Anand Giridharadas is a brilliant thinker who has a blog called The Ink. In his latest post, he prints whole sections of Trump’s incendiary campaign speech in Vandalia, Ohio, and gives a close reading to his language. (Something oddly appropriate about the location since Trump is the King of Vandals.)
Anand’s parsing of Trump’s words is incisive. I’m posting only part of it, and Anand has made this post available for free. I urge you to open the link and read it all.
He writes:
Former President Donald Trump’s fascist performance art this past weekend in Vandalia, Ohio, was ostensibly a stump speech for someone else. But you could be forgiven for forgetting that. In what was effectively his first real rally since clinching the GOP nomination, Trump offered a grim vision of America and a patchwork of unhinged tirades against his usual targets. Yet there was more to it than that.
There is little value in fact-checking the former president’s words, given that the great majority of them bore so little relationship to reality that you quickly realize their purpose could only be to destabilize reality altogether. They simply restate dozens of well-worn lies, from birtherism up through the Big Lie, interspersed with a smattering of playground insults, projection, and a stew of misunderstood economic schemes and xenophobic delusions that do the work of standing in for policy ideas. This is a hole of lies that cannot be filled with facts.
But that doesn’t mean the speech wasn’t worth paying attention to. And, being of the reading sort, we suggest there is value in reading the text, not just rage-consuming the viral videos everyone has been rehashing.
We think all Americans need to take Trump’s speech both seriously and literally as the what-you-see-is-what-you’ll-get messaging of a would-be dictator. These are things that are actually being said, in public, by a person who has already occupied the world’s most powerful position and seeks to occupy it again. It’s an advertisement for autocracy that — give it this at least — complies with the notion of truth in advertising. And as Masha Gessen has reminded us, “Rule no. 1 is to listen to and believe the autocrat.”
What we look at below is how Trump’s rhetorical performance works, how it functions. In many of these examples, the “meaning” isn’t important, and that’s why the goal here isn’t to question his command of the facts. He’s making these statements without much pretense to knowing the facts in the first place; rather, he’s looking for maximum emotional impact. He fights entirely on the battleground of emotion, and that, Ruth Ben-Ghiat has reminded us, is pretty much what autocrats have always done.
Trump’s language here — from stabs in the back to dystopian visions of foreign nations seeking to flood the American body politic with their unwanted criminals — has plenty of precedent in the words of the strongmen of the past and present. He goes out of his way to praise Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, perhaps returning thefavor for Orban’s snub of the sitting U.S. government on his recent visit to the U.S.
And it’s the fact that this speech follows that well-established playbook that demands we pay attention. His words may be murky. What he plans to do to us is clear.
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The Victim King
Because I’m being indicted for you and never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom.
I’m being persecuted. I think more than anybody, but who the hell knows? You know, all my life…you’ve heard of Andrew Jackson. He was actually a great general and a very good president. They say that he was persecuted as president more than anybody else. Second was Abraham Lincoln. This is just what they said. This is in the history books. They were brutal. Andrew Jackson’s wife actually died over it, they say, died of a broken heart, but she died over it. He was never quite the same.
But they say Andrew Jackson, they say Abraham Lincoln was second, but he had a, you know, in all fairness, he did have a civil war. So you would think that would cause a problem, right? So you could understand it. But nobody comes close to Trump.
Elementary school historical analysis aside, this passage is a reminder that, more than anything, Trump relishes playing the role of the Victim King. He’s casting attacks on him as attacks on his subjects, and valiantly stepping into the breach to block the slings and arrows so his loyal supporters won’t suffer. It’s part of the personalization of leadership that’s always been at the center of cults of personality — the devotional, movement-building side of authoritarianism.
The notion that the leader acts as both weapon and human shield is a central rhetorical tool in the arsenal of autocrats. And of course he’s done this better — or maybe just “more” — than anybody. More than Lincoln; more than Jackson.
Trump’s victimhood here is absolute. He’s devoted himself entirely to protecting his flock. An attack on him is an attack on them; a win for him a win for them.
We dig here more deeply into Trump’s pursuit of absolute power through his performance of weakness.
The Horst Wessel song
And you see the spirit from the hostages, and that’s what they are, is hostages. They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly. And you know that. And everybody knows that. And we’re going to be working on that soon. The first day we get into office, we’re going to save our country, and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots, and they were unbelievable patriots and are. You see the spirit, this cheering. They’re cheering while they’re doing that. And they did that in prison. And it’s a disgrace, in my opinion.
