Trump’s Increasingly Fascistic Speeches
A disturbing dissection in the NYT Magazine.
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.
““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.””
And this is different from the message of the 2016 essay The Flight 93 Election because…?
That seems overstated.
@gVOR10: I’m being mildly tongue-in-cheek, but I see that critique constantly in these comments as well as in the punditocracy. See Jeff Jarvis in March. And Jarvis again yesterday. Lucian Truscott last month. Former NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan in February. There’s a constant stream of this.
It’s worse than that. I would posit that the NYT coverage of Biden rivals those of right wing networks, in that all negatives are amplified, while positives are minimized or ignored.
The Petty Feud Between the NYT and the White House.
Politco is carrying the water of the NYT in this piece, but here’s an illuminating snippet:
Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants.
Why Team Biden Is So Angry at The New York Times’s Coverage Of Trump
As a long time subscriber of the NYT, I’ve lost all faith in their sense of objectivity when it comes to Trump v. Biden. This is “But her emails” all over again.
@gVOR10: @James Joyner:
I think it’s understated. And I believe a fair reading of their coverage regarding both Biden and Trump will show that the NYT is bending over backwards for “objectivity”, which, in real terms, positively minimizes the outrageous behavior by Trump, and negatively exaggerates Biden’s normal governing behavior.
@EddieInCA: After 20+ years of subscribing I actually ended my e-subscription due to the Politico article. Loved Krugman, Boule and others but the clear evidence that the NYT has not learned anything from the “but her emails” finally pushed me out. The Post, Talking Points Memo and the Bulwark give me a good balance without funding Peter Baker etal.
@gVOR10:
If referencing the the opinion editors or features editors, yes.
As for Peter Baker and the news desk…I have no nice things to say.
I find the NYT useful for recaps and reviews of TV shows, science news, health news, stuff like that.
For political information, I go elsewhere. (Exception: I do like to watch the NYT “needle” during elections).
This is relevant to the “Fascisitic Speeches” thing, not the FTFNYT thing. Recent reading and current events, especially Trump’s “immunity”, got me to wanting to refresh my memory of the aftermath of the Nazi Night of the Long Knives and how the perpetrators of at least 85 and possibly hundreds of murders escape responsibility. WIKI has a an article.
One has to keep one’s priorities straight. What’s more important, democracy and the rule of law, or Alito’s career should Trump win?
So, federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies conspired to undermine and delegitimize Trump’s Presidency, the media spent two years endlessly smearing him with a false conspiracy theory, and there are now multiple efforts from Democrats in the legal system to throw Trump in prison.
But Trump is the fascist because of the language he uses.
And by the way, “One of the messages (Biden) has delivered in previous visits to Pennsylvania is that former President Donald Trump, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, is a danger to American democracy.”
https://apnews.com/article/democracy-threats-biden-trump-2024-pennsylvania-176e42a3877eaf33160c71d1b73c96cd
Given how few around here can admit the obvious fact of Biden’s mental and physical decline, it is hardly surprising that not even the NYT is fantasy-based enough to satisfy them.
I haven’t seen much of a “transformation” in Trump’s message. “American carnage” was the theme of his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention. It was his hobbyhorse long before that. “Losing our country” is a longstanding right-wing meme which Trump was repeating back in 2015. “Out of control” crime, illegal immigrants, people losing jobs and America frittering away its wealth on other countries have always been the pillars of his campaigning. The only really new element is his denigration of the justice system, due of course to his own legal troubles.
@TheRyGuy:
Did you notice him trying to overturn democracy?
Just askin’
BTW I wouldn’t characterise criticism of the New York Times as claims it’s “doing everything it can to sabotage President Biden’s re-election campaign”. It’s more that its choice of stories and the way it writes them minimises Trump’s negatives while highlighting Biden’s. For example, it tends to present Biden’s age and Trump’s legal troubles as comparable handicaps in their quest for office, not as grossly disproportionate flaws in their fitness for office. And Trump’s own age, so close to Biden’s, is seldom mentioned as an electoral handicap.
@Gustopher:
Given that he said
my guess would be “no.”
@TheRyGuy: Dude, put down the bong and step away! It’s time to let some else have a hit.
@TheRyGuy:
Trump is a rapist and fascist who declared he would be dictator on Day One of a second presidency, after he plotted to overthrow the government and incited the deadly Jan 6 terror attack with sore loser election lies.
Trump ran in 2016 on locking up Hillary Clinton. He also colluded with Russian attacks on the 2016 election: he publicly told Russia to steal emails (they did the next day), his campaign met Russian operatives in Trump Tower to exchange election meddling for reducing sanctions, and his campaign chair Paul Manafort admitted giving data to Russians. His Justice Department lead conspired to downplay these treasonous acts.
Traitor Trump, who exchanged love letters with North Korea’s communist dictator and who recently pledged to greenlight a Russian attack on Europe, won the 2016 election because the New York FBI office intervened on his behalf against Hillary last minute.
Now Trump is rightly facing accountability for a series of crimes: refusing to return the nation’s security secrets, his sore loser coup, and falsifying records of illegal hush money payments.
Your MAGA tears taste delicious. Keep crying. #LockHimUp
@TheRyGuy:
Mike Pence, Liz Cheney, and Nikki Haley are among prominent Republicans who have pointed out Trump’s physical, mental, and moral unfitness. Yet you refuse to admit Trump lost in 2020 because he failed as president. You refuse to admit Trump mishandled COVID. You refuse to admit it’s Trump’s fault he alienated voters with his rancid, childish, classless behavior. You refuse to admit Trump attempted a violent, fascist overthrow of the US government rather than accept he loss because of his choices.
You refuse to admit Trump is charged with crimes because he broke the law. You refuse to admit Trump rants on social media like a serial killer having a psychotic break. You refuse to admit Trump constantly slurs his words and can’t stay awake in court. You refuse to admit Trump looks unhealthy and plastered with orange pancake makeup.
You refuse to admit a guy who can’t pass a background check shouldn’t be president. You refuse to admit a court found Trump liable for sexual assault, that he repeatedly made gross comments sexualizing his own daughter, that he bragged about walking in on naked teenage girls, that he praised Jeff Epstein for liking women “on the younger side.”
Denial and lies won’t help Trump, a groomer and a thug, avoid the same fate as Red Wave 2022. MAGA will need another tactic, to attract the voters running from Republican extremism, like book banning and forced birth.
Poor Mr. Lardass! He’s the most powerful man, the smartest man, and he is all man, and yet he keeps getting foiled by his inferiors, who are inferior to him in every way.
But, what can you do? You submit to the dictator you have, not the dictator you want.
Compare and contrast:
Versus:
The same person said these two things within 48 hours.
There is no intellectual consistency here except a firm denial that Trump can do anything wrong. There’s no point trying to reason with this, because it’s simply a broken process.
@ptfe: “There is no intellectual consistency here except a firm denial that Trump can do anything wrong.”
Hey, if it’s good enough for the Supreme Court…
@TheRyGuy:
I’m not sure which ‘false conspiracy theory’ you’re talking about? To be fair (and balanced, too), in 2016 Trump Jr and others from the Trump campaign met with a known Russian operative at the Trump Tower.