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maga extremists
Dems Can Win If They Go on the Offensive
They must focus all their energy on reminding voters of just how extreme former President Donald Trump is while offering an alternative vision for the future the American people can actually vote for.
Jul 26, 2024
The back-to-back Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and news of U.S. President Joe Biden dropping out of the race offer the clearest strategy yet for Democrats to win in November: focusing all their energy on reminding voters of just how extreme former President Donald Trump is while offering an alternative vision for the future the American people can actually vote for.
In recent weeks, Trump has noticeably moderated his tone. He came out in support of IVF after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling led some providers to suspend their IVF programs, argued he does not support a nationwide ban on abortion, and even disavowed the infamous Project 2025. Trump may be an extremist, but he knows where the threats to winning the White House lie. But the red meat rhetoric, cult behavior, and gross incompetence on display at the RNC told the real story. Attempts to distance himself from fascist policies and call for unity after an unconscionable attack against him were ultimately a sham meant to confuse voters—and the MAGA, anti-freedom party is here for the long haul.
Trump’s introduction of Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate alone should dispel any illusion Trump was moving to the center. Trump could have picked a vice president with the ability to appeal to specific constituencies Democrats desperately rely on, lock a swing state, or further portray unity. But Vance is easily the most extreme choice of them all: a supporter of total abortion bans who will make Project 2025 a reality, anointed by Trump as the future of the party.
Everywhere Trump goes, turmoil follows and people lose their freedoms.
The vice president pick was followed by a sea of “Mass Deportation Now” signs; Nikki Haley getting booed while swallowing her pride and political conviction to endorse Trump; Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan, and Ultimate Fighting Championship’s Dana White offering a weird but revealing display of a hyper-masculinity; and extremists attacking Usha Vance online for her Indian heritage.
We can’t let Trump cynically exploit the shooting and position himself as both a martyr and God’s gift to Earth, saved in what he described as a “providential moment in his speech.” We can wholeheartedly condemn an assassination attempt while acknowledging Trump himself fomented the kind of political violence he fell victim to. Voters are with us: Most Americans blamed political rhetoric for the shooting, and nearly 40% blamed Trump himself. We need to talk about Trump not just as a general threat to democracy, but as an agent of chaos, someone whom turmoil follows everywhere in rhetoric and actions. Everywhere Trump goes, turmoil follows and people lose their freedoms.
Even as we remind voters of who Trump really is, our side can’t solely rely on the anti-Trump movement to win. A lot of folks are disillusioned and haven’t heard or felt the incredible progress made over the last four years despite the administration’s attempts to deploy surrogates on the road. And, as some voters don’t see or know about these accomplishments, they have not been hearing something to look forward to because Biden just hadn’t outlined a clear second-term vision. Only time will tell if his decision to drop out will help remove one layer of voter apathy and discontent, but the Democratic Party seemingly coalescing around Kamala Harris, who would offer many “firsts” if elected president, is a massive opportunity to change that dynamic.
Now, it’s on us to work with progressive activists and organizers on the ground, outside of the party machine, to paint a positive picture of why our values are worth supporting. Voters don’t have to vote for everything we stand for and every one of our leaders. But there is undoubtedly something that matters to them they can proactively cast a ballot for—and that’s what we need to remind them.
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Portraying Trump as the Fascist He Is Could Save US Democracy
It comes down to Democratic framing, a truth-telling media, and the independent judiciary to convince the electorate that Trump is actually the biggest threat ever to the story of America.
Apr 18, 2024
April 19, 2025. WASHINGTON (AP)—At the direction of Donald Trump, 47th president of the United States, Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday sent teams of FBI agents to the residences of General Mark Milley, Eric Holder, and Hillary Clinton.
Knocking on their doors at precisely 9:00 am, the lead agents identically told each of their targets, “We’ve come to confiscate your electronic devices pursuant to a lawful warrant. You are not now under arrest.” Clinton appeared the most resigned. “What might the charges be?” “Sorry, ma’am,” said the female agent with a small ponytail and large vest emblazoned with the familiar oversized yellow lettering of the FBI. “We’re not now allowed to say.”
