals, being a Christian means never having to say you're sorry. And that's one thing they definitely have in common with their Dear Leader Donald Trump.
Donald Trump dreams of an American Fourth Reich — and he's not kidding
Chauncey DeVega
Mon, November 20, 2023
Donald Trump Alon Skuy/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s hate sermons are becoming even more intense and combustible. As he comes ever closer to openly quoting Adolf Hitler and the other 20th-century fascists, his behavior is clearly intentional and strategic.
Trump publicly admires and praises tyrants and demagogues and views them as role models. If he returns to power in 2025, he intends to create an American Fourth Reich. Consider Trump's speeches, interviews and social media posts over the last few weeks.
At a rally in Hialeah, Florida, last Wednesday, Trump painted a picture of a hellish (predominantly white) America overrun by serial killers and other human monsters from foreign (and predominantly nonwhite) countries, insisting that only he could save (white) America from the death and contamination caused by Democrats and “the left.”
“Anybody ever hear of Hannibal Lecter?” Trump asked the crowd. “He was a nice fellow. But that’s what’s coming into our country right now.”
The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson continues from there:
The leader of the Republican Party — and quite likely the 2024 GOP nominee — was on an extended rant about mental institutions, prisons, and, to use his phrase, “empty insane asylums.” Speaking to thousands of die-hard supporters at a rally in South Florida, Trump lamented that, under President Joe Biden, the United States has become “the dumping ground of the world.” That he had casually praised one of the most infamous psychopathic serial killers in cinema history was but an aside, brushed over and forgotten.
This was a dystopian, at times gothic speech. It droned on for nearly 90 minutes. Trump attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. Those unnamed people were similar to, yet different from, the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C. — a place Trump famously despises, and to which he nonetheless longs to return.
Over the past seven or so years, I have watched many of Trump’s speeches. This was one of the most frightening and most disturbing I have seen. It was fascinating in much the same way as witnessing the aftermath of a horrible car accident or watching a horror movie.
Although many among the news media, pundit class and other professional politics-watchers avoid saying this, Trump’s dark charisma can be highly compelling. I'm convinced they feel its allure as well, even if they publicly deny it.
On Friday, in an interview with Univision, Trump threatened to use the Department of Justice to put his political enemies in prison: “They have done something that allows the next party … if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.” Trump also defended his regime’s cruel family separation policy (and by implication concentration camp system) that targeted millions of brown and Black migrants and refugees.
These white supremacist plans are part of a larger project to revoke birthright citizenship, invoke the Alien Enemies Act to imprison or deport (or worse) the Trump regime’s perceived enemies, and using the law more generally as a weapon to crush dissent and resistance.
Last weekend, on Veterans Day, Trump escalated his Nazi-style threats by declaring that his political enemies to be "vermin" or human poison to be purged from the system. That came at a MAGA rally in New Hampshire and also in a post on his Truth Social platform:
In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
At a fundraising event in San Francisco last Tuesday, President Biden spoke out against Trump’s antisemitism and white supremacy: “In just the last few days, Trump has said, if he returns office, he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called ... the vermin in America — a specific phrase with a specific meaning…. It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the '30s.”
In a post on Truth Social that went largely ignored by the mainstream media, Trump continued to summon Nazi imagery by threatening to imprison “Radical Left Zealots" in a “mental institution”:
Deranged Jack Smith, Andrew Weissmann, Lisa Monaco, the “team of losers and misfits” from CREW, and all the rest of the Radical Left Zealots and Thugs who have been working illegally for years to “take me down,” will end up, because of their suffering from a horrible disease, TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME (TDS!), in a Mental Institution by the time my next term as President is successfully completed. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Declaring that the enemies of the regime and the Great Leader are mentally ill and then imprisoning them for "treatment" is a common practice in authoritarian states.
Predictably, the mainstream news media and responsible political class responded with performative shock and surprise at Trump’s week-long channeling of Hitler and Nazism. In fact, Trump’s hateful behavior and language are no surprise.
For at least the last seven years (and for decades before that), Trump has shown himself to be a casual antisemite. He reportedly once slept with a copy of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet next to his bed. It is no coincidence that professed Nazis, white supremacists and other hate-mongers are among Trump’s strongest supporters, or that he refuses to publicly disavow or condemn them.
It appears that the American news media and political class, and by implication the mass public, have already forgotten that since at least September Trump has publicly spread conspiracy theories about being “stabbed in the back,” suggesting that the country is being “poisoned” by immigrants and that “good Jews” should support him while “bad Jews” will be punished for their “betrayals.”
But the mainstream media is bored with Trump's rhetoric and has now largely moved on. That irresponsible choice further normalizes Trump’s evil and the larger neofascist assault on the country’s democracy and civil society.
It is nearly incredible that the presumed nominee of one of the country’s two institutional political parties is explicitly channeling Hitler and the Nazis. That should be dominating the news. Trump's Fourth Reich aspirations constitute a national emergency. But America is an unhealthy society where all this will likely be normalized as just "culture war" tactics or political "polarization."
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If Donald Trump's American neofascist movement did not have tens of millions of followers, it would not pose an existential threat to democracy. History is full of examples of “good people” who become capable of doing horrible things to others once they are given permission and encouraged by fascist leaders, fake populists and demagogues.
In his book “Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself,” which examines mass suicides by Germans at the end of World War II, historian Florian Huber writes:
After leaving the German Reich in 1933 to run the Paris offices of the Daily Express, British newspaper correspondent Sefton Delmer returned in 1936. He found people transformed. Three years had been enough to put them under the Führer’s spell. “They were adoring his firm ruthless rule. They were in raptures at being told what to think, whom to hate, when to cheer.” … He knew, and knew how to galvanize, their feelings, yearnings and prejudices—how to transform depression into exhilaration. As a man of the people, he spoke their language. He was the faith healer they had been waiting for.” …
Silence in the arena, as his voice swelled. He spoke of victory over the past, of the present, and the future, work and happiness — and every member of the audience seemed to feel as if he we addressing them personally. ... [H]e transformed their vague but urgent feelings into something more tangible. People’s longings and resentments were laid out before them, on public view. Their most secret thoughts were no longer to be ashamed of; they belonged to everyone in the hall.
Trump has a similar power over his MAGA followers. Here is Hendrickson’s description of the scene at Trump’s Florida rally last week:
No other candidate has legions of fans who will bake in the Florida sun for hours before gates open. No one else can draw enough people to even hold a rally this size, let alone spawn a traveling rally-adjacent road show, with a pop-up midway of vendors hawking T-shirts and buttons and ball caps and doormats and Christmas ornaments. Voters don’t fan themselves with cardboard cutouts of Chris Christie’s head.
Multiple merchandise vendors told me that the shirts featuring Trump’s mug shot have become their best sellers. Some other tees bore slogans: ultra maga, ultra maga and proud, cancel me, trump rallies matter, 4 time indictment champ, super duper ultra maga, f*ck biden. “Thank you and have a MAGA day!” one vendor called out with glee. … In the hours before the night’s headliner, this felt less like a political event and more like a revival.
Trump’s Fourth Reich will not be an exact copy of its German counterpart from nearly a century ago. Instead, Trump’s Fourth Reich (or that of his successors) will be adapted to fit contemporary America’s cultural norms, values and institutions. The final horror is still evolving, but the threat and dangers are very clear. The American people are running out of time.
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