Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN
6 minute read
Published 12:00 AM EST, Tue December 19, 2023
Donald Trump’s extreme rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi propaganda and his penchant for siding with America’s adversaries and autocrats pose a unique challenge to his Republican opponents and, ultimately, US voters.
The ex-president, who has a good chance of being the next commander in chief, warned over the weekend that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. And he parroted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to discredit American democracy in his latest craven genuflection to the ex-KGB officer, who’s been accused of war crimes.
Trump’s comments on Saturday, at a rally in the first-in-the-nation GOP primary state of New Hampshire, are contrary to America’s founding values and political traditions. They are the latest sign that Trump, who sought to overturn the will of the voters after the 2020 election, would act in an even more extreme fashion in a second White House term. His rhetoric is also likely to play into the central premise of President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign – that he’s the only option to thwart a return to power by an ex-president who could destroy US democracy. It is not yet, however, helping the incumbent in polls that show him trailing Trump in vital swing states.
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Even if Trump’s rhetoric demands a sense of proportion from his critics, his aberrant behavior also requires an understanding of his inflammatory aims and a sober evaluation of the exact threat he poses to democratic values around the world, which are under threat from autocracies in China, Russia, Iran and elsewhere.
Not taking Trump’s remarks at face value would be a mistake, because even with him out of office, they are having a destabilizing political impact. With his searing language about immigration, Trump is seeking to unleash hostility and fear against immigrants and to weaponize anxiety that White, Christian preeminence is under threat from outsiders of different ethnic groups and creeds. His comments put every racial, ethnic and religious minority at risk at a time of already angry political polarization. He is also exaggerating the threat from undocumented migrants to play on the Biden administration’s failure to control a surge of arrivals at the southern border. Republicans have long argued the situation is a crisis, and the White House hasn’t come up with a political narrative to counter that.
Violent and often racist immigration rhetoric is central to Trump’s appeal: He used his conspiratorial campaign over ex-President Barack Obama’s birthplace as a springboard for his political career. Slandering Mexicans energized his campaign language right from his first speech in the summer of 2015. And after he tried to overthrow an election, there should be no illusions about Trump’s willingness to eviscerate American political systems to enhance his power. In recent weeks, he’s called his political opponents “vermin,” in another echo of Nazi propaganda, and warned that Biden – and not he – is the real threat to democracy in a shape-shifting move typical of his demagogic style.
Categories: Trump