Paxton late morning explained the administration’s reasoning. “May we remind critics that the American people have spoken?” an apparent reference to Trump’s electoral vote victory of 270 to 268, despite former President Joe Biden’s popular vote margin of 10 million votes over Trump—or 48% to 40%. (The remainder went to four minor party candidates.) The electoral college, however, for the third time in the last seven presidential elections, turned a popular vote victory into a narrow loss.
Secretary of Homeland Security Stephen Miller made additional news on immigration in a Newsmax interview. “Today, we’re beginning construction of 50,000 modular homes in Waco, Texas, to launch ‘Operation Relocation’ to deport three million Americans who came here illegally. Promise made. Promise kept.”
The Pentagon also yesterday sent in federal troops under the 1871 KKK Insurrection Act to a dozen cities holding long-planned “Democracy, Not Dictatorship” protests—organized by MoveOn, Brady United, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Tens of thousands of peaceful marchers in each location were shocked to encounter M1 Abrams tanks rolling down city streets to block their paths with tear gas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets. Thirteen students were killed in Atlanta alone when they stood in front of tanks that wouldn’t stop.
Reporters caught up with President Trump early afternoon in between rounds of golf at his Bedminster Club in New Jersey.. “Well, didn’t Biden do the same thing to me and Rudy? Sad about the deaths in Atlanta but, excuse me, what were those protesters doing in front of our tanks? Anyway, I’d like to remind all Americans that today is the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord that began our journey as an exceptional model of freedom and democracy.”
* * *
Growing up politically as a progressive Democrat, I never called conservative Republicans “fascist,” a) because they weren’t and b) because it sounded alarmist if not naive, the prevailing view being “only Hitler was Hitler.” That was and still is literally true… yet hopelessly dated since ignoring Donald Trump’s chesty Caesarism is now what’s truly naive.
Which raises three separate though related questions: What’s the evidence that he’s an American Fascist? Should the mainstream media finally concede that should be a newsworthy part of the 2024 contest? And will branding him as one repel a small but decisive number of independent voters to conclude, “Enough!”?
There are of course avalanches of solo articles detailing Trump’s astonishing rhetoric, scandals, and prosecutions. But in each instance, he belligerently “doubles down”—which by definition means there’s no depth he won’t descend to—and quickly offers up dog-ate-my-homework excuses: “It was a joke… Hillary and Joe are worse… What about Hunter?… That’s taken out of context… I never read Mein Kampf… Black prosecutors are racists!… that was AI, not me… Trump Derangement Syndrome!… Witch Hunt!“ His calculation is apparently to isolate and disparage all criticism and indictments so they appear at worst to be aberrations and obscure how his whole is-worse-than-the-sum-of-his-parts, as if a pointillist were judged by only a few dabs of color rather than the entirely of the work. Which in Trump’s case would reveal a portrait far closer to Orban than Obama.
America has never before witnessed a politician who so compulsively and flagrantly lies about everything that his lawyers will not allow him to testify in court.
It’s tempting to respond to his rotating evasions with John McEnroe-worthy contempt: “You. Cannot. Be. Serious!” But in the current context of close polls and monumental stakes, mere indignation might allow him to keep escaping accountability through a combination of scandal fatigue, Trump judges, his base of delirious ideologues and credulous abettors, and GOP leaders paying tribute to Trump by shrugging off his predations. Add to that Team Trump’s expectation that the Fourth Estate will just keep bothsides-ing every controversy due, in Molly Jong-Fast’s insight, to its “normalcy bias.”
With his rants dominating coverage and polls barely budging after a year of startling news cycles, Democrats need more passionate language and memorable story lines to move the needle. Brian Klaas, in his best-selling Fluke, urges advocates to use “schemas… psychological tools to distill vast amounts of information into easily maintained categories.” Former President Abraham Lincoln embraced his “rail splitter” moniker; Lenin took over Russia at the end of World War I with the penetrating slogan, “Land. Bread. Peace”; recent Republicans get it too, from Nixon’s “Silent Majority” to Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” to “Make America Great Again” and recently the rage over “Age.”
What new schema could help keep Democrats on offense and the GOP on the ropes? One would be to portray Trump as a “fascist,” despite or perhaps because of how much of the media dismiss that truth as taboo.
