“This is how fascists campaign”
The campaign that Donald J. Trump is running in 2024 is a stark departure from 2016. It’s not just that he’s eight years older, chronologically. It’s the transformation in his rhetoric.
In the Sunday New York Times magazine, Charles Homans details what he’s learned after attending “seven Trump rallies in seven states since October.”
When I got home from Mar-a-Lago [on Super Tuesday], 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.
As Trump wraps up his rallies, he segues into a dystopian vision. This is from November 2023 in Claremont, N.H.
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…
And today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left. And it is growing every day. Every single day.
The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.
Our threat is from within.
Homans asked Federico Finchelstein, author of A Brief History of Fascist Lies, his opinion of the speech. His reply:
“This is how fascists campaign.”
Finchelstein, chairman of the history department at the New School for Social Research, is renowned for his research into fascism and the relationship between history and political theory. He calls Trump a “wannabe fascist.”
Homans again with a closing thought:
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.”
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