Letters from an American - October 13, 2024

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

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October 13th, 2024. He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he's a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country, a fascist to the core. This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation's highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former President Donald Trump to veteran journalist

Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position. Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant stories. But since the September 10th presidential debate, when he drew ridicule for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating their white neighbor's pets, Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by black and brown criminals and that they, along with their democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed with the help of the military.

My award of Politico noted on October 12th that Trump's speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls animals, stone-cold killers, the worst people, and the enemy from within. He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world, from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and that she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens. Trump's behavior is authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called The True Believer, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or

politically. Such people are willing to follow a leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who that is doesn't really matter. The group simply has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader's supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and increasingly Democrats,

deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him. According to Hoffer, there's a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader's behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and in order to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that the enemy is not good-intentioned, as they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly. According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets.

Indeed, their loyalty will only grow stronger as his behavior becomes more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves. At a MAGA rally in Aurora, Colorado on October 11th, Trump added to this formula his determination to use the federal government to attack those he calls enemies. Standing on a stage with a backdrop that read, deport illegals now and end migrant crime, he insisted that the city had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs and proposed a federal program he called Operation Aurora to remove those immigrants he insists are members of savage gangs. When Trump said, we have to live

with these animals, but we won't live with them for long, a person in the crowd shouted, kill them. Officials in Aurora emphatically deny Trump's claim that the city is a war zone. Republican Mayor Mike Kaufman said that Aurora is not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs and that such statements are grossly exaggerated. While there have been incidents, they were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents. The chief of the Aurora police agreed that the city is not by any means overtaken by Venezuelan gangs. In Aurora, Trump also promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. explains, the Alien Enemies Act authorizes the government to round up, detain, and deport foreign nationals of a country with which the U.S. is at war. But it is virtually certain Trump didn't come up with the idea to use that law on his own, raising the question of who really will be in

charge of policy in a second Trump administration. Trump aide Stephen Miller seems the likely candidate to run immigration policy. He has promised to begin a project of denaturalization, that is, stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship. He too spoke at Aurora, leading the audience in booing photos that were allegedly of migrant criminals. Before Miller spoke, a host from Right Side Broadcasting used the dehumanizing language associated with genocide, saying of migrants, these people, they are so evil. They are not your run-of-the-mill criminal. They are people that are satanic. They are involved in human sacrifice. They are raping men, women, and children, especially

underaged children. Trump added the old trope of a population carrying disease, saying that immigrants are very, very, very sick with highly contagious disease, and they're led into our country to infect our country. Trump promised the audience in Aurora that he would liberate Colorado. I will give you back your freedom and your life. On Saturday, October 12th, Trump held a rally in Coachella, California, where temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38 degrees Celsius, sparked heat-related illnesses in his audience as he spoke for about 80 minutes in the apocalyptic vein he has adopted lately. After the rally, shuttle buses failed to arrive to take attendees back to their cars, leaving them stranded. And on Sunday, October 13th, Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents. After weeks of complaining about the enemy within,

Trump suggested that those who oppose him in the 2024 election are the nation's most serious problem. He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that even more troubling for the forthcoming election than immigrants is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics, and it should be handled easily by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military. Trump's campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism

by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City's Madison Square Garden on October 27th, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington's birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the True Americanism event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform, flanked by swastikas. Trump's full-throated embrace of Nazi race science and fascism is deadly dangerous. But there is something notable about Trump's recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win, but rather is holding them in states, Colorado, California,

New York, that he is almost certain to lose by a lot. Longtime Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told Matt Dixon and Alan Smith of NBC News, this does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing vote locations. It seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes. Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strong man, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report, although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality.

And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas. Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina, Trump is not being transparent. He refuses to release his medical records. I've done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate. It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away? Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America?

Is that what's going on? For these reasons and so many more, she said, it is time to turn the page. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Denham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss. This is your world.