He did, after all, name his movement “America First” after Charles Lindbergh’s appeasement toward Germany in the 30s. Now he openly lauds, quotes, and yearns to imitate Putin, Xi, Kim and Orban—indeed acting as “Putin’s puppet” by implying that Russia should attack NATO (which is odd since the country he seeks to again lead is a member state). If that’s the company he keeps, Trump should be pressed to explain why he too isn’t a fascist, and down-ballot Republicans why they aren’t mute accomplices.
Many Americans may not now understand what that really means since America has never before encountered one… but intense national campaigns can be teachable events. A synthesis of recent books on modern definitions describe a governing system that sounds eerily familiar—viz., one-man rule (“unitary government” in the GOP euphemism) based on big lies, nationalist fervor, xenophobia, hatred of marginal groups, displays of militarism, incitement to violence, media manipulation, and persistent lawlessness.
Let’s apply those criteria to the 2024 election to see whether a democracy birthed after defeating a distant monarch might actually elect one 248 years later.
Lies. Most politicians will at times lie or fib—Mark Twain charitably called them “stretchers”—or, worse, they’ll weaponize Big Lies to justify depravity. The Confederacy maintained that slaves were “property,” Hitler blamed Jews for stabbing Germany in the back in WWI, Joe McCarthy waved around his shifting list of supposed Communists. Those falsehoods attracted immense, eager audiences… until, eventually, they didn’t.
America, however, has never before witnessed a politician who so compulsively and flagrantly lies about everything that his lawyers will not allow him to testify in court. It’s not merely Trump’s astounding 22 lies or falsehoods on average per day in his one term in office, according to The Washington Post’s fact-checking team, but also several ridiculous ones that have mesmerized his Cult-45: e.g., Obama was a Muslim born abroad; Biden stole the 2020 election; scores of different prosecutors, judges, and juries around the country are somehow in cahoots; vaccines are about personal liberty not public health; and serious crime is rampant with immigrants largely to blame (except, fyi, migrants commit fewer crimes per capita than non-migrants). Last month he even declared that Jewish Democrats “hate their religion and Israel” (which was news to this writer).
The problem is not any particular falsehood but rather how their critical mass has gravitationally pulled millions of aggrieved Americans into his black hole so they wind up not trusting anyone… except The Great Leader.
Then there are the thousands of times that Trump has deployed a classic tactic of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels—keep accusing enemies of your own misconduct in order to blur the truth. Hence, the ex-president declares, “It’s Biden who hates democracy and wants to overturn an election.” Why lie so blatantly, Trump friend Billy Bush once asked him? “Look, you just tell them and they’ll believe it. That’s it. They just do.”
Amplifying laughable lies are MAGAphones like House GOP chairs and Fox anchors. Republican chairmen have become innuendo-machines that disparage the “Biden Crime Family” based on “very credible” witnesses… who, mirable dictu, disappeared or are now in jail for spreading Russian disinformation. The performative outrage of Messrs. Jordan and Comer overlooks Biden’s zero criminal charges over his 50 years of public service compared to Trump’s 88 felony indictments in the past year (not counting adverse defamation, disbarments, and civil judgments).
At the same time, Fox seems to exist as mini-me’s repeating his gaslighting de jour—the latest being Hannity’s nightly attempts to earnestly announce that things were better four years ago, when 1.1 million American were dying from Covid-19 and Trump became the first president since Hoover to end his term with fewer jobs than at the start.
The problem is not any particular falsehood but rather how their critical mass has gravitationally pulled millions of aggrieved Americans into his black hole so they wind up not trusting anyone… except The Great Leader. Again, sound familiar?
Violence. Fascist rulers throughout history have won or maintained power via violence and intimidation: Lenin, Mussolini, Franco, and Gaddafi in violent takeovers; rogue militias such as Italian Blackshirts and German Brownshirts in the 1920s; Stalin’s Great Purge; and Hitler’s Kristallnacht in 1938 as a prequel to far worse later.
The ex-president of course has not been as savage, but it was interesting that—not exactly being a student of history—he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet by his bed, some of which were echoed later in his own propaganda. He repeatedly warns of a “blood bath” if he loses in 2024, promises that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and, recently, endangers jurists and their families by attacking them by name. Nor was it cool when he dined with, and then praised, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.
