Left-wing magazine The Atlantic is making a final desperate attempt to demonize former President Donald Trump and the “evils” he will do to the country if elected.
Just weeks before the November election, the magazine published an article likening Trump to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. The article claims the 45th president “brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics.”
Author Anne Applebaum pointed to dictators around the world who used “vermin” language against their opponents to “deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them.”
She suggested Trump would do the same.
However, it is essential to remember that Trump was already in office, and during that time, the rights or freedoms of Americans were not once at risk.
The article goes on to cite several instances— all debunked— when Trump used language that is comparable to dictators. Examples are when Trump used the word “bloodbath” and in 2020 when he referred to veterans as “suckers and losers.” Both of which were debunked and significantly taken out of context.
Applebaum warns that history often repeats itself, suggesting Trump is a modern-day dictator, fascist, and communist.
Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”
This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”
The Atlantic claimed that Trump believes he can secure the White House by using the “tactics of the 1930s” and deliberately “dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence.”
It is important to note that Applebaum was one of the first reporters to coin the “Russia collusion” hoax. She did so even before the votes were counted during the 2016 election.