And how any of his supporters do not see this, or if
they do, they have blinders on. The words HAVE been
spoken, they have been spoken out loud for all to hear,
yet only some can hear.
"Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini
Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny
were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation
of powers became important in the 17th and 18th
centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates
from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and
communists liked to describe their political enemies as
vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as
insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been
revived and reanimated, in an American presidential
campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his
opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like
vermin.”
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.”
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.”
This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao
Zedong also described his political opponents as
“poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing”
hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that
Cambodia would be “purified.”
In each of these very different societies, the purpose
of this kind of rhetoric was the same. 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.
Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal
part of American presidential politics. Even George
Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963
speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and
the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided
such language. Wallace called for “segregation today,
segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did
not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or
talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered
Japanese Americans into internment camps following the
outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but
not parasites.
In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. 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.
These phrases have not been put on posters and banners
at random in the final weeks of an American election
season. With less than three weeks left to go, most
candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for
the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite.
Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his
campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the
1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of
whole groups of people; the references to police, to
violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will
unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not
only against immigrants but also against political
opponents—none of this has been used successfully in
modern American politics.
But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern
American politics. Several generations of American
politicians have assumed that American voters, most of
whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in
school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never
experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant
to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling
—knowingly and cynically—that we are not."
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