He routinely practices “stochastic terrorism” by deploying incendiary rhetoric that he knows—or hopes—will trigger subsequent violence. Like the hammer-wielding home invader looking for Nancy but settling for Paul Pelosi; the mass killers at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue, Walmart in El Paso, and the Buffalo supermarket quoting MAGAisms in their manifestos; and his near-physical inability to condemn the Proud Boys and Charlottesville protesters—can these private militias be fairly called his “Redshirts”?
Has America faced such a climate of “mobocracy”—a phrase of Lincoln’s—since the 1850s?
This campaign of menace has produced anticipatory genuflection by frightened Republicans whose in-boxes are clogged with death threats at any perceived disloyalty. It gets worse: FBI data demonstrate that a significant majority of domestic terrorism is now committed by white reactionaries; some senators privately admit they didn’t vote to convict him at his impeachment trial fearing for the safety of family members; ex-Pentagon Secretary Mark Esper disclosed that Trump suggested that “soldiers shoot civilians” during the George Floyd marches… as growing predictions of a new Civil War emanated from only one of our two major parties, even before the major film Civil War hits screens this month.
“In America, the hallmark of budding fascists was not intellectuals discussing how to take power,” concludes scholar Heather Cox Richardson recently in Democracy Awakening. “It was populist violence.”
No doubt that the leading example was the shouts of “hang Mike Pence” during a Trump-inspired riot that took seven lives. And no surprise that a Navigator poll in March showed the “fear of political violence” had jumped a stunning 29-45% among independents in only the past three months. Has America faced such a climate of “mobocracy”—a phrase of Lincoln’s—since the 1850s?
For the founders never anticipated a leader who would say, “We don’t debate our opponents, we destroy them!”… Oh, that was Benito Mussolini in 1936, but notice how easy it was to conflate two strongmen for whom violence was not a bug but a feature of their governance. Trump himself explained to Bob Woodward that his core belief was that “real power is, I don’t even want to use the word, fear.”
Democracy and Freedom. “Welcome to the end of Democracy,” said the smug opening speaker at this year’s CPAC conference, who at least gets props for candor.
Of course, dictatorships shun democracy by a) rigging free and fair elections and b) limiting independent thought since that threatens their all-powerful and all-knowing image. In the U.S. that shows up in proposed Republican bans on books, abortions, and marriage equality. Trump admitted to wanting to be “a dictator for a day” (as if he’d then voluntarily relinquish that power) and suggested yanking the broadcast license of NBC because of how SNL makes fun of him (networks, by the way, don’t have licenses, only stations do). A joke? Not when he previously declared that “I alone can fix it,” that “Article III [of the Constitution] allows me to do whatever I want,” and that future presidents should “have absolute immunity” for any crimes committed while in office.
Here’s only part of the GOP game plan to repress freedom by rewriting our laws and history:
- First, by shrinking minority voting at the state level while the Trump Supreme Court undermines the hugely successful Voting Rights Act (enacted unanimously, then reenacted). Why? Because, said Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby County v. Holder, the South had changed since segregation became unlawful. Except it hadn’t and hasn’t. The Brennan Center in March documented a growing racial voting gap since that 2013 decision due to the 20 states that have enacted scores of new voter elimination laws.
- Second, limiting speech based on the unspoken premise that “everyone’s entitled to our opinion.” Numerous states are trying to imitate Florida’s pioneering attempt to ban books in school libraries that discuss racism and gender identity since that might either upset white students… or “groom” others. So Black children for generations had to endure the chains of racism, but white children today are too fragile to even learn about it.
- Third, systemically attacking the “fake media” for being “enemies of the people,” a coinage of Stalin’s. As he admitted to CBS’s Leslie Stahl, his intention behind repeating this phrase was to taint independent journalism and preempt any criticism of him.
Two of the leading Democracy indexes ( The Economist and Freedom House) rate the U.S. a “flawed democracy,” and declining. Trump redux might put us into Belarus territory.
The Rule of Law seems likely to invert into a version of mob rule if the Heritage Foundation’s dystopian Project 2025 were to be enacted. And what else could Trump have meant by admitting that he would “terminate the Constitution” in an emergency and—understanding the allure of the “anti-hero”—by repeatedly lauding Al Capone’s “tough guy” aura? Al Capone! It’s unlikely that any other American politician has ever said or even thought that.
