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Anne Applebaum lays out the striking extent to which Donald Trump’s rhetoric in the last weeks of this interminable campaign has become overtly fascistic and totalitarian:
This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.”
Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.” . . .
Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”
His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.
These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.
Recently I looked back at the contemporaneous reviews of Paul Verhoven’s 1997 (27 years ago!) film Starship Troopers. It’s remarkable how many reviewers completely missed that the whole film is from beginning to end a very broad and pointed satire of fascism. Even as perceptive a critic as Roger Ebert missed this — his review treats the film as if it were pretty much on the square, although he does in one sentence acknowledge that by “remaining faithful” to Robert Heilein’s source material — I haven’t ever read the novel so I can’t comment on this — the film “adds an element of sly satire.” But even this tepid acknowledgement goes further than many prominent reviewers, who missed the satire completely, despite the fact that the film’s enemies are literally vermin, several characters are basically wearing SS uniforms, and the film’s script reads like Dwight Schrute pounding the podium at a sales conference while yelling about how blood alone moves the wheels of history.
In any event, there’s no way any even slightly sophisticated reviewer today would make a similar mistake, because in 2024 fascism is very much a live issue again, as opposed to a farcical and discredited atavism from mid-20th century Europe.
On the other hand I don’t doubt that the modal Trump voter will still be enthusiastically rooting for SS-Oberfuhrer Doogie Howser and company to crush the invading vermin in our midst.