Trump is "Fascist to the Core"

His "enemy within" is you and me

If Donald Trump wins the election in three weeks he will be the first open fascist to serve as president of the United States.

I have been calling Trump a fascist and MAGA a fascist movement for several years, but this week their identity burst into the open in ways that made it impossible to ignore. When Charlamagne tha God said to Vice-President Kamala Harris on Tuesday that Trump’s campaign “is about fascism, why can’t we just say that?” She agreed, “Yes, we can say that.”

MSNBC host Chris Hayes headlined his show Tuesday, “The Fascist Campaign.” On Wednesday, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough told his audience, “What Donald Trump said is right out of the fascist playbook, where you use the military to go after your political opponents.”

Both were reacting to Trump’s threats from a Fox interview on Sunday (and repeated in the days that followed, including a Fox interview that aired Wednesday) that he would use military force against his political opponents.

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said. He added: “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

He singled out Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff as enemies.

“On Sunday, Donald Trump said that he wanted to deploy the United States military and National Guard  against his political opponents,” Scarborough said in amazement, “and it wasn’t a screaming headline in any of the newspapers anywhere.”

Nor were there front page headlines about the warning from former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley about Trump. “He is the most dangerous person ever…now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country…A fascist to the core!” Milley told Bob Woodward in his new book, War.

The inability or unwillingness of the mainstream media to recognize the seriousness of this threat may now by cracking. For years they have treated Trump as a normal, if unconventional, politician. He is anything but. The “sane-washing” where newspapers treat Trump’s bizarre, unhinged behavior as merely eccentric or “Trump being Trump’ is fading. So, too, may be the “fascist-washing” where his threats are ignored or excused or simply not believed. As The New York Times — one of the worst practitioners of these washing exercises — had to admit on Wednesday, “Never before has a presidential nominee openly suggest turning the military on Americans simply because they oppose his candidacy.”

When Madaleine Albright penned her prescient 2019 book, Fascism: A Warning, she hesitated to explicitly call Trump a fascist because he had not yet resorted to violence. That has changed. It is not just his rhetoric or the insurrection he stoked on January 6, but the multiplying threats he inspires against any who oppose his falsehoods.

This week, North Carolina authorities arrested an armed man after he threatened FEMA workers. Trump’s campaign has fueled wild stories of FEMA refusing to help people if they were Republican and of being out of funds after diverting billions to “illegal immigrants.” All totally false but spreading like wildfire across the MAGA world.

Similarly, Arizona Democrats had to shut down a Phoenix campaign office after the office was hit three times by gunfire. The violence is real; it is here now; it will grow worse if Trump is elected.

Journalist Anand Giridhardadas reports in his Substack newsletter, The.Ink, that Olivia Troy, a former senior aid to Vice-President Mike Pence now campaigning for Kamala Harris, “is so concerned about her own and others’ basic safety in a second Trump presidency that she is shopping around for foreign countries that would grant her a backup citizenship.” His story is titled, “Call It by It’s Name: Fascism.”

Even meteorologists have faced violent harassment and death threats based on Trump’s wild hurricane disinformation. The New York Times reported multiple examples, including this: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes,” wrote the forecaster in Michigan, Katie Nickolaou, in a social media post. “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”

Trump’s turn to explicit fascism is not a slip, it is a strategy. The Trump campaign is making a bet, says Chris Hayes. “They believe that fear and bigotry are gong to win them this election. That’s the bet of this fascist campaign. It is a war on truth, on people who tell truths. It promises an ultimate violent victory over every perceived enemy of Donald Trump, using the power of the state, invoking the voice of the people.”

A review by Politico of Trump’s rallies and speeches over the past two months shows a disturbing trend. “Trump has demonized minority groups and used increasingly dark, graphic imagery to talk about migrants in every one of his speeches since the Sept. 10 presidential debate,” Myah Ward reports

Ward quotes New York University history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat. ““He’s been taking Americans and his followers on a journey since really 2015 conditioning them … step by step instilling hatred in a group, and then escalating.”

She also cites Robert Jones, author of "The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, “What is so jarring to me is these are not just Nazi-like statements. These are actual Nazi sentiments.”

These threats are not just directed against immigrants, or rival political leaders. They are meant to intimidate anyone who challenges Trump’s false, fabricated reality. Today, that includes election officials, rescue workers and weather reporters. If Trump wins this election, tomorrow it will include all who dare speak truth to fascist power.