A fraternity of "vermin"
How Donald Trump has shamed America by sharing Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin's repulsive speech.
It’s hard to listen to Trump's “vermin speech,” delivered on Veterans Day to New
Hampshire voters.
Yes, it was typical of just about every other rally address that went before it. But its dark rhetorical turn took Trump to new depths. That’s when he joined a small but particularly lethal fraternity of world leaders who referred to citizens of their own country as “vermin.”
Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were the last western leaders to use the term. And many of us believed the word had been swept into the dustbin of history with the end of World War II. But it’s been revived now in the nation that helped bring down those leaders … by the former American president, Donald Trump.
The “vermin” comment came late in the speech after the former president went through the litany of complaints targeted at people – some from the “favorites” lists, others new. All have become calling cards for grievances spawned when America denied him a second term as president three years ago.
From now on, forget “dogcatcher”
First up, a new insult, then an old. New Hampshire Governor Republican Chris Sununu has not endorsed Trump and did not attend the rally, so the former president has decided he’s done for: “He can’t be elected dogcatcher,” Trump asserted.
General Mark Milley in the last weeks of Trump’s term held firm in the Department of Defense against the then-president’s last-minute efforts to stay in office. But in Trump’s telling, Milley was a coward. “Isn’t he a beauty?” Trump asked, suggesting weakness and a lack of masculinity of the highly decorated five-star general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Taking credit
Trump contended without evidence Milley was a reluctant warrior in the fight to bring down ISIS. In Iraq some other general nicknamed “Raisin’ Cane” put desk-bound generals like Milley to shame in the ISIS fight, he said. It was “Cane” and Trump who bravely took down ISIS when Obama and his generals dawdled, Trump declared to rally-goers’ generous applause.
Not backed up
This belief was not backed up by those tasked to head up allied efforts to take down the terrorist organization. According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s factcheck.com, Brett McGurk, who headed the international coalition to eliminate ISIS, 98 percent of its territory had been recaptured by allied forces by late 2017, 10 months into Trump’s first year in office, with 50 percent recaptured before President Barack Obama exited the presidency in early 2017.
The “crooked” trope
Continuing the insults, Trump used the familiar trope “Crooked Joe” for President Joe Biden. This from a man facing 91 criminal counts for attempting to steal the 2020 presidential election, taking and refusing to return national secrets, racketeering in connection with his “Big Steal” election claim, and being successfully charged for business fraud in New York.
In a nod to Trump’s nemesis, Nancy Pelosi, Trump trained his sarcasm on her husband. Trump ridiculed Paul Pelosi for being home alone in San Francisco the night he was violently attacked by a Trump supporter. Suggesting something nefarious, Trump asked, “What the hell was going on with her husband? I tell ya…” trailing off in Catskills lounge comic fashion. He ended with this non sequitur: “She had a wall around her house. That didn’t work out very well!” (Rally-goers and
Trump laugh.)
Not just “incompetent”
Next up was New York Attorney General Letitia James who brought the civil fraud trial against the former New York hotelier that’s still playing out in a Manhattan courtroom. “Grossly incompetent,” claimed Trump, although a New York judge has already ruled her presentation of facts to be truthful and accurate. All that’s left in the AG’s case is determining the amount the Trump organization owes the State of New York for committing fraud.
To no one’s surprise and the audience’s delight were Trump’s predictable attacks on the news media. They’re “failing,” “going broke,” and, the old chestnut, “fake news!”
Trump’s icons
In contrast, others came off well on the New Hampshire dais: the nation’s chief adversaries – China, North Korea, Russia, Hamas, and Hezbollah. They’re headed by “incredibly smart men” who routinely put our current and past presidents — except him — to shame.
Trump’s targets
Trump then turned, dictator-style, to those who could not easily fight back: would-be immigrants. To Trump, none were coming here to seek a better life. Their ranks were polluted with drug dealers largely responsible for the nation's growing fentanyl addiction. “Look what’s happened to our country!” Trump demanded, promising to round up immigrants, put them in internment camps, deport them, and impose the death penalty for anyone importing drugs, as China does.
Trump claimed declaratively: “We didn’t have any of these problems!” when he was president. But as with the ISIS contention, this too was not accurate. New data shows the Biden administration has removed more illegal aliens in its first two years than Trump did in his last two, without separating families and putting children in cages awaiting their fate (bier, david. cato institute.org).
More than an hour in on his Saturday rant, Trump introduced his now-infamous “vermin” reference, vermin being a term used by Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Josef Stalin to describe whomever they deemed to be the lowest of the low. In Hitler’s Germany, propaganda depicted Jewish citizens as rats skirting around streets and sewers polluting German life. The synonym for “rodents” was used by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin as a prelude to violently taking them out.
Switching in his speech from a casual to more formal tone, as if he were any one of those men speaking of the threats to their dictator-led countries in the 1930s,
Trump said:
“We must root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin in the confines of our country! “ Then, using projection — accusing others of having done or doing what he does — Trump added Americans to the vermin list – those who “lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do ANYTHING, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and the American dream.” Ironically and unconsciously, Trump has applied the “vermin” term to himself.
Ridicule makes dehumanization possible
To New York University History Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat such “dehumanization” is an important step in seizing and maintaining power by whatever means, including violence. Ridicule makes dehumanization possible. And dehumanization performs the same service for violence:
“Authoritarians…want to change the way people see violence, making it into something necessary and patriotic and even morally righteous. Hitler started talking about Jews as parasites in the 1920s. And Mussolini literally talked about rats…he said we need to kill rats who are bringing infectious disease and Bolshevism from the east.”
Trump’s rhetorical acceleration – this was the first time he has used “vermin” either as president or since he left office – marks a “new phase” for Trump, says Ben-Ghiat:
“He’s openly dehumanizing his targets so that will lessen the taboos in the future. And we see that in 2025 he’s got plans for mass deportations and giant camps. So you need people to be less sensitive about violence, either committing it or tolerating it…In all cases of history that I’ve studied, people did not take the various Hitlers and Mussolinis seriously until it was too late.”
To bone up on history’s lessons, this writer dug up one of Hitler’s most famous speeches – his Reichstag address of Jan. 20, 1939, delivered early in the year that would see the beginning of World War II in Europe with his invasion of Poland on Sept. 1.
I found differences in style, but similarities in content. Stylistically, Hitler’s speech was lengthy, formally written, and filled with “evidence” although his proofs were riddled with lies and half-truths. Overall, however, it featured the words and style of a person trying hard to convince his audience to trust him. Trump’s casual, arrogant, conversational rants assume that trust to exist.
In the Reichstag speech, Hitler justified Germany’s persecution of Jews in the kind of up is down and down is up fashion Trump uses. Jews, not the Germans, were “propagating their campaign of hatred under the cover of the press, film, radio, theater, and literature, which are all in their hands,” Hitler said.
Hitler continued his big lie, saying, “To date, no one has been persecuted because of religious affinity, nor will anyone be persecuted for this reason in the future, either.” This deliberately papers over Germany’s brutal Jewish marginalization programs, beginning in 1935 as Nazis stripped Jews of their citizenship, barred them from professions, used violence against them and their businesses with impunity, and denied them the right to vote. And, of course, he deliberately overlooks the program of annihilation the Holocaust would bring.
Trump’s Veterans Day speech similarly featured unfounded claims, lies, and half truths. But it was delivered in a voice that comfortably assumed his audience would believe anything he said. Judging from the happy American faces laughing, nodding, and applauding behind him, they do.
–trg
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