8/31/20
Yesterday, President Trump retweeted a video of a man on a New York subway platform shoving and injuring a white woman. In normal times, it would have been unfathomable to determine why the president of the United States would take an interest in this case. The assault took place a year ago, and the perpetrator was arrested in short order. But the actual source of Trump’s interest is perfectly obvious. The perpetrator was Black, and the victim white. The video was shared, and seems to have come to Trump’s attention, by an account called “I’m With Groyper.” For those unfamiliar, “Groypers” are a white-supremacist sect who criticize other far-right groups for failing to be explicitly “pro-white.” Trump has a way of wearing down journalists by violating norms so often and so shamelessly that it ceases to be newsworthy. Last week, Mary Ann Mendoza was removed at the last minute from the Republican National Convention after a reporter discovered she had promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Perhaps even more confusing is the fate of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican nominee for Congress in Georgia, and an avid proponent of QAnon. Last week, Media Matters found that she has promoted a far-right video that “features anti-Muslim propaganda.
Is Trump a Nazi? Not exactly. He does embrace a certain fascist aesthetic elevating strength over all other values. Trump’s evocation of racist tropes is not Nazism, exactly. It is better described as Nazi-adjacent. He has activated and energized open white supremacists, who for the first time in decades have been given a president who reflects their values closely enough to inspire open defense. Where Nazis were once treated by both parties as an unambiguous source of pure evil, now they inhabit a gray area on the fringe of the Republican coalition. His now-infamous description of “Unite the Right” Nazi protesters as “very fine people” was not a flub or a one-off. Trump would never come out and praise Hitler, but he will stoke their race-war dreams. The United States is not headed into world war and industrialized murder factories. But Trump has changed the orientation of the political landscape in ways that include creating a new opening for the far right. He is calling armed men into the streets. There are pickup trucks bearing Trump fans itching for blood. One of his delusional idolaters brought a rifle to Kenosha and blundered into a bloodbath. The question now is, having come this far in four years of Trump, what would lie ahead if we have four more?