Here Trump returns the favor, in a sense, to his shock troops. The speech opened with a playback of “Justice for All,” the MAGA fundraising release by the “J6 Prison Choir” that interpolates Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over a backing track of the inmates singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The track is meant as a legal defense effort for the January 6 insurrectionists, but the role it plays here is to define those insurrectionists as true patriots, and to link Trump’s own persecution with that endured by his most devoted followers — the ones who’ve demonstrated their willingness to go into battle on his account. It’s a barter of martyrdoms.
This, as with the rest of the rhetoric here, is a classic authoritarian strategy. If you consider the insurrectionists cast in the role of Sturmabteilung(“SA,” the original paramilitary forces of the Nazi Party) martyr Horst Wessel (Ashli Babbitt specifically, though the group as a whole plays the same part generally here), this patriotic mashup recalls the Nazi anthem.
The Big Lie
I happen to think we won most of the country. You want to know the truth. If the voting…if the voting were real, I actually think we won most of the country.
Central to Trump’s identity is infallibility, and, given that, his mass popularity is without question. Again, this is classic autocratic positioning. Thus his obsessions with ratings, with polls, with casting primary victories that were never in doubt as fantastic triumphs.
Jokes about huge numbers aside (and the speech is rife with riffs on poll results), there is simply no way that he could have lost a legitimate electoral contest, and any such contest he might have lost would be, by definition, illegitimate. One need only look to Vladimir Putin’s “landslide” victory this week for an example of the way elections function in an authoritarian state.
The Big Lie is Trump’s truth, and it’s not just a boast. It’s key to the story he’s trying desperately to sell to the crowd, the story of a guy who can’t lose.
I was asking Jim Jordan about it because he was commenting that we have the largest crowds in the history of politics. Nobody comes close. If Ronald Reagan came to a place called Dayton, Ohio — have you heard of it? If he came to Dayton, Ohio, honestly, J.D., if he had three or 400 people in a ballroom, that would be great. We get 25-30,000 people for a small rally…We had 88,000 people show up in South Carolina.
An addendum: In his bid for recognition as the greatest of all Republicans, Trump is even willing to throw Ronald Reagan under the bus if it helps make the case.
Not even people
They’re very smart, very streetwise. And I would do the same thing. If I had prisons that were teeming with MS-13 and all sorts of people that they’ve got to take care of for the next 50 years, right? Young people, they’re in jail for years. If you call them people, I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say…
We have so many people being hurt so badly and being killed. They’re sending their prisoners to see us. They’re sending and they’re bringing them right to the border and they’re dropping them off and we’re allowing them to come in. And these are tougher than anybody we’ve got in the country. These are hardened criminals. And we’ve got hundreds of thousands of them.
If you take Trump at his word here — and we think you should — the leaders of countries around the world are conspiring to conduct an organized invasion, deploying their criminals to the United States in order to submerge it in violence. On one level, there’s nothing here but racism and xenophobia, but this works on the level of the conspiratorial ideas of mysterious foreign threats to the body politic that have long been part and parcel of the autocrat’s appeal.
Migrants, in this account, aren’t fleeing refugees or people looking for a better life against all odds, but have been mobilized and directed against the U.S., a superhuman and yet subhuman army, “dropped off” by a shadowy cabal of foreign interests who aren’t content merely to sell us cheaper cars and fentanyl precursors.
Just insert “bankers” or “Jews” or “capitalist roaders” or even “globalists” here and you’re on the right track towards understanding what Trump’s trying to do.
Migrant crime
These are the roughest people you’ve ever seen. You know, now we have a new form of crime. I call it Biden migrant crime, but it’s too long. So let’s just call it migrant crime. We have a new category. You know, you have vicious crimes. You have violent crimes. You have all these. Now we have migrant crimes, and they’re rough. They’re rough. And it’s going to double up. And you see what’s happening.
You know, throughout the world right now, I don’t know if you know this. Crime is way, way down. You know why? Because they sent us their criminals. That’s why. It’s true. It’s true. They sent, you know, Venezuela is down 66 percent because they sent us their gang members and gangsters. They sent us their drug dealers and their murderers. They’re all coming into our country. And Venezuela now, their crime is down 66 percent.
The supposed statistics here are just a “gish gallop,” in which the speaker simply overwhelms the opponent (or in this case the audience) with a flurry of inaccurate statements, knowing that the very attempt to correct them will both derail any reasonable argument and delay a response until the time has run out.
