Vermin in America.

The important thing is not that Trump sounds like 1930s-era fascists.

The important thing is that crowds cheer him and that most Republican thought leaders are silent.

From Trump's Truth Social

The morning's news is that Trump used language that sounds like Adolf Hitler. Hitler repeatedly used images of vermin, of infection, of national defilement in his speeches and writing. In Mein Kampf: 

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.

Hitler had a grand explanation of the German condition. They were a great people beset by parasites and vermin. Communists and Jews lurked. The enemy was within.

Trump wrote:

In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump pointed at immigrants. "They drink, they have drugs, a lot of things happening." In Dubuque he said, "It’s the blood of our country; what they’re doing is destroying our country.” 

In Claremont, New Hampshire Trump repeated his Truth Social comment:

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. . . . They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.

It is easy to miss the big story. Eight years ago in Rochester, New Hampshire a man asked Trump a question at a rally. The man said Barack Obama was a Muslim and asked what was Trump going to do about it. Trump said, "A lot of people are saying that. We're going to be looking at a lot of different things."

Like the TV news commentators I watched later that evening, I recalled John McCain's reaction when a woman asked him a question with a similar premise. McCain immediately corrected her. Like others, I thought the big event of the evening was that Trump let a false idea go uncorrected, and by his silence he tacitly endorsed it.

Rochester, NH

There was a second thing to notice that I had missed. It was a noisy, rambunctious crowd, but there was no rustling in chairs or moaning or booing or objection to the premise in the man's question. On reflection, that was the big event of the evening.

The GOP is OK with what Trump is doing now, too. There is no rustling in the seats by Republican Senators, Representatives, governors, and conservative media. The Heritage Foundation is silent. The Federalist Society is silent. Except for Christie, candidates still in the Presidential race are silently compliant.

Trump is saying aloud, repeatedly, that he won the 2020 election. He says proudly, repeatedly, that he will change non-political civil service. He says his Justice Department will carry out revenge on political enemies. He says he will prosecute generals who had blocked him when he considered martial law so the U.S. military could stop counting ballots cast for Biden. He says he will round up millions of people, put them in concentration camps, do an expedited denial of their status as amnesty seekers, then deport them.

Trump isn't secretive. 

We have a chicken/egg problem. Republican voters won't be alarmed by the erosion of democratic process if Republican leaders don't speak up. But those leaders are afraid of a primary electorate that believes things those leaders know to be false and dangerous. Trump intimidated the GOP. He exiled critics, calling them RINOs. So the vast majority of GOP leaders stay silent, change the subject, go along, or in the cases of the most cynical, cheerlead and fundraise. 

Those second-level influencers are an essential part of the American constitutional system. They aren't doing their job of putting up warnings and objecting. They are good Republicans, at a time when the country needs good Americans. 

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