Autocrat or Dictator? Trump Lets Us Know How He’ll Govern

The true Donald Trump has come out over the last few months. There have been symptoms all along, but now his fascist longings and racial hatreds have burst forth unrestrained. They have become his manifesto.

It has become standard for him in his campaign rallies to hold up for praise the dictators of other countries. He seems to be applying for membership in their club — they are of course listening – but also he is selling his audiences on autocracy as a better way than the democracy that has been the bedrock of this country for a quarter millennium. Last Saturday in New Hampshire he said this:

"Has anybody here ever heard of Vladimir Putin, of Russia, [he] says that Biden's, and this is a quote, politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system which cannot pretend to teach others about democracies."

He spoke with admiration of "powerful" president Xi of China "who controls one-point-four billion people rather ruthlessly, right?". He touts his "very good relationship" with North Korea's Kim Jong Un, the world's most brutal human rights oppressor. And we are to take in the endorsement of Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orbán, who espouses a tightly controlled "illiberal democracy" and says "Trump is the man who can save the western world", Trump quotes him saying.

These are the exemplars he holds in high regard in contrast to how he views Americans who are not his followers of whom he spoke on this year's Veterans' Day:

"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections…The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within."

Forbes was quick to identify Trump's speaking of Americans as "vermin" as

"a term frequently used by Nazis to dehumanize Jews, including a 1939 quote attributed to Hitler: 'This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies', he told the Czech foreign minister."

New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose field of study is fascism, reported the same of Mussolini who "literally talked about killing rats…who were bringing infectious diseases and communism into Italy." As a propaganda technique, dehumanizing conditions followers to discard compassion for groups held in contempt by the authoritarian leader so they will accept anything from oppression to genocide once the regime makes its move, as Germany did accept the extermination of Jews by the Nazis.

The groups that Trump targets are migrants. The overflowing southern border is an out of control mess that cannot be minimized, but note the way Trump speaks of people who have gone through arduous physical hardship trying make their way across hundreds to thousands of miles to the United States to escape threats to their lives at home or to escape from poverty, simply hoping to find a better life:

"Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have."

That was in an interview in October with a right-wing website, The National Pulse. Prisons, insane asylums, terrorists — there's no evidence for any of this. How could he know? It's a total fabrication. Again, he dehumanizes to bring along his followers to think of them as undesirable people irrespective of their actual nature.

"Poisoning the blood" drew stunned reaction politically and in the media. Revealed is a man running for president of our country who follows the teachings of Adolf Hitler. In several passages of "Mein Kampf" the "Führer" wrote that the "Influx of foreign blood" was a "poison" that polluted his strivings for a Germany of pure Aryan blood superior to all other races. And, of course, this was more about Jews than anyone else. Is it coincidence that Trump hit upon that phrase? Was it fed to him by his racist henchman Stephen Miller? In a September 1990 Vanity Fair profile of Donald and his first wife Ivana at the time they were divorcing, she told her lawyer that Trump kept a book of Hitler's speeches on his bedside table.

"Poisoning the blood" got the attention. Overlooked is his saying that migrants are coming from…

"all over the world not just in South America, not just in three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they're coming into our country from Africa, from Asia. All over the world, they're pouring into our country."

He is sending the message all over the world that they are inferior people, that his white America must not be contaminated. This is now his standard rhetoric, repeated three days later in Iowa. "They're destroying the blood of our country. They're destroying the fabric of our country. And we're gonna have to get 'em out".

Trump has said that he will not only send troops to the border to seal off migrant intrusions into the U.S. but will embark on what fellow xenophobe Steve Bannon says will be "the largest deportation plan in history. All 10 million must leave". But it is Stephen Miller, rabidly anti-immigrant despite his maternal grandparents being from Belarus, who will probably become the deportation czar of a Trump regime. Just this week on Fox News he said about migrants,

"We are being conquered. This is a complete resettlement of America in real time…Now we have millions of people coming in from different cultures and different ways of living and different belief systems…Unless there is massive, large scale deportations by the millions, it will be irrevocable."

Trump intends to expand the travel bans that he instituted shortly after becoming president. His executive order banned entry into the U.S. by anyone from seven predominantly Muslim countries. To this he would now add anyone from Gaza. For him Haiti and Africa are "shithole" countries, as he told a group of senators in 2018. He will discriminate based on “Judeo-Christian civilization and values”, he told supporters in Iowa.

Trump's deportation plan is only one item in a vast intended overhaul of the government, a plan with a longer name but referred to as "Project 2025". Largely architected by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, along with some eighty contributors, it's a subject of its own. It advances what is known as the "unitary" presidency where s single individual, the president, holds all the power. Trump has accordingly spoken of tightly reining in the departments and agencies of the federal government that will, if he returns to power, take direction from him and will not be free to act on their own initiative. This is practically the definition of fascism, defined by Mussolini as "everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” where the dictator becomes the state.

Trump has made clear that he intends to use the Justice Department as a tool of vengeance, wielding it against those who have opposed him, who have violated the "nothing against the state" edict. He says,

"I will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out of control fake crooked prosecutor in America for their illegal racist-in-reverse enforcement of the law."

In 2016 he told his followers "I am your voice" but in his first campaign rally in March of this year in Waco, Texas, that phrase became,

"I am your warrior, I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution."

Channeling Mussolini, whose equivalent word was "avenging", Trump intends to appoint a submissive attorney general who will prosecute those on his enemy list. "He’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list”, Mark Milley told The Atlantic in a profile of the general, who recently stepped down from the highest position in the military, the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs. In a tweet – he calls it a 'truth' at his Truth Social copy of Twitter – Trump wrote that for Milley "in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH" for Milley's having assured a worried China that in his final days as president Trump would be prevented from any warring action he might take to stay in power. Others on his list are his former attorney general Bill Barr for undercutting his claim of a fraudulent 2020 election, and his second chief of staff, Marine four-star John Kelly, who has persistently warned America about Trump.

Next on the list: journalists.

"He’s begun occasionally soliciting ideas from conservative allies for how the U.S. government and Justice Department could go about turning his desires — for brutally imprisoning significant numbers of reporters — into reality."

So reported Rolling Stone. The First Amendment means nothing to Trump. Nor does the Constitution. A year ago he called for the termination of the Constitution in a post on Truth Social which said,

"Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

A couple of weeks ago, in reply to Fox News's Sean Hannity asking for assurance that he would not abuse power for retribution, Trump joked, "Except for Day One". But this week came the Colorado Supreme Court's disqualification of him from the state's ballot. Trump's reaction was a reminder of the summer of 2020, when he began setting up his claim that there would be floods of fraudulent ballots — groundwork for his ultimately insisting the election was stolen. In his reaction to Colorado, are we seeing first signs of how he will indoctrinate the worshipful that he will have no choice but to govern as the following says?:

"A ruling party is attempting to amass total control over America by rigging the election against its leading opponent who happens to be a political outsider committed to defending the needs and interests of hardworking Americans. This is how dictatorships are born."