But this, again, is the story of the alien threat, here described as entering at the behest of their domestic collaborator, Joe Biden. It’s a “stab-in-the-back” accusation (there are several in the speech), in which a leader is identified as a secret traitor, betraying the nation to foreign interests.
The truth is that crime rates are down worldwide, and these statistics are pulled out of the air. The fear people have of the loss of control of the border, and of what it means to be “American” is real, however — even if Trump’s helped in its creation — and that’s what he’s playing to so effectively.
Please open the link and continue reading this insightful exegesis of Trump’s rhetoric. He is a talented orator. So was Hitler.
He gets all his best stuff from the Kremlin.
We better take him at his word. This is the disjointed meandering of a highly disturbed sociopath!
What’s most concerning is how speeches like this that would have causes outrage a few decades ago have slowly become normalized. ”Two sides” equally valid, those who believe in democracy and the Constitution and those who spurn it for a higher cause.
Back when I was a teenager, two of my (temporary) favorite novels were Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.
I also watched the mini-series version in the 1980s, and I recently came across episodes of The Winds of War and started watching again. It begins in 1939, and Robert Mitchum is the naval attache stationed in Berlin.
It feels so different to watch this 40 years later. When I watched it in the early 1980s, it felt like the distant past. I felt sadness for the folks not recognizing the horror of what was coming. Blind to what was obvious. Now I watch it and it is chilling. It is so close to today.
Robert Mitchum’s heroic character Pug Henry in an audience of German leaders cheering on one of Hitler’s speeches full of lies, turns to the British journalist and asks “are they really buying all this?”
The ability of the Third Reich to say anything at all and have that be the only “truth” most Germans embraced. People who should have known better debasing themselves to the lies.
Those “nice” Germans in thrall to Hitler. The belief that Hitler is just another anti-Semite and while things will be hard for Jews as they had been in the past, it is just the same old discrimination and prejudice that Jews survived for centuries. Outrageous act after outrageous act being normalized.
I just watched a tv series made in 1983 where Hitler says he wants to “Make Germany Strong Again”.
Both the books and the mini-series spend an extraordinary amount of time digressing into the real history happening during the time of the story. At various times in a typical episode there might be a 5 minute narrated documentary-style scene of Hitler and his top advisors and generals discussing strategy or politics. Amazing that it was such a hit back then. Some of the acting is pretty bad, too. But I wish I could watch it the way I did back in the 1980s, as long ago history, instead of now being unable to see how close our country is to a version of this in the future.
In 1983 I thought it was long ago history. Watching it in 2024, it seems like America, something I never believed was possible.
Well said. Who could have predicted we would be trying to fend off fascists once again? We had Nazi sympathizers trying to take over in the 1930s as well.
Who would have thought the fascists would have been in total control of one of the two major American political parties, already having enormous political power, including control of the Supreme Court, and poised to gain even more power that could end democracy!? With lies being normalized and truth being presented as simply partisan opinion by the so-called liberal media and a vast swath of the public, in thrall to those lies!
“If you call them people, I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say…”
It is hard to imagine a more frightening statement. Like NYC pointed out, this normalizes the idea of humans being less than human. Jared Diamond points to this tribal trait in humanity as a universal in the human experience, which suggests to me that discarding the idea of the “other” is paramount in our fight for civility in our lives.
We must soundly defeat this encroachment on our collective humanity. There is no other way. The irony of the upcoming election is that the electoral college was perceived by the founding fathers as an insulator against “mob rule” and an assurance that reason, their avatar, might reign supreme in a “machine that goes of itself.” The electoral college now threatens to give us our first real threat to universal liberty.
It would be wrong to view the history of the United States as a March toward perfect liberty, but there had been, up until the rise of the tea party and trumpism, a theme of increased inclusiveness in the body politic. Modern reactionary politics threatens to actively reverse the general trend in history.
We stand, as we ever stand, on the precipice.
The idea that some people are “not people” is intended to dehumanize them. If that happens, the stronger ones can do anything, no matter how cruel, to the not-people. I think immediately of Bartolomé de las Casas’ horrifying description of what Spanish invaders did to the indigenous people they encountered. Among other things, they roasted them on open pit fires as if they were pigs or cattle.
You should read the transcript of the interview Trump did with Sean Hannity on Sunday, the day after his bloodbath speech. FOX News apparently has suppressed this exchange, which was intended to help 45 clarify his remarks.
