Trump And The Fascist Threat

The other night, I went to Leopold’s bookstore in Madison to hear Yale University Professor Jason Stanley talk about his latest book, “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.” In a hair-raising conversation with Nick Ramos, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Stanley did not mince his words.

Within the first minute, Stanley said, “We’re hearing direct stuff from Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ coming out of (Republican presidential candidate) Donald Trump’s mouth.”

Stanley mentioned Trump’s attack on “non-white immigrants” — specifically, his comments about them “poisoning the blood” of the nation — as a parallel to how Hitler talked about the Jews. He also mentioned the “extremely harsh scapegoating of trans Americans.” And he noted that Trump’s talk about the need for “patriotic education” is a
direct echo of Hitler’s language.

“Fascism: That’s what we’re seeing,” Stanley said.

The attacks on the mass media and the fact-checkers, the assaults on schoolteachers and professors who want to tell the truth about U.S. history — all this is part of the authoritarian project, he argued.

“So many people don’t realize it’s going to be terrible for them,” he warned, citing the famous saying from Martin Niemoller: “First, they came for the communists and I wasn’t a communist. So, I didn’t speak up. Then, they came for the socialists … Then, they came for the trade unionists … Then, they came for me, and there was no one left to speak
for me.”

Latinos will see their cousins being hauled away under mass deportation, he said. Black people will be victimized by Trump’s national “stop and frisk” policy.

Even businesspeople who want lower taxes aren’t going to fare well under authoritarian rule unless they are in the tiny clique close to Trump.

He urged us to embrace people who are being targeted.

“When they go after someone in your community, make them an apple pie,” he said. “Be vocal in supporting them.”

Stanley stressed the urgency of the upcoming election and the moral imperative to elect Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

“This is winnable,” he said. “The hope is that together, Republicans and Democrats, we can defeat an existential threat to our country. We will go down in the history books if we preserve our democracy.”

I left the bookstore even more rattled than before. We’ve had a week of warnings, starting with U.S. Gen. Mark Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telling author Bob Woodward that “Trump is a fascist to the core.”

And then, just the day before Stanley’s talk, I read an article in The Atlantic by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Anne Applebaum, entitled “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” She, like Stanley, cited many examples from Trump that directly echo the language of these authoritarian figures.

Here’s her warning: “If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.”

My friends, this is the hour of our destiny. In these next two weeks, we have the power, in our own hands, to hang on to our democracy and to give ourselves the chance to keep working to perfect it. The downside, if we fail, is too dark to fathom.

Editor’s Note: Matt Rothschild is the former editor of The Progressive magazine and former executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. He’s also the host of “Wisconsin Forward,” a Civics Media podcast series that looks to explain the background on a number of issues across Wisconsin, including the seemingly split personality the state presents in electoral politics, the results of political gerrymandering, and many more.