Even as Team Trump excoriates the mild-mannered Merrick Garland for “weaponizing justice” (despite his record number of Republican Special Counsel), the ex-president unironically tells rallies that “if I see someone doing well and beating me… I’ll say indict them.” An ex-president who used his pardon power to release imprisoned political allies now promises to pardon 1400 people duly convicted of crimes in the January 6 insurrection. And no matter how delayed his multiple criminal trials may be, there’s already voluminous evidence under oath that his corrupt character puts him on a scale with Benedict Arnold and 100 Nixons. As his NSC advisor John Bolton put it, “For him, obstruction of justice is a way of life.”
If you taped over the name Donald John Trump on top of a list of all the times he’s lost in court, a neutral observer would conclude we were dealing with a career criminal.
Other-ism. History’s worst dictators have conjured up sinister-sounding enemies to boost nationalist fervor and justify violence. Whether it was Jews in Germany (Hitler famously looked admiringly on Confederate laws and later Jim Crow to help model his approach), socialists in Italy, the intellectual elites in Mao’s China, or gays now in Russia, it’s been an irresistible itch that they scratch. They may not have social programs but readily understand political pogroms (actual or polemical) to fuel their fundamental “US vs THEM” dynamic.
Trump has a proven history of bigotry. It includes unlawfully barring Black people in the 1970s from his father’s apartment buildings; questioning the birth of America’s first Black president; asserting that The Squad should “go back” to where they came from; calling African countries “shitholes”; attempting to bar Muslims from entering the U. S.; and now pledging to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. At the same time, fellow-travelers Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Fox hosts promote the white nationalist “Great Replacement Theory” and blame DEI (“Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” in hiring) for causing airline crashes and the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
While avoiding the “N” word, the unmistakable GOP message is that everything will be all-white.
Wealth. Putin is reportedly the world’s richest person and keeps his oligarchs in line by controlling their wealth. Trump’s core DNA is obviously money. Consider: his obsession with ranking high on the Forbes 400; near sole policy goal of $2 trillion in more tax cuts for the already rich; transformation of the RNC into his personal piggy bank; and of course the emolumental $2 billion that Crown Prince MBS gifted son-in-law Jared Kushner. To MAGA, steep wealth and income inequality is not a problem but a promise.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in her brilliant 2020 book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, summarizes the “contract” between the authoritarian ruler and his collaborators: “The offer of power and economic gain in exchange for supporting his violent actions and suppression of civil rights.”
* * *
It’s critical that we appreciate the ambition of Trump’s extremism. He is attempting to pull off one of the biggest propaganda campaigns in political history and is getting dangerously close to succeeding. Slowing, stopping, defeating, and then reversing everything itemized above is no simple task.
Totalling all these similarities with history’s authoritarians, there must be a word that describes a corrupt megalomaniac who is running a campaign based, in his own words, on “revenge and retribution.” But that word isn’t “conservative” as Eisenhower, Reagan, or the Bushes would have understood it. If Trumpism, The Sequel were a streaming video,it would require a casting call for actors to play dolts like those in the cult movie Idiocracy, which was supposed to be a satire on reverse Darwinism, not a reality TV series.
The right word is Fascist. According to the most cited scholarship on such matters, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then…” But can that word and frame in 2024 become as salient as the high-decibel GOP campaign of smear and fear?
We’ll never know whether the fascist moniker is effective if most of the Fourth Estate sticks to its standard “horse-race” template, and continues to assume that today’s GOP is anything like country-club Republicans of decades past.
There are still clusters of influential people who appear scared to utter it: commentators who are stuck on Hitler as the litmus test; politicians who don’t want to risk offending some conservative constituents; an entire party in a two-party system too fearful to criticize him; editors at major publications reluctant to turn off any of their audience, as libertarian oligarchs like Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch, and John Malone show no interest in encouraging debates about the GOP’s dangerous extremism. The mainstream media regularly quote Republicans calling all Democrats “socialists,” yet reach for their smelling salts at the prospect of discussing whether the Trump clique is “fascist,” even though the former is false and the latter true.