Is This a Real Transcript from a Trump Interview with Hannity? | Snopes.com
Nailed it, fjstats01cf252ba4
Dear Bob,
This is the Trump-Hannity transcript that was slipped under my door two days ago. I can’t vouch for its authenticity. We live in an AI world of disinformation. But here it is in the spirit of nudge-nudge-wink-wink:
What follows is the unreleased transcript of a conversation between former President Donald Trump and Sean Hannity. It was intended to help Mr. Trump explain a series of remarks he made in Ohio at a rally for a Republican senatorial candidate. Its authenticity has not been confirmed by Fox News.
SH: Mr. President, it’s good to talk with you on short notice. I wanted you to clarify your words on Saturday, which seem to have caused some confusion.
Let me start by asking whether you had prepared statements to deliver but couldn’t read them because there was a problem with the teleprompter.
DJT: Yes, the teleprompter had been tampered with. We suspect that a leftwing techie jammed the equipment. But I went on without notes for 90 minutes. Huge crowd kept cheering me. Really gifted for thinking on my feet. Biden can’t do that—think or stand without falling down.
SH: Let me get right to your words about a bloodbath in this country if you lose the election. This has brought sharp criticism from certain quarters. Your political foes have interpreted you to mean that there would be violence in the streets should Mr. Biden win…
DJT (interrupting): Biden didn’t win. It was stolen…
SH: But your supporters say you were referring to economic disaster for workers and for the auto industry. So, please put your prediction into context.
DJT: I talk about blood all the time. America’s pure blood is being poisoned. Mexicans, Muslims, migrants bringing crimes and who knows how many diseases endangering our civilization… And Biden welcomes these animals with open arms.
We need healthy blood to supply oxycontin to the brain. Sleepy Joe stumbles around. Still can’t tell the difference between a lion and a camel. These invaders, the millions of immigrators, who pollute our system, get a free ride and drain us.
SH: Okay, but weren’t you really addressing danger to the auto industry and…
DJT: Now, some things have gone too far. People come here from India, open up 7-11s, and rip us off with Slurpees. They need to be deported back to Bombay. When I’m re-elected that will be my first executive order. And bringing inflation down from the way it shot up in the last three years.
And you know, Black Americans are the ones who are hurt the most by junk food and Slurpees. The smart ones will vote for me. They recognize how much I’ve been mistreated and suffered at the hands of our unfair criminal justice system.
SH: Do you believe the media misconstrued your comments in Ohio?
DJT: They know I’ll put an end to the biased reporting and the fake news when I’m back in the Oval Office. They’re desperate. Lawrence O’ Dumbbell and Rachel Madcow. They give the press a bad name. Their lies are over from Day 1.
That will come the same day that I unlock the jails that are holding the patriots of January 6th. I’ll give them jobs in the Justice Department and make them inspector generals in every government agency—with high salaries and back pay for the time they lost defending democracy.
SH: Anything else?
DJT: I’ll invite a few Supreme Court justices to the White House on Inauguration Day to honor their service in upholding the Constitution and will award a Medal of Freedom to Judge Cannon for her courageous devotion to the law.
Of course, I will be sure that Mexico continues to pay for and completes the wall. And I will thank Putin and Kim Jong Un for praising my strong leadership. They have inspired me.
SH: Thank you, Mr. President, for setting the record straight. We appreciate the time you have taken from your crushing schedule.
DJT: And my base loves me. They love when I do the twist at all my rallies. And Biden can barely walk.
[Editor’s Note: Other copies of this transcript may have gotten away from Fox News. Network spokesmen have not denied its existence.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The zig zagging of his speech , the stop and go , the imagination appearing as reality , seem to me to be the signs of a continuing psychosis .
Trying to make sense out of nonsense is a job for a psychiatrist- and definitely not someone who I could start WWlll through his fantasy preoccupations.
Yes. He is quite literally insane. Think of that. 40 percent of Americans think that this totally psychotic guy should be president again. That’s disturbing.
The whole Trump phenomena ought to be understood and feared for what it is: IRRATIONALISM. Irrationalism is the mortal enemy of any functioning civil society based on tolerance, the rule of law and professionalism. Be it racism, xenophobia, misogyny, homophobia, anti-intellectualism and everything else the flies out the Pandora’s box of earthly woes, it has become The disease of the public mind threatening America. Think of it in Freudian terms: irrationalism is the Id hijacking the Ego and overthrowing the Superego. The swamp of human chaos from which strongmen and autocrats emerge. Make no mistake: Trump is merely is its most visible, disgusting symptom; and when he departs as he surely will after his defeat this November, we will still have this disease of the public mind rampaging through the body politic. The question that ought to be asked now and for years to come: How do we fight irrationalism???
xoxoxo
Thank you for your piercing insight.
