Worked for others in their time. And Trump has been practicing Strongman-speak for a long time.
“he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win.”
The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics.
www.theatlantic.com
His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he
would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at
his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.
These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention
held up prefabricatedsigns: mass deportation now. Just this week, when Trump was
swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of
a huge slogan: trump was right about everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat
posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini’s Italy displaying his slogan: mussolini is always right.
These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence,
to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.
But neither has this rhetoric been
tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.
