On Tuesday, the New York Times published a long interview with Donald Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, who Googled an online definition of fascism before saying of his former boss:
Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators—he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.
Also on Tuesday, the Atlantic published a report that Trump allegedly said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
The revelations have dominated discussions on Fox News, and prompted two-dozen GOP senators to call for Tr—haha, just kidding.
Instead, Democrats and their supporters once again contend with a muted reaction from the media, the public, and politicians, who seem unmoved by Trump’s association with the F-word, no matter how many times Kamala Harris says “January sixth.”
One exception was Matt Drudge, the archconservative linkmonger who has been hard on Trump, who ran a photo of the Führer himself. This proved the rule, argued Times (and former Slate) columnist Jamelle Bouie: “genuinely wild world where, on trump at least, matt drudge has better news judgment than most of the mainstream media.”
Debates about Trump and fascism have been underway for a decade now, and applying the label seems unlikely to convince or motivate anyone. But the lack of alarm underlines a deeper question that doesn’t require a dictionary to engage in: Why do so few Americans, including many on the left, seem to take seriously the idea that Trump would use a second presidency to abuse the law to hurt his enemies?
Maybe it’s because Democrats have studiously avoided confronting Trump about some of the most controversial, damning policy choices of his first term, or the most radical campaign promise for his second. You simply can’t make the full case against Trump—or a compelling illustration of his fascist tendencies—without talking about immigration. Immigration was the key to Trump’s rise and the source of two of his most notorious presidential debacles, the Muslim ban and the child separation policy. Blaming immigrants for national decline is a classic trope of fascist rhetoric; rounding our neighbors up by the millions for expulsion is a proposal with few historical precedents, and none of them are good.
It’s like Democrats are trying to play a national game of Taboo, trying to help people identify a zebra without saying “stripes.”
To be sure, Democrats are wary of getting stuck talking about an issue where Trump always polls better than Harris. Backlash to a Democratic president and a surge of migrants at the Mexican border have helped make Americans suspicious of immigration at levels not seen since 2001. As Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma explained to Mary Harris on Wednesday’s What Next, the share of Americans who think immigration should decrease has risen from 28 percent in 2020 to 55 percent today. And some polls have found that a majority of Americans support mass deportations.
But results like that are an indictment, not a vindication, of Democrats’ reluctance to talk about immigration. Mass deportation would separate 4.4 million U.S. citizen children from their parents. It would require the largest police action in American history, wipe out millions of jobs, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and destabilize the economy. Industries from milk to housing construction would be damaged for years. Los Angeles and Houston would see their populations fall by 10 percent; Florida would lose 1 in 20 residents. A million mortgages could be at risk.
It’s a world-historically terrible idea on humanitarian and practical grounds, and Democrats ought to be able to explain that to voters. The prospect also recalls some of the most shameful and chaotic episodes of the Trump administration, like the day of the Muslim ban, when Trump invalidated visa paperwork that had been assembled over many months and at great cost by arrivals from Syria, Sudan, Iran, and four other Muslim-majority countries—some of them mid-flight. Or the day of the largest single-state Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in U.S. history, when hundreds of American children had their parents taken away. Or the days when the Trump administration separated 5,000 migrant children from their parents, with little plan to help them find each other again, and kept the children in chain-link cages.
When those memories were fresh, Biden saw an opportunity to rebuke Trump on immigration. “If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said at the (virtual) Democratic National Convention in 2020. Family separation was the least popular federal policy undertaken in decades!
But Harris has treated the topic like it’s radioactive. She couldn’t bring herself to condemn mass deportation in a Univision Town Hall, and has waffled on her support for granting citizenship to Dreamers, the 2 million undocumented Americans who were brought to the country as children. Instead of crying American children asking where Mommy and Daddy are, her ads trumpet her background as a “border-state prosecutor.”
By focusing only on her plan to secure the border and her law enforcement background, she has missed a chance to reframe the debate, raising the alarm about Trump’s plans and reminding voters of the suffering he inflicted the first time around. This poll-driven politics is cowardly, but it’s also counterproductive: You can’t win an argument you don’t have.
The Atlantic article is a case in point: Trump’s wish for a good Nazi general by his side actually did attract some attention. Harris herself talked about it on Wednesday; Andrew Ross Sorkin grilled Bill Ackman about it on CNBC.
But far more revealing, and relevant to American politics, was the story’s opening anecdote, in which Trump offered to pay for the funeral of a Mexican American soldier who was murdered at Fort Bragg. When the bill arrived at the White House for the citywide ceremony in her native Houston, Trump allegedly told his staff not to pay it: “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!”
As we saw in the presidential debate during the discussion of Springfield, Ohio, the subject of immigration—first- or second-generation, legal or otherwise—brings out Trump’s weird, nasty core. It underscores the shallowness of his distinction between legal and illegal arrivals, his flirtation with Great Replacement Theory, and his grotesque fixation on genetics. Immigration offers the most damning evidence of what he might do on his four-year revenge tour. And it’s the most potent evidence of his ideological affiliation with fascism.
But not if nobody wants to talk about it.
