During Trump University professor Donald Trump’s weekend lecture in Fascist 101, he said something so egregious, something so reeking in criminality, something so steeped in cesspool stench, that it actually got major play in the mainstream media. While ostensibly babbling about the car industry, about how he’s gonna save it if he’s restored to power, this is what fell from his pie hole:
“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”
Naturally, his obsequious apologists insisted March 17 that Leader was only talking about the car industry, and therefore that anyone daring to criticize Leader was taking his “bloodbath” warning totally out of context. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana duly bowed to Leader on Meet the Press: “You could also look at the definition of bloodbath and it could be an economic disaster.” Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota did the same on CNN: “With regards to the autoworkers, he is showing them or he’s telling them what has been an economic downturn for them.”
It should be obvious to anyone with a functioning brain that he wasn’t just talking about a car industry bloodbath – (“that’s gonna be the least of it … That’ll be the least of it”). The domestic terrorist who has already been indicted for fomenting a violent insurrection against the democratic process is now dog-whistling his rabble to do it again at year’s end if he loses again.
I suppose we could cut Trump a break on context and agree that he was just talking about the car industry … if not for the fact that he has always fetishized violence (urging his fans to “knock the crap” out of protesters; hoping that cops would “shoot them in the legs“); that he salutes the hundreds of criminals who’ve been convicted in courts of law for the bloodbath of Jan. 6, 2021, and vows to pardon them (his rally announcer on March 16: “Please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages”); that he borrows Hitler’s rhetoric (referring to his critics as “vermin”); that he dehumanizes migrants by calling them “animals” (he says “they’re not people”); that he vows to jail his opponents (Liz Cheney, he said March 17, “should be prosecuted for what she has done to our country”); that he thinks Gen. Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserves the death penalty; that he thinks shoplifters should be shot on sight; that he mocked Nancy Pelosi’s husband after his skull was smashed by a hammer-wielding MAGAt.
I could cite many more, but that paragraph was already too long.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an NYU professor who specializes in decoding “strongman” rhetoric, said in a recent interview that “authoritarians always want to do two things – they want to change the way that people see violence, making it into something necessary and patriotic and even morally righteous, and they want to change the way people see their targets. And so they use dehumanizing language. And former President Trump is doing both. He’s been using his rallies since 2015 to shift the idea of violence into something positive.”
That’s the proper context for assessing what he said on Saturday night, March 16. It’s the context of the last nine years.
Ben-Ghiat said that Trump wants people “to be less sensitive about violence, either committing it themselves or tolerating it. (That’s) the reason he’s using this dehumanizing rhetoric now, to prepare people … All of this is part of a campaign of, you could call it mass reeducation of Americans to want forms of authoritarian rule … This is very dangerous rhetoric with a very precise fascist history.”
Alas, she said, “people did not take the various Hitlers and Mussolinis seriously until it was too late.”
If you catch my drift.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2024
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