Calling out hard-core MAGAs, to be sure, won’t change their minds since they emotionally bond with a leader who shamelessly hates whom they hate and are loathe to abandon their tribe. “You can’t reason people out of an opinion,” wrote Jonathan Swift, “that they didn’t reason themselves into.” Still, that public conversation would likely spur a larger Democratic turnout (especially as compared to 2016 when so many lazy voters thought Hillary couldn’t lose) and also repulse some slice of undecided voters otherwise immune to mere high-minded appeals to democracy and freedom.
How real is the threat that an Americanized fascism can defeat “the world’s oldest democracy” this fall? My best answer—very real yet still very unlikely. There are obviously several big unknowns to come beyond the scope of this article, like the result of Trump’s upcoming criminal trial(s), the Extreme Court’s ruling on “president immunity,” third-party candidates getting on ballots, and a possible October surprise in either of two major wars.
But Biden has a clear edge (as of now) for three big reasons: first, the ascendancy of abortion as the likely No. 1 voter variable due to the Dobbs decision and the absurd Arizona decision this month that upheld a total ban based on an 1864 statute… and as voters have clearly shown in the 2022 midterms and all subsequent state abortion referenda; second, a steadily rising economy that undermines the GOP falsehood that things are going to hell; and third, Trump is in fact a dangerous extremist, although no one narrative has yet stuck to him. Fascist can because it’s true and odious.
Sticky monikers have done that before. The Johnson campaign was able to label Goldwater a war-monger, which helped produce a record majority. And in a non-political context, “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit“ successfully focused O.J.’s jury. Similarly, in 2024, “Dad, how can you vote for an open Fascist who threatens judges’ families and wants an abortion ban that could send your daughter to jail?” is not an easy question for a parent to answer. But we’ll never know whether the fascist moniker is effective if most of the Fourth Estate sticks to its standard “horse-race” template, and continues to assume that today’s GOP is anything like country-club Republicans of decades past.
While the campaign’s exact language and framing is evolving, the stakes are way bigger than even a timorous media. It’s a contest not merely between two presidents but especially between two traditions that have competed throughout U. S. history. One assumes that we are a nation founded on Democracy, the Rule-of-Law, and Equality; the other, to the contrary, on States Rights, Corporatism, and Free Markets. One flows from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration, a “we-the-people” Constitution, Lincoln’s Proclamation, FDR’s New Deal, and the 60’s Civil Rights laws. The other stems from the Articles of Confederation, the Confederacy, Reagan’s Cowboy Capitalism, Mike Johnson’s theocracy, and Trump’s dictatorial dreams.
Progress for all or privilege for some. The Rule of Law or the Law of Rule. Human rights or Property rights. Democracy or Fascism.
In this homestretch of our 60th national election, it comes down to Democratic framing, a truth-telling media, and the independent judiciary to convince the electorate that Trump is actually the biggest threat ever to the story of America. If these three entities can crystalize the tyranny in Trump’s personality and program, America will again validate Tom Paine’s optimism that “there is too much common sense and independence in America to be long the dupe of any fiction, foreign or domestic.”
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Trumpworld Promises New Camps for an At-Risk Democracy Near You!
Should he somehow, despite four criminal indictments and multiple trials, return to the White House on January 20, 2025, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Dec 06, 2023
On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially different group defined as “the enemy.”
Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons were not being established for citizens or residents of German or Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United States. While not a single person of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.
Such a travesty of justice was not just being pushed by Roosevelt, one of the most liberal presidents in American history, but by notables like California judge Earl Warren (later to become a liberal Supreme Court justice) and renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow.
It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration.
Although lawsuits challenging the prison camps were filed, the Supreme Court allowed them to continue to operate. More than half of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with any crimes. Often under the banner (made popular again in our time) of “America First,” far-right, racist policies had been put in place and millions suffered from them.
The openly discussed basis for unity in those years was, at least in part, opposition to non-Aryans and non-Protestants, whether they were Japanese, Jewish, or African American.
In 1981, 36 years after World War II ended with the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, a Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians issued a report making clear that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent in such striking numbers “was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it… were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
Trump Threatens
It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration. Promises of new “camps,” should The Donald be elected a second time in 2024, are already pouring out of Trumpworld. These would be “huge camps” for migrants near the border with Mexico, as The New York Timesreported recently, “to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.” To ensure that Congress has no direct role in funding them, they will be built and operated with money taken directly from the military budget.
