Violence

Violence in the streets is not new to Americans. But we’ve not had a President who stoked violence as a crucial part of his approach to governing. Violence is the result of hate and extremism, especially toward immigrants and people of color, and has been fueled by Trump’s “own toxic hate.” Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His writing and speaking is important as we look ahead to stop Trump’s third attempt to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Here is a quote by Dr. Sachs that I used in The Trump Files:

Trump is stoking mass violence in America. Hate crimes and deaths from mass shootings are soaring. And when they occur, as with the horrific attack on the synagogue in Pittsburgh, Trump’s response is always more violence, calling for more guns, not fewer, and for the death penalty, while denying any role of his own toxic hate-filled speech. Herein is another sign of Trump’s pathology, an utter inability to face the consequences of his own actions.²

Reprinted from Hassard, Jack. The Trump Files: An Account of the Trump Administration’s Effect on American Democracy, Human Rights, Science and Public Health (pp. 131-132). Northington-Hearn Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition.

Dehumanizing People

Trump, like many authoritarians and dictators, uses incendiary language to threaten others he considers his enemies. Trump has a long list of enemies, and he has threatened to go after them if he wins the 2024 election. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an American historian, is a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders and a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University.

On her Substack site, Lucid, she recently posted “Trump’s Latest Speech Echoes Fascist Rhetoric.” According to Dr. Ben-Ghiat, Trump “really does want you to call him a Fascist.” His language is not only violent, but it is the way autocrats dehumanize people. His language, according to Ben-Ghiat, is used to educate Americans to view violence as “justified, patriotic, and even morally righteous.” She provides some history on dictators use of violence, and makes these comments.

To get people to lose their aversion to violence, savvy authoritarians also dehumanize their enemies. That’s what Trump is doing. Hitler used this ploy from the very start, calling Jews the “black parasites of the nation” in a 1920 speech. By the time Hitler got into power in 1933 and translated dehumanizing rhetoric into repressive policies, Germans had heard these messages for over a decade.

As a historian of autocracy with a specialization in Italian Fascism, the use of the “vermin” image got my attention. Mussolini used similar language in his 1927 Ascension Day speech which laid out Fascism’s intention to subject leftists and others to “prophylaxis” measures to defend the Italian state and society from their nefarious influences.

By the time Il Duce delivered this landmark address, the dictatorship had been in place for two years, and opposition politicians and the press were in prison or had gone into exile. That did not stop him from talking about killing “rodents who carry infectious diseases from the East: the East that brings us lovely things, such as yellow fever and Bolshevism.”

Mussolini loved to make jokes in his speeches to Parliament, and this one elicited laughter —or so says the official transcript. He is speaking about actual rats but, as the Bolshevism comment makes clear, also about Communists. “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person,” he concluded chillingly about leftists and other targeted categories of people.

Trump’s recent comment about undocumented immigrants “polluting the blood of our country” is in the same vein, as are the ideas circulating among his 2025 advance team to deport millions of immigrants and “quarantine” others in massive camps.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Trump’s Latest Speech Echoes Fascist Rhetoric. Lucidhttps://open.substack.com/pub/lucid/p/trump-really-doesnt-want-you-to-call?r=eita&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Using Donald Trump’s Presidency to stop him in 2024

In one sense, Donald Trump’s entire presidency was a training exercise. It’s up to us to realize that he has already shown us what he will do again if elected in 2024. It’s a mistake to think that the United States Capitol building storming was the only part of Donald Trump’s training exercise. To understand the depth of his criminality, we should pay attention to the January 6th and Fulton County Election Interference indictments.

January 6

The January 6 indictment is being prosecuted by Jack Smith, with Tanya S. Chutkan as the judge in the case. Donald Trump has been charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S., conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. The trial is scheduled to begin March 4, 2024.

Fulton County

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is prosecuting the Fulton County election interference case. Scott McAfee is the judge in the case. Trump and 18 defendants have been charged with solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, false statements and writings, filing false documents, violation of the Georgia Racketeer Act, conspiracy to impersonate a public officer, conspiracy to commit forgery, conspiracy to commit false statements, conspiracy to commit computer theft and trespass, conspiracy to commit election fraud, influencing witnesses.

These indictments detail how Donald Trump tried to steal an election that he knew he lost. In the first case (January 6), he incited a mob to attack members of Congress to prevent the naming of the winner of the 2024 election. The physical attack on the Capitol was only one part of the Donald Trump’s malfeasance. He organized groups of lawyers, elected representatives, and staff in the White House, and the Justice Department to collaborate to overturn the election.

Donald Trump’s “training exercise” exposes his criminal behavior, It also alerts us to the tactics he and his allies will use in the upcoming election.

Books

There are several books that I hope you will consider and possibly refer to your family, friends, and colleagues. I’ve found these books important in understanding the danger that Donald Trump poses for our country.

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat. This is one of the best books to help us understand the nature of authoritarian men. This includes Mussolini, Hitler, Putin, Donald Trump, and many others. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the “strongman” playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues. from Mussolini to Putin. enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future.”

For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers, elf-proclaimed saviors of the nation. They evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual, and other predators.

Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt. The authors provide a follow up to their 2018 book, How Democracies Die. America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it? They call for a reform to politics to figure out how to promote a democracy in a multiracial society.

The Trump Files: An Account of the Trump Administration’s Effect on American Democracy, Human Rights, Science, and Public Health by Jack Hassard. The Trump Files is a history of a president and administration who undermined the tenets of a liberal democracy with the Big Lie and attempted coup d’etat. From the author comes his vivid, real-time documentation of the nation’s turbulent Trump years returning citizens to those troubling days of not-so-very-long-ago to help deal with the future. This is not a tell-all and get-out-of-dodge Trump book. It is a smart, and informed book—rare during this dangerous and chaotic time in history.

Germany 1923 by Volker Ullrich. Publishing a century after that fateful year, Germany 1923 is a riveting chronicle of one of the most challenging times any modern democracy has faced, one with haunting parallels to our own political moment.

Prequel by Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis. While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.

That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.

Notes

1. Bandy X. Lee, “When a coup attempt goes unpunished, it becomes a training exercise,” Twitter, May 9, 2021, retrieved April 1, 2022, https://mobile.twitter.com/BandyXLee1/status/1391376829844500482.
2. Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 4.