Why is Trump talking just like Hitler? | Will Bunch Newsletter

Worlds collided — along with a massive vehicle and a 6′7″ human torso — when a hit-and-run driver in Center City plowed into new Sixers forward and instant fan favorite Kelly Oubre Jr. Saturday night. Nothing about an incident that shocked and scared Philly can be called “good news,” but a) Oubre’s broken-rib prognosis is optimistic and b) maybe NOW the city will take seriously a crisis of pedestrian safety. But why does it take something like this?

We’ve made a format change! Scroll down in the newsletter for the answers to last week’s question about President Joe Biden running again in 2024, and a new question you’ll definitely want to weigh in on.

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Fascism doesn’t occur naturally in human nature. Somebody had to invent it, and no one played a greater role than Benito Mussolini, an Italian World War I veteran who saw that a new kind of politics could arise from the charred ashes and bitter resentments of men traumatized by a conflict that had just killed 20 million. A vain and violent man, Il Duce taught Donald Trump how to strut on stage, posed shirtless generations before Vladimir Putin, and clung to power after 1922′s March on Rome by whipping up hate against leftists he described as vermin.

Adolf Hitler picked up the ball from his 1920s hero Mussolini and ran with it — taking antisemitism to new lows by comparing Jews to filthy animals and parasites, years before his Nazi regime killed 6 million of them. After seizing power in 1933, the German Führer told a Czech minister that “vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies, and at the end of this year, there will not be a Jew left in Germany.” His gutter language was adopted by the Third Reich’s writers and editorial cartoonists who often depicted Jews as rodents, targets for elimination.

Maybe Trump was paying his own warped tribute to Hitler — the ultimate disgruntled war vet — when he chose Veterans Day to visit Claremont, N.H., and deliver an address that sounded just like a page ripped from a book of the German dictator’s speeches that his first wife Ivana famously claimed the future 45th president of the United States kept by his bedside.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” said Trump, only days after a flurry of one-year-before-the-2024-election polls showed his campaign for another term moving ahead of President Joe Biden. He told voters in the key primary state that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.” He repeated the “vermin” bit on his Truth Social website, lest anyone missed it.

Trump’s “vermin” rant — and its seemingly deliberate echo of the 20th century’s worst tyrants — will be remembered as something of a turning point. Although the embarrassingly timid New York Times nearly whiffed (”Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech In a Very Different Direction” was the initial headline from editors terrified of calling fascism by its name), by Monday multiple media outlets were expressing an appropriate level of horror over remarks by the GOP’s all-but-certain nominee, and what they mean for American democracy.

Still, I think the media is missing something about Trump and his campaign as it grinds inexorably toward Milwaukee and maybe 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. What may be forever known as “the vermin speech” was not the only time that Trump, aided by his past and future propaganda ministers like Stephen Miller, have plagiarized Hitler in ways that cannot be accidental.

As Trump did on Saturday, Hitler famously rallied his Nazi Party supporters to take on “the enemy within.” In a recent campaign stop, the ex-president repeated a line hailing “One people, one family, one glorious nation” — a fairly blatant lift from the German autocrat’s invocation of “One people, one realm, one leader.” The GOP frontrunner, in an escalation of his anti-immigrant rhetoric, also said not long ago that migrants to the southern border “are poisoning the blood of our country,” a deafening echo of Hitler’s riffs on “blood poisoning” in Mein Kampf. (A Trump spokesman called it “a normal phrase that’s used in everyday life.”)

“I study the breakdown of democracy, and I don’t know how to say this more clearly: We are sleepwalking towards authoritarianism,” Brian Klaas, political scientist at University College London and writer, said Monday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, noting the rise in fascist rhetoric can’t be considered a coincidence.

It’s not. To the contrary, the intentionality here is stunning. Most of us in “It Can’t Happen Here” America not only believe that our exceptionalism will magically and forever protect us from dictatorship, but also that anyone who tries to implement fascism will take a stealth approach, hoping to sneak his diabolical plan past a wise, democracy-loving electorate. But Trump is being deliberate. He desires not just to make himself a dictator, but to brag and mock us while he’s doing it.

How else to explain that not only is Trump talking like Hitler and Mussolini, but he has overt plans to act like them after Jan. 20, 2025. The latest example was reported in the same edition of the Times as the Veterans Day speech: a scheme to round up thousands if not millions of undocumented immigrants from coast to coast and place them in concentration camps, awaiting mass deportation. While Trump’s worst ideas in his first term were often thwarted by more responsible public servants, the 2.0 model has a plan to install thousands of loyalists throughout the government — including a Justice Department where Trump seeks prosecution of anyone who wronged him.

Is this plot to nuke the American Experiment really leading in the polls? It might be. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump recently pointed to data that 38% of Americans think “that things in the U.S. had gone so far off track that we need a leader who would break rules in order to fix the country’s direction.” Millions more — from CEOs wondering if dictatorship is better for the bottom line to Times editors afraid they might melt at the word “fascism” — can’t or won’t speak up. There are also millions of us determined to stop Trump’s tyranny, or die trying — but we have a lot of work to do.