Just to be clear, Trump isn’t against all immigrants. Anything but. After all, he married two, one from the Czech Republic and the other from Slovenia, countries that most Americans would have to google to find on a map of Europe. Instead, the targets of the pending Trumpian anti-immigrant tsunami will, of course, be individuals and families from the Global South. The racism embedded in such a future effort isn’t beside the point, it is the point.
Trump’s former adviser and fellow xenophobe, Stephen Miller, stated that such a new administration would build “camps”—think: prisons—that could house up to a million undocumented immigrants while preparing them for mass deportations. As he told The New York Times, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me—they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do.
And rest assured about one thing: The next Trump administration won’t just go after undocumented immigrants trying to enter the country. It will build an unprecedented gulag system to round up and deport millions of people of color, one that would be unimaginable if those undocumented immigrants came from Canada or Denmark. The Trump gang has stated that they will end TPS (temporary protected status), reinstate the former president’s Muslim ban, reimpose and expand health restrictions on asylum seekers, revoke visas for foreign students who participated in protests against recent Israeli actions, shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and deport immigrants who had been allowed into the United States for humanitarian reasons.
Mind you, Trump proposed or tried to institute much of this while still in office, only to be thwarted by his administration’s ineptitude, Democratic resistance, grassroots organizing, and the courts. If, in the wake of the 2024 election, the GOP were to gain control over both chambers of Congress as well as the White House—a formula that would ensure the appointment of ever more Trump-friendly federal judges—success (as he defines it) will be a given for many of these efforts.
When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me—they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do and will provide the retribution for all the harm supposedly done to them by immigrants (of color), Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native peoples, feminists, and other enemies.
The Fascist Aims of America First
While Trump is the likely GOP nominee in 2024, the election is still a year away and any number of unforeseen developments could lead to someone else being nominated. At this moment, the other potential Republican candidates are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, business executive Vivek Ramaswamy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie excepted, there isn’t a sliver of policy difference between any of them and Trump. And notably, Christie supported Trump for nearly all of his administration. In addition, each of them would need the former president’s far-right MAGA base to win the nomination.
Trump’s people have cloaked themselves in an “America First” aura without in any way owning that as a meme. In fact, it harks back both to the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the American fascist movement of the 1930s. By the mid-1920s, the KKK had ballooned to between 3 and 8 million members and, as scholar Sarah Churchwell notes in her remarkable book Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, it had already adopted “America First” as a motto.
While both Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and Republican Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had used the term earlier to promote American isolationism, nativism, and “exceptionalism,” it was the KKK that truly embraced its white supremacist core ethos. As one example, 1,400 Klansmen chanted “America First” as they marched in a Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, in 1927. And consider it more than ironic that, as Churchwell documents, their presence evolved into a riot that led to the arrests of five Klansmen, one bystander (by mistake), and under circumstances that remain less than clear, Fred Trump, the father of the future 45th president of the United States.
Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents.
In 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) was founded. At its height, it would have more than 800,000 members. Initially, it was seen as isolationist—that is, against American entry into the war already being waged in Europe—and even anti-imperialist. As a result, its ranks initially included liberals, progressives, and socialists, as well as conservatives, libertarians, and avowed fascists. The latter, however, would eventually come to dominate, especially after the nation’s leading antisemite and pro-Hitler celebrity, pilot Charles Lindbergh, became its most popular spokesperson. The fascist-loving AFC then joined other U.S.-based far-right groups in celebrating German nazism and Italian fascism, while making America First their rallying cry.
Of course, the historically challenged Donald Trump undoubtedly doesn’t know much, if anything, about this history. But give him full credit. From the beginning, with the instincts of both a fascist and a white nationalist, he intuitively grasped the mobilizing value of seemingly patriotic but xenophobic slogans. Count on one thing, though: Some of his allies know all about the noxious roots of “America First” and still embrace it. Such jingoistic patriotism has, in fact, become a thinly veiled cover for a revised and expansive contemporary version of white nationalism.
