22: India

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Trump Has Turned It Up to 11 Donald Trump is so dependent on racial and ethnic antagonism that without it, he would be a marginal figure, relegated to the sidelines. ....... Trump’s constant demonization of Black people and immigrants has inured the public to the fact that he is the first — or certainly the most explicit — modern president and party nominee to transparently generate, not to mention exacerbate, fear and white animosity toward people of color......... In the closing days of the 2024 election, he continues to foment race hatred and to rely on it ever more intently. ............. “Trump was distinctive in how he tapped into white grievance,” they wrote. “Trump’s primary campaign became a vehicle for a different kind of identity politics” — one oriented toward capitalizing on the feeling of many white people that they were being “pushed aside in an increasingly diverse America.” ........... in late 2015 a P.R.R.I. survey found that 64 percent of Republicans claimed to believe “that ‘discrimination against whites has become as big of a problem as discrimination against Blacks and other minorities.’” .......... “There is a definite anti-white feeling in this country, and that can’t be allowed,” Trump told Time magazine in April. ........... after “talking to people in Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District, the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the country”: ......... The people I talk to do not believe they are racist and are insulted when they see themselves so described on CNN. They roundly rejected a 2017 white nationalist march through Pikeville, Ky., led by the neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach. Many I talked to were proud to have the first integrated cemetery, and there are town markers commemorating an early-century Black female poet. ........... But they also sense themselves sinking and are threatened — by, in order of importance, immigrants, refugees, Blacks, women, highly educated “elites” — who are doing better than they are — and feel these categories are favored by the Democrats over them. They feel the Democrats are consumed by “identity politics” and have, because of it, wiped white men off the Democratic social map. ........ Most of Trump’s appeal is based, I argue in “Stolen Pride,” on his call to turn the shame of white, non-B.A. downward mobility into blame. Primary among the many targets of blame are immigrants, but secondary are Blacks and women — sort of “secondary immigrants” threatening to replace white males in the status hierarchy. ........... Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Democratic Party has struggled in its efforts to deal with racial issues, while the Republican Party has repeatedly used crime, busing, urban decay and immigration to divide the Democratic coalition. .......... Trump is unique in that he has made explicit racial outreach a core part of his campaign. He did this in 2016, 2020 and now again in 2024. ........... Gary Jacobson, also a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, sees Trump as an avatar of malice. “Extreme rhetoric fanning fear and hatred of nonwhite immigrants and urban minorities is central to Trump’s current campaign,” he wrote by email. “I assume he thinks it works for him.” .............. Trump could benefit from focusing on these problems and addressing them in terms that make him appear reasonable. This could even include a less hysterical approach to immigration. But it is not in his nature to do so. ............. some reporting indicates that Trump campaign officials have tried to steer the candidate toward those issues. His focus on racial hostility, in terms of policy rhetoric and how he talks about his opponent, appears to be somewhat of a personal choice. ............ Without tapping into and triggering citizens’ racial resentment and racial prejudice, Trump would not be competitive. He is incapable of articulating traditional conservative values. ............ We’re rapidly running out of superlatives to describe how extreme Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has become. He’s clearly amped up his harsh and violent rhetoric. Even in 2020, his rhetoric largely focused on building a wall and keep out undocumented immigrants. But in 2024, his rhetoric has shifted almost exclusively to talking about immigrants as the deranged and violent enemy who has already invaded the country. ......... He talks about immigrants slitting the throats of housewives in their kitchens and raping young girls and promises mass arrests, militarized encampments and deportation. His rhetoric has now moved — there’s really no other way to say it — fully into Nazi territory. He has called immigrants “not human” and referred to them as “animals.” ............... Trump has taken his supporters with him on this extremist journey. In 2013, a majority (53 percent) of Republicans supported a path to citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally; by 2019, that number had dropped to 39 percent. ............. Today, two-thirds of Republicans (64 percent) and a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54 percent) agree even with Trump’s dehumanizing assertion, echoing Hitler’s arguments in “Mein Kampf,” that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” We know these words are the bricks paving the road to political violence and even genocide. ......... If he loses, Trump will face an avalanche of criminal proceedings that could last the rest of his life. If he wins, they are likely to go away.

22: Donald Trump, Elon Musk

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What Elon Musk Really Wants The Tesla and X mogul has long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own extreme image. Trump may be his Trojan horse.............. In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government—not to mention the business opportunity of the century. ........... because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image. ........

because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.

Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics. .......... The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.” ............ This language isn’t merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.” In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: “Jews are lice: they cause typhus.” Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as “the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood.” ........ Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the “enemies of the people,” implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be “subjected to ongoing purification,” and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against “vermin activities” (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime’s critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed “Operation Vermin.” ....... This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.” ......... In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable. .......... \........................... In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” .......... In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”.................. 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 prefabricated signs: 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. ...........

The Moment of Truth The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States.

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17: Ajit Doval