For now, Team Trump is rubbing it in our face. Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said Monday that people comparing his boss’s rhetoric to Hitler and Mussolini “are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” (He later clarified he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence” — as if that’s better.)

From somewhere intolerably warm, a bare-chested Il Duce surely crossed his arms, looked up, and smiled.

Question: How is it that Gen-Z and Millennials, after berating Boomers for this, are so bad at social media and have allowed TikTok to make them this stupid? — Via Democracy Rules (@WasserL) on X/Twitter

Answer: LOL, it’s hard to answer the gist of your question when I’m not sure which of the many assorted stupidities we’re blaming on our young people today. I do think it’s time we acknowledge that social media can inform and on rare occasions even uplift people — but that users from age 13 to age 93 can also too easily be moved by disinformation. Here’s what alarms me: Calls to censor or even ban platforms like TikTok. I believe the ultimate answer for disinformation is not to limit what people can see, but to bolster education and make them smarter — both in news literacy but also just about the world in general.

Last week’s question about President Joe Biden’s poor poll numbers and whether he should still run in 2024 prompted a predictably large response that — much like the Democratic Party itself — was all over the map. A lot of you agree that the Democrats have little choice but to play out the Biden hand. Wrote Jan Marvin: “I worry about him not making it through the next term but I have confidence in [Vice President Kamala] Harris.” But some of you think voter concern about the president’s age calls for a drastic change — if it’s not too late. Polly Schaller wrote: “Ultimately, we do need younger blood in the Oval Office, but it’s hard to see how that can happen in 2024.”

📮 This week’s question: Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman has adopted a strong pro-Israel stance in the current conflict, delighting some but angering many of his younger and more progressive voters who want a ceasefire. Has war in the Middle East changed your opinion of Fetterman? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

If truth is the first casualty of war, journalists are on the front line. A team of American NPR journalists reporting from the Middle East learned that the hard way recently when it tried to interview a Palestinian olive farmer in the occupied West Bank, where a spillover from the war in Gaza has sparked violent attacks by Israeli settlers and stepped-up activity by Israeli Defense Forces. The interview was only halfway done when a drone appeared overhead, followed by Israeli soldiers brandishing assault weapons. The troops hustled the Palestinian away, and when the NPR team raised questions, the Israelis pointed their firepower at the journalists’ heads. “Move on,” they said.

And yet the American reporters were lucky — they lived to tell about it.

A violent assault on a free press began with the Oct. 7 terror attack by Hamas on southern Israel, when four Israeli journalists were murdered. That was a despicable act, but the death toll that day has paled in comparison to the number killed — solely by Israel, mostly by air strikes — in its retaliatory war. Since the latest conflict began, an additional 38 journalists — just over one a day, 37 Palestinians and one Lebanese — have been killed, making this the deadliest war for journalists in modern memory. Several, such as Mohammed Abu Hatab, a journalist for Palestine TV, funded by the Palestinian Authority, killed with 11 members of his family, died when Israeli air strikes destroyed their homes, which has only heightened suspicion that Israel is targeting members of the press.

Israel denies this, but the hostility that the current right-wing government of America’s longtime ally in the region feels toward a free press is palpable. When a website run by a former Israeli journalist with the ironic name of HonestReporting made an allegation — unfounded, it later admitted — that some journalists who risked their lives to film the Oct. 7 attack must be in cahoots with Hamas, some allies close to the Israeli government pounced. The nation’s former UN envoy posted on X/Twitter: “We will hunt them down together with the terrorists.”

Killing journalists is a straight-up war crime. Yet I and other rank-and-file journalists have been dismayed at the timidity of leading U.S. newsrooms in speaking out against Israel’s ongoing assaults — the cutting edge of a culture of cowardice when it comes to describing the politically and emotionally fraught war. This is not a time for silence. In the strongest possible terms, I condemn the violence against a free press — initially by Hamas, but now on a daily basis by Israeli forces who are making a mockery of an ally’s professed democratic values. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said our lives begin to end the day we remain silent about the things that truly matter. I urge newsroom colleagues to join me in demanding an immediate end to these crimes against our profession, and our basic humanity.

Seven years ago today, America — at least my sliver of blue America, anyway — was in a state of shock. Donald Trump’s unexpected election victory just six days earlier sent protesters out in the streets of Philadelphia and elsewhere, chanting, “We! Reject! The president-elect!” Others who’d voted for Hillary Clinton were in a deep funk. On Nov. 14, 2016, I wrote about how cities like Philadelphia and other progressive jurisdictions could fight Trumpism by becoming oases for good policy. I wrote that “the current crisis is also an opportunity — to morally secede from the kind of hate that we heard in the 2016 campaign, and work on a better world in the place where we can.” Check out the rest: “How Philly can ‘morally secede’ from Trump’s America.”

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Also: Last week’s newsletter misidentified the name of the New York Times’ polling partner. It is Siena College.