On a day filled with reporting about Donald Trump’s admiration for despots and dictators and clear desires to emulate them, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum warned in an essay published by the Atlantic that in fact, he has adopted the rhetoric of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes had Applebaum as a guest on Tuesday’s episode of “All In” to talk about her essay, and to flesh out her warnings about what Trump is clearly planning in plain sight.
Applebaum told Hayes that Trump’s turn to “calling your political opponents ‘the enemies within,’ or using terms like ‘vermin’ or ‘cold blooded killers’ to describe people you don’t like,” is new for American politics. And it’s language “borrowed directly” from some of history’s worst despots.
“People keep talking about Hitler, it’s or Mussolini, but actually, Stalin used language like that. Mao used language like that. The East German Stasi used language like that. And they they did it for a reason,” she contined. “They did it because they were trying to dehumanize their political enemies. To say, these people don’t count, you don’t have to think about them. You can do what you want to them. You can, you can commit violence against them. They don’t have any rights. They aren’t, you know, they’re not even they’re not human beings, they’re not citizens.”
You watch watch the whole segment, including Hayes’ interview with Applebaum, below:
Earlier, Hayes began the segment by talking about recent Trump campaign events at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania and a barber shop in The Bronx, New York.
The ex-president’s events “always have this sort of vaguely ‘Dear Leader’ feel,” Hayes argued, adding that the McDonald’s event in particular “perfectly captures something about Trump.”
“I mean, campaign photo op stunts are part of electoral politics everywhere, right every day, but this entire thing was completely fabricated. Right?” Hayes said. He explained how at the McDonald’s, the restaurant was closed for the day, all the ‘customers’ were pre-selected Trump supporters, and they weren’t allowed to actually order food. He then explained how the barber shop appearance was similarly fake.
Hayes then compared this to photos taken in the 1930s of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, pretending to work, shirtless, on a farm. Hayes called this “his version of 1930s McDonald’s. Exact same campy uncanniness.”
“It’s not the only thing Trump has in common with some of the worst figures in history, as Anne Applebaum points out in the Atlantic, by using terms like ‘the enemy within’ and calling immigrants people who ‘poison the blood.’ Trump knows exactly what he’s doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes,” Hayes added.
Applebaum for her part explained that Trump isn’t setting out, exactly, to be a clone of the 20th century’s genocidal despots, though the danger is as great. What he wants, she said, is “to rule without any checks and balances, without any norms, without any guardrails, without independent courts, without independent media.”
People who believe in the same neofascist political philosophy as Trump in other countires “have, once they took power, once they’ve used that kind of language to win elections legitimately, have often begun to then take apart their democratic systems. And of course, that’s the threat of Trump. Not that he’s going to be Hitler… Don’t imagine a Nazi movie. Imagine rather, the slow dismantling of institutions, the use of the IRS or the Department of Justice against Trump’s political enemies or against media he doesn’t like.”
“That’s the kind of thing that people who use this language have have been doing, whether in Hungary or in Turkey, or a decade ago in Russia. And when Trump says that he admires [Russian autocrat Vladimir] Putin, or he admires Xi [Jinping, leader of China’s ruling communist party], or he admires [Hungarian autocrat] Viktor Orban, I think that’s what he admires. They don’t have to worry about these rules and norms and laws and the Constitution,” Applebaum added.
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