Trump & Fascism: The Beast That Be & the Mock Shock Crock

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On 9 Sept., a campaign account for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted (or “X’d”), “President Trump will deport migrants who eat pets.” The same day on the same platform, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance was ranting about “illegal Haitian immigrants” in Springfield, Ohio, and posted that, “reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” Two days later, Trump himself was repeating this in his debate with Kamala Harris:

“…what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War 3… What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States… In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there! And this is what’s happening in our country.”

It was a typical Trump campaign narrative: false in every particular (there has been no known pet-killing or eating; the Haitians being attacked were legal, not illegal, immigrants), aimed at demonizing and utterly dehumanizing a powerless “out group,” and to spark and create a justification for ugly retribution against that group. It didn’t just sound exactly like what neo-Nazis say about immigrants every day, Trump’s “source” was, in fact, a neo-Nazi group (called Blood Tribe). In the days that followed, Vance continued to repeat this and to escalate the rhetoric, continuing to pretend the legal Haitian immigrants were “illegal” and that they were responsible for “a massive rise in communicable diseases” and “crime” in Springfield (also false).[1] Presenting Jews as an alien infestation of unclean creatures who commit crimes, live like (and are) animals and spread disease were central themes of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, the groundwork for the Holocaust. Vance made the rounds of the Sunday network news shows repeating all of this.

And then on Monday — literally the very next day — Vance was on X whining that “the rhetoric was out of control.” Not Trump’s rhetoric or his own but the rhetoric of Democrats, for reacting to this sort of “campaign.” Their condemnations of Trump’s words and behavior, not Trump’s words and behavior themselves, were, Vance bleated, encouraging “violence” and assassination attempts against Trump...

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https://jriddle.medium.com/trump-fascism-the-beast-that-be-the-mock-shock-crock-df874a02c0e9