Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric echoes the racist screeds written by white supremacist mass shooters; the chants of the tiki torch-wielding neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia; and the disgusting, profoundly false theses penned by eugenicists and so-called race scientists.
Although he launched his successful 2016 bid for the White House by labeling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and calling for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S., the severity of the GOP presidential nominee’s rhetoric this election season marks an escalation — one that has seen some political observers, once hesitant to call Trump a “fascist,” suddenly more at ease with the label.
“People were very careful early on not to compare him to Hitler, and to not use the term ‘fascist,’ because people thought it was an exaggeration,” Ernesto Castañeda, a professor at American University who directs The Immigration Lab and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, told HuffPost's Christopher Mathias.
“When he was in power, it was not a fascist regime, but his campaign rhetoric right now — the rally [that] took place in Aurora, Colorado, I listened to the whole thing, and it could have been a Nazi speech from a reel in English. The people shouting, the people saying hateful things and the crowd going crazy. He had clips of incidents with immigrants committing crimes, running one after the other, from different media sources, credible and otherwise. It was really, really emotional. Really, really trying to move somebody that wasn’t informed.”
A dispatch from The New York Times described Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign speech in the Denver suburb of 400,000 on Oct. 11:
Mr. Trump repeated claims, which have been debunked by local officials, that Aurora had been “invaded and conquered,” described the United States as an “occupied state,” called for the death penalty “for any migrant that kills an American citizen” and revived a promise to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process.
Such rhetoric has become boilerplate in Trump speeches, interviews and social media posts. In recent months the former president has called for immigrants in the U.S. to undergo “remigration,” a well-known euphemism for mass deportations with links to European fascist movements. His use of the term corresponds with his campaign promise to expel millions of immigrants from the country once in office. |
