“This is the final battle,” Donald Trump declared at a recent campaign rally. “Either the Communists win and destroy America, or we destroy the Communists.”
Trump has long employed red-baiting tactics, tinged with antisemitic tropes. But as he fights for a second term and fends off a gathering cascade of legal troubles, his rhetoric has gotten even more acrid and apocalyptic.
His evocation of the “final battle” calls up Biblical references to the end of days, and he’s taken to describing himself in messianic terms, proclaiming, “I am the only one that can save this nation.”
This is Trumpism distilled to its intense, inflammatory and deeply deranged essence. It’s politics as holy war, good vs. evil, with no room for reason, responsibility or respect for contrary viewpoints.
The Associated Press reports that Trump has used labels like “Marxist” and “Communist” to describe his enemies “since he first appeared on the political scene, but it lately has become an omnipresent attack line that also has been deployed by other Republicans. The rhetoric is both inaccurate and potentially dangerous because it attempts to demonize an entire party with a description that has long been associated with America’s enemies.”
As Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker, “The point is to have an enemy — or many enemies — whoever they are.”
If Trumpism is a despicable and damaging concept, it is also very American. Throughout our history, this country has suffered spasms of xenophobia that have done exactly what Trump is trying to do — link our troubles to foreign infiltrators who are controlled by shadowy outside forces focused on infecting Americans with insidious ideas, injuries and illnesses.
In 1856, the Know-Nothing Party won 25% of the presidential vote on a platform excoriating Roman Catholics as drunken but dedicated agents of the pope. During World War II, about 120,000 loyal Japanese Americans were shamefully interned in remote camps out of fear that they would aid Tokyo’s war effort. Periodic outbreaks of virulent anti-Communism have often been connected to antisemitism, with Jews accused of two contradictory sins: conspiring with both wild-eyed radicals and hard-eyed bankers to control and corrode the American character.
Trump fits squarely into this treacherous tradition of demonizing foreigners, entering public life by falsely accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim born in Kenya. In announcing his campaign for president in 2015, he warned that China and Japan “kill us” with their exports and denounced Mexican immigrants:
“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
During the 2016 campaign, he charged that Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.”
Once in office, Trump justified banning immigrants from Muslim countries by saying he wanted “to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of our country,” and adding, “We don’t want our buildings blown up.”
The pandemic presented Trump with yet another foreign foe, China, and he repeatedly denounced the “Wuhan virus.”
During the current campaign, Trump has redoubled his efforts to blame his troubles on frightening foreign malefactors. For example, in talking about Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted him on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents, Trump asked, “This lunatic special prosecutor named Jack Smith — I wonder what it was prior to a change?” The implication was crystal clear — Smith was really a closet Jew, part of the international cabal that Trump railed against during the Clinton campaign.
Trump and his supporters have increasingly been using the word “globalist” as a summary description of all the foreign boogeymen they claim to be fighting against. For instance, Trump has branded Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a globalist because he signed a law encouraging big insurance companies to issue policies in his state. Fox News earned that label when it dared to criticize him.
Perhaps because DeSantis has focused his campaign on social issues, like banning books and abortions, Trump has expanded his tirades beyond his previous targets — job stealers, drug dealers, disease spreaders, building bombers — to include “cultural Marxists” and the “pink-haired communists teaching our kids.”
One pro-Trump ad ties all his fears and foes together, condemning “the global elitists who send your kids to war, who tell you a woman is a man and a man is a woman, who teach your children their country, their faith, their beliefs are a lie. They have corrupted every facet of American government.”
This is venal, vicious stuff. But all too familiar.
(Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.)
