The New York Times, whom I am reliably informed is doing everything it can to sabotage President Biden’s re-election campaign, has a long feature in today’s Magazine arguing that Donald Trump is a fascist. Written by Charles Homans, it’s titled “Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This.”
It’s a walk through seven select campaign speeches, starting with his Super Tuesday victory address. The text is that Trump is eschewing standard campaigning techniques by constantly emphasizing the dire state of the country. But the subtext is substantially darker.
It features a series of quotes, each of which link to an audio clip. They include:
- “We’re going to win this election, because we have no choice,” Donald J. Trump told us. “If we lose this election, we’re not going to have a country left.”
- “Our cities are choking to death,” he was saying now, some 20 minutes in. “Our states are dying. And frankly, our country is dying.”
- “We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake-news media until they become real. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will finish the job that we started better than anybody has ever started a job before.”
- “When they start playing with your elections and trying to arrest their political opponent — I can do that, too!” Trump said. “If I win — which I hope we do, because we’re not going to have a country — but if I win, I could then say, I don’t know: ‘This guy, this Democrat’s doing great. I don’t like the poll numbers. Attorney General, come down, arrest that guy, will you, please? Give him a subpoena! Indict him!’ That’s the end of him.”
- “Biden’s conduct on our border is, by any definition, a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” he said in Greensboro, N.C., a week before the Rome rally. “He is a danger to democracy. No.1, he goes after his political opponent, which nobody’s ever done in this country.”
- “I will stop this invasion. I’m going to do it. I will stop the killing. I will stop the bloodshed. I will end the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country. They’re conquering our country.”
This is interspersed with analysis from Homan and his expert witnesses.
I had been attending Trump’s speeches on and off for several months by this time, as I had in the last days of the 2016 campaign and then throughout and after his presidency. Watching him in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina this campaign season, it was clear that something had shifted.
Trump is among the world’s most obvious political creatures, but the sheer constancy of his public communications, their assaultiveness and density, has sometimes made it hard to see clearly their evolutions, to trace changes in the signal through the formidable noise. His demands on the world’s attention make it paradoxically easy not to pay attention to the particulars. Most Americans, in any case, made up their minds about him one way or another long ago. This has made Trump appear more static than he actually is — made it harder to see how the Trump presidency, which profoundly changed America, also changed Trump.
When I got home from Mar-a-Lago, I pulled up a video of him from Super Tuesday 2016, addressing his supporters in the same ballroom under similar circumstances. I was stunned by how different the man on the screen was from the one I had just seen. The Trump of 2016 had a spring in his step as he congratulated Ted Cruz on winning Texas, ribbed a vanquished Chris Christie, bantered and parried with the assembled reporters. His digressions into the many evils he sought to remedy were brief, and he seemed eager to get back to all he had accomplished, and all he would accomplish.
He provides modest evidence for this but I agree with the assessment.
No major American presidential candidate has talked like this — not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Trump himself. Before November 2020, his speeches, for all their boundary crossings, stopped short of the language of “vermin” and “enemies within.”
When I asked the political historian Federico Finchelstein what he made of the speech, he replied bluntly: “This is how fascists campaign.” [emphasis mine]
For roughly the entirety of Trump’s political career, his detractors have debated, exhaustively and exhaustingly, whether the “f” word is reasonably applied to him. Finchelstein, the chairman of the history department at the New School for Social Research, was for years among those who argued it was not. In his 2017 book, “From Fascism to Populism in History,” he contended that the most useful historical point of reference for the newly elected American president was the postwar populism of Juan Perón, the president of Finchelstein’s native Argentina in the 1940s and ’50s and again in the 1970s.
An alumnus of a military dictatorship who served as an attaché in Mussolini’s Italy, Perón admired the fascist regimes of interwar Europe. But he also understood that repeating them was both undesirable and probably impossible following the defeat of the Axis powers. If authoritarianism had a future, it was not in openly overturning democratic systems but in working inside them.
The result was what Finchelstein called a series of “authoritarian experiments in democracy.” Perón won elections fairly within a democratic system and never tried to overturn it, as Mussolini and Hitler did. At the same time, he often acted autocratically in office, exiling opponents, removing unfriendly judges from the bench and shuttering hostile newspapers.
Like the fascists, Perón redefined “the people” as an exclusive, not inclusive, category: an us defined against a them. Where he differed, crucially, was in claiming the mantle of democracy — and presenting himself as its perfection. In populism, the leader had arrived to beat back a threat to the will of the people that came from within the country’s democratic system — and that, absent the leader’s vigilant rule, would return to cause worse destruction. Perón’s enemies were not just Perón’s enemies; they were the enemies of democracy.
Before Trump, no American populist had enjoyed the stature and structural conditions necessary to succeed at populism’s essential act of mashing a democracy into the shape of his own face: of winning a presidential election. His 2017 Inaugural Address, which came to be known as his “American carnage” speech, was a Perónist speech, Finchelstein argued at the time. It presented Trump’s inauguration as a total break with American history. It announced the defeat of a threat that came from within the system and the perfection of American democracy, now contained within the form of Donald Trump.
The worldview the speech presented was unapologetically us against them, but like Perón’s, it was decidedly heavier on the us. “Jan. 20, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again,” Trump told his admirers on the National Mall. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.”
The story of the transformation is murky and long. But, essentially, Trump kept losing and piling up evidence that “they” were out to get him. And, Homans argues, this campaign is about getting even.
The essay has far too much discursive color, obscuring the narrative and taking away from the central argument. There are simply far too many asides and quotations from randos in the crowd. Even the sort of people who read the NYT Magazine are likely not going to fight their way through all that. Regardless, the picture is disturbing.
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Author: James Joyner
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