We’ve just endured another drinking-from-a-firehose week and can likely look forward to more of the same in the weeks ahead. The 45th ex-President took his revenge-tour to Waco (Texas) Saturday night to kick-start his 2024 campaign. To no one’s surprise, Trump’s default campaign message emerged as an ugly slap at the American justice system.
But what was surprising was the unprecedented, amped-up degree of Trump’s anger: Prosecutors, courts, (and ultimately, by inference, juries) are unfairly targeting him.
Against a celebratory on-stage visual backdrop of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, many of whom now face prosecution and jail time, remained an apparent contradiction. Trump claims he is his followers’ “retribution” for whatever grievances they may harbor about American society or the wider world.
But in a twist of who’s helping who, Trump now calls on his base to be his retribution against an American justice system that’s holding him accountable for multiple forms of criminality. Again, he wants them to do his dirty work without any promises or policies of how he would make life better for them.
Using another Trumpian rhetorical tool, “projection”—accusing others of what you do yourself—Trump said: “The abuses of power that we’re currently witnessing at all levels of government will go down as among the most shameful, corrupt and depraved chapters in all of American history.”
Trump then linked his own personal grievances to his followers as if he and they were one and the same. His message: What’s happening to him could happen to anyone–never mind that would require an absurd leap in logic to assume they too could have paid off a porn star to clear the path for winning the presidency, tried to flip a presidential election in Georgia, obstructed the return of national secrets from a palatial home in eastern Florida, and conspired to steal the presidency of the United States.
“They’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you,” Trump emphasized, inferring all Trump’s legal woes are rooted in unfair, unjust politics—not anything he’s done.
Unlike 2016 when Trump exhorted Americans to join him in “making America great again,” seven years later Trump has trashed aspiration in exchange for a doom and gloom pitch based on anger and revenge. Trump now believes that “woe is me” can either be a winning strategy or one to burn the house down. Either outcome seems OK with him.
Will his poor-me talking points trump a positive vision or any practical policies to help Americans? I tend to believe not.
No place to hide
But while Trump spews explicit and implicit calls to violence, most eyes remain fixed on emerging indictments, which at this point the almost 77 year-old has avoided, but probably can’t now.
And being on constant indictment watch is still better than actually having Trump in the White House, a phenomenon we barely tolerated, white knuckled, from January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021. But it comes in a close second, as we must again endure Trump’s crimes, near-crimes, and ugly rants throughout the daily news cycle, all while the 45th president is OK with destroying the U.S. to avoid a mound of legal consequences for himself.
In his new position of backed into what appears to be a permanent corner, Trump is ratcheting up to even dangerously higher levels of racial animus and violence than he did as president, threatening to easily exceed even that high bar.
Dangerously familiar
Of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is African-American, Trump employed the kind of imagery Hitler once used to describe the Jewish people in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. For example, after the United States failed in the Evian Conference of 1938 to convince some central European powers to create an escape route for European Jews to migrate to other countries, Hitler ranted, “Nobody wants that SCUM!”
Following in Hitler’s verbal footsteps, Trump posted on Truth Social that Bragg and the other members of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office are, similarly, “HUMAN SCUM!”
Trump once again borrowed a Nazi trope while posting that Bragg was a “degenerate psychopath.” Nazi leaders similarly called Jews “degenerate” even while, like Trump, proving they themselves fit the meaning while their targets did not.
The art of Nazi imagery
For example, after confiscating millions of dollars of impressionist and modern art from wealthy Jewish homes before sending Jewish families who owned them off to Auschwitz and other death camps, Nazis described the stolen artifacts as “degenerate,” the implication being their owners
were too.
(Famously, Nazi higher-ups preferred sentimental, kitschy landscape art over Impressionist or edgier modern works. But they stole the paintings anyway to fatten German war coffers by selling them on the black market, while others decorated their homes with the stolen paintings, “degenerate” or not.)
Trump’s use of the word was even more egregious, since he directed the word toward Bragg himself, calling him a “degenerate psychopath.” If Trump were truly cognizant of what the term meant, he might have remembered that both arm-chair and full-time psychologists contemplated what psychological designation best described Trump during his presidency, with “psychopath” and “sociopath” vying for top spot.
It’s hard to know if Trump is or is not aware of the Nazi roots of his insults. After all, Trump famously didn’t know much about his own country’s history, as evidenced by former Chief of Staff John Kelly’s having to school the 45th President on events most Americans have at least a working knowledge of—like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 (businessinsider 1.15.20.).
At stake: a nation of laws, not men
What’s most troubling is something Ruth Ben Ghiat wrote in her book, Strongman, which chronicles the histories of men like Hitler, Mussolini, and now Trump who have emerged as existential threats to their countries' ability to remain free.
Obsessive language, such as that found in Trump’s attacks on the government coupled with slurs against men and women who stand in his way signal something important about the strong man persona and the dangerous effects it can have on their countries. Ben Ghiat warned that “Strongman states turn their rulers’ obsessions into policy.”
Hitler’s attacks on the Jewish people led to the extermination policy that killed more than six million Jews across Europe. Americans’ challenge is to keep Trump’s obsessions from ruining this country’s founding principle: that America remains a nation of laws, not men.
–trg