Drew: I follow Diane Ravitch’s blog and occasionally enter comments on its threads. Click on my name to get the full text of my latest comment on Trump and the reactions I got…. Enjoy! – B
To R Bruce Tuttle: “How do we fight irrationalism?”
Education, education, education, as distinct from and more important than STEM STEM STEM, and especially distinct from propaganda, propaganda, propaganda. How many of the Trumpists even know the difference?
In my experience, political stupidity rules the day and is the fallout of 50 years of it in our educational system.
Also, the ignorant are uncomfortable in the presence of people who like to read and who keep up with things, and will not vote for those who are beyond their own educational horizon. There is some embarrassment in it for them, which is a clue in itself. I think this defines some of what your say above as anti-intellectualism.
A poor political education is not the whole problem, but I think a huge part of it. I say this having been afforded family who are sorry for me because I won’t be “taken up” when that phenomenon occurs. I’ll wave from down here, thank you. CBK
Thank you, Catherine! As an educator (college) from a past life, I heartily agree that education — especially in public schools — is essential to restoring sanity (faith in secular rational thinking and discourse) in the fight against irrationalism. But American education has been threatened not only by the onslaught from the Radical Right and Christian nationalist, but more broadly by consumerism, the dominant culture in which most Americans live their lives. To be brief, consumerism is what facilitates the high-volume production and consumption of any and all commodities (goods and services) that constitutes roughly 70% of the American economy. In our private lives consumerism entails succumbing addictive behavior; in our public lives it leads to the tabloidization of civic life. It goes without saying that consumerism is a breeding ground for irrationalism — which is why the fight for public education is a fight we cannot give up on. As well as the fight to reign in and regulate advertising and mass social media platforms. Voltaire aptly summed up what’s at stake in regard to education: “Whoever who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” - RBT
R Bruce Tuttle: I think what you are referring to as consumerism, I am referring to as having adopted a capitalist and transactional mindset that tends to takeover one’s thinking, even to dehumanize in some respects.
At any rate, when the shift to STEM and to hyper-testing occurred, it was AWAY from the humanities, the social sciences, and history (and writing), none of which are directly related to “consumerism.” Whereas STEM, though hugely important, is about positivist-leaning thinking and work, and big paychecks, and exactly that: consumerism. The next step is not thinking at all. CBK
Your comment about the role of STEM in education is good, but without a great deal of irony. How can such a science-based rationality like STEM end up enabling an increasingly irrational consumerism. My definition of consumerism was a brief distillation of a longer description I wrote a few years back. So, yes, it is very much about American capitalism (esp the “financialization” of the US economy after WWII) and the soul crushing reality of everything being reduced to commodities bought and sold, including human relations themselves (ie transactional). And no greater manifestation of the potential evil of consumer capitalism is the reality of health care as a commodity to be accessed by one’s ability to pay. The school is one of the few (if not the only, it seems) public space where we can learn (instead of consume) that there is a different reality right here and now where we can live rationally, humanely as citizens…
R: You write: “How can such a science-based rationality like STEM end up enabling an increasingly irrational consumerism.”
Not STEM as such, but a misdirection and overemphasis on it where, again, the humanities, social sciences, history (and philosophy, BTW), the things that humanize a more technical education, are devalued in the same way that teaching, especially in K-12, was devalued over time. If we ever had a balance, its influence was lost after WWII to too many who grew up after it.
So it’s not STEM as science-based, or as related to the development of rationality, but STEM sans other aspects of a whole human education, including human developmental concerns, e.g., a political education, which is a necessary part of children’s education if democracy is going to be maintained . . . since “the people” have to know how it differs from other forms of government and why they might want to support and keep it, if indeed they do. (It’s an experiment, after all.)
My thought is that, at least in great part, we are where we are with Trump followers precisely because of a loss of that depth of education over the years. It has layers, of course, but the absence of a political education, which apparently “blew away in the wind,” is one of those layers. CBK
I misspoke – I meant to say WITH a great deal of irony. I quite agree that the over-emphasis on STEM (and most of the bouosterism for it seems market/career or national security driven) leaves out the humanities and civics. My college career was mostly teaching American Government and political philosophy, and the academic battle over whether the study of politics and society should be rendered a field of science (as in “social science”) as opposed to a more humanities/philosophic/historical approach back in the 60s and 70s is still fresh in my mind. I believe we wold both agree that civic education that enables students to defense themselves against the absurdities of the present day is paramount for today’s schooling. - RBT