A funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 horserace. The mainstream media brought Hitler into the conversation.
Trump gave them no choice. He kept amping up his rants in terms that were so explicitly Nazi, so lifted — practically verbatim — from Hitler’s speeches, that it was hard for them to keep ignoring what they’ve willfully ignored for so long.
When Trump used the word ‘vermin’ in his Veteran’s Day speech, he was taking a whole chapter from the fascism playbook. Whether he knew it or not.
Dehumanization — the art of equating human beings with insects — is a classic stochastic terrorism technique, beloved of dictators the world over. In Rwanda in the nineties, the Hutu tribe openly called its rival Tutsis “cockroaches” on the radio, inciting its members to exterminate them with machetes, which they did.
We’ll probably never know who actually wrote the Vermin speech — Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon are likely suspects — but we can be sure it wasn’t Trump. Not that he doesn’t totally embrace Nazi philosophy, it’s just that any philosophy at all is outside his skill set. I’m not sure he has either the cognitive wherewithal or the attention span, let alone the vocabulary, to articulate Nazism. Or anything else.
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