The proliferation of America First groups run by former Trump staffers and supporters is daunting. The dizzying array of them includes America First Legal, America First Action, America First Policies, America First Policy Institute, America First P.A.C.T. (Protecting America’s Constitution and Traditions), America First Foundation/America First Political Action Conference, and America First 2.0, the latter a contribution from Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.
America First Legal is run by Stephen Miller and promotes itself as an alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union, but its deepest focus is on defending whiteness and amplifying Miller’s white nationalist proclivities. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, it typically produced radio and television ads like this fact-free one:
When did racism against white people become OK? Joe Biden put white people last in line for Covid relief funds. Kamala Harris said disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first. Liberal politicians block access to medicine based on skin color. Progressive corporations, airlines, universities all openly discriminate against white Americans. Racism is always wrong. The left’s anti-white bigotry must stop. We are all entitled to equal treatment under the law.
Decrying (fake) racism against whites fits well with Trump’s hysterical, desperate accusations that Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are all “racists” out to prosecute him because he’s white, not because he broke the law in their jurisdictions. (So far, none of Trump’s Black supporters have echoed that call—perhaps a bridge too far even for them—but Miller and others on the far right certainly have.)
Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration under Trump, is now the president of the America First Policy Institute, which claims that its guiding principles are “liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.” That well-funded group takes on policy and culture war issues. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that it recently held a gala at—yes!—Mar-a-Lago.
The America First P.A.C.T., led by former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, focuses on running state candidates on a far-right MAGA agenda and prioritizes raising funds for GOP candidates. Blasted across its website is the phrase “A weak Republican is more dangerous than a Democrat.” Ward is under investigation in Arizona for her alleged involvement in a 2022 fake-elector plot there.
Perhaps this country’s best-known white nationalist (and former Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes is the founder and president of the America First Foundation. It sponsors the annual America First Political Action Conference, an unabashed gathering of white supremacists and other far-right and extremist elements. Fuentes founded AFPAC because he thought the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was too moderate. However, the political distance between the more traditional CPAC and AFPAC has narrowed. Noted Islamophobe Michelle Malkin, for example, spoke at both in 2019, as did conservative journalist Jon Miller in 2020. Neither Malkin, who is Asian, nor Miller, who is African American, called out Fuentes and other bigots at the conferences on their racism.
The 2022 AFPAC conference featured a who’s who of contemporary American extremists, including disgraced former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, defeated Arizona election-denier Kari Lake, longtime founder and publisher of the white supremacist American Renaissance Jared Taylor, Florida-based Islamophobe and anti-immigrant warrior Laura Loomer, extremist activist Milo Yiannopoulos, and former too-toxic-for-even-the-House-Republicans Representative Steve King. Current Republican congress members who have spoken at AFPAC include (you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn) Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
Violence as Politics
Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents. In October 1923, Klan leader and Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans gave a fiery anti-immigrant speech in Texas railing against the “polluting streams of pollution from abroad” that immigrants were bringing to the United States. This October, exactly 100 years later, Trump gave an interview to the far-right National Pulse in which he declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
In his 2024 campaign, he’s not only planning to go after immigrants, but a broader group of liberal and progressive citizens and even Republicans who stand in the way of his fevered lust for heading a genuinely authoritarian government. If he returns to the Oval Office, he’s already declared that he’ll “root out” what he’s called “communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
“Vermin” (a classic Hitlerian word choice) and those who would “poison” the nation must be wiped out, annihilated. Responding to criticism of such language, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the very notion “ridiculous,” even as he reinforced the point by insisting that the former president’s critics suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
None of what Trump and his allies plan to do is likely to be passively accepted. In fact, they’re already anticipating a massive popular revolt and preparing for it. As The Wall Street Journalnoted, in 2020 Trump first contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to employ the military to enforce federal laws under special circumstances, to break up protests related to the murder of George Floyd and other African Americans by the police and racists. He was talked down. Its use was then suggested by Trump ally Roger Stone and evidently considered by the president as a way to “put down” any “leftwing protests” related to the 2020 election. Again, the idea went nowhere.
The third time, however, could be the deadly charm. The Washington Post has reported that Trump is now considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day back in office. One thing is certain: Should he somehow, despite four criminal indictments and multiple trials, return to the White House on January 20, 2025, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
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