The N Word

I say they're Nazis and I say to hell with it

If you have paid any attention to politics over the past eight years, you may recall seeing occasional, delicate discussions in the press about whether or not Trump is a fascist.

The best known of these have always been conducted by Prestige Press poohbahs who are always very careful about terminology and Robert’s Rules of Hitler. Recall this hed and dek from Vox in 2020: “Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in. / Call him a kleptocrat, an oligarch, a xenophobe, a racist, even an authoritarian. But he doesn’t quite fit the definition of a fascist.”

Vox author Dylan Matthews said he asked some smart guys the question in 2015 (when the most appropriate descriptor for Trump was “rich asshole”) and again in 2020 and, while their 2020 responses were “tinged with much greater concern about Trump’s authoritarian and violent tendencies,” harrumph harrumph, they remained confident, as Matthews was, that Trump was no fascist (though one of them admitted he was “using fascist political tactics”).

Even after Trump tried to jack the 2020 Electoral College count, from time to time some of these same soft boys would come to the podium and tell us no, sorry, this just doesn’t tick all the boxes, go back and use another slur. Get a load of this, at The National Interest in May: “Roger Griffin, a professor at Oxford Brookes University, called Trump a ‘wheeler dealer,’ but not a fascist.”

Welp.

In recent months Tubby has been screaming for mass deportations of foreigners who are in the United States legally – which, if you’re paying attention, is Phase 2 in the “deport anyone who looks foreign i.e. non-white” process. His figures range from one million to 20 million, depending on which way his brain chemicals happen to be sloshing on any given day, and are widely predicted to be highly disruptive (not to mention inhumane, if anyone cares) if realized.

Also Trump says he’ll keep track of the mass movement of sub-humans with “serial numbers,” though he didn’t say whether these would be tattooed on their arms.

Trump’s sidekick JD Vance, having stirred up the original Springfield Haitian shitstorm, not only admitted that his lurid slanders on the local Haitians were untrue but claimed his lies were justified because they got people’s attention, and also insisted he’d keep calling these legal residents “illegal” because, well, why not — don’t the Big Men get to decide who’s “legal” and who isn’t?

Meanwhile Tubby himself has grown increasingly unhinged. (Not that the sanewashing Prestige Press notices.) He calls for Americans who criticize his Supreme Court Justices to be “jailed,” and rouses his increasingly feral audiences with creepy monologues about how foreigners are “destroying” the country and non-foreign Americans should “get them the hell out,” and casts himself as the “protector” who will see to it that women “will no longer be thinking about abortion.”

And let’s not forget Trump’s enablers such as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson who, when asked if he would certify the 2024 election in the normal way — the way it always was before Trump decided to try his J6 putsch — replied he’d do so “if we have a free, fair, and safe election” — a rather unnecessary qualification, unless you’re looking for loopholes and working for a guy who will reject any election he doesn’t win.

Now, we still have some folks telling us how awfully imprecise it would be to describe this as fascist. Vance, for example — who took his Springfield slurs directly from the neo-Nazi Blood Tribe — has been blubbering about it (or rather, given his traditional mode of address, emitting a wan and insincere laugh followed by an equally wan and insincere show of concern).

Complaining as well are manicured wingnuts like Rich “Miggers” Lowry at National Review. Lowry admits Trump’s fantasies are “more extravagant and pungent than usual” — but on the other hand, he says, the country is indeed “flooded with illegal aliens” — I mean, Republicans keep saying it, it must be true — plus “Trump refers to, as quoted above, illegal migrants,” and it’s not as if Trump’s idea of who’s legal and who isn’t has proven extremely fluid, based on how scary-black they look to his latest mob of rage-addled rubes.

In the face of this insanity, some people who are not editorial-sinecure lifers are more willing to call what these fuckers are doing fascism. Catherine Rampell went perhaps a tick further than most at the Washington Post the other day, in an essay entitled “Trump gets compared with history’s great villain because his rhetoric is that bad.” (The headline was originally “Don't scoff at the Hitler comparisons. Trump’s rhetoric is that bad” before the Post chickened out.)

This is all to the good. My brothers and sisters in Christ, no matter what the pencil-necks say, these people are fascists, and there is no downside to saying so.

They have proven by word and deed that they are willing to use blatantly racist appeals and pogroms to gain and hold power, and to use extra-legal means to keep it if threatened by the will of the people. We have all seen them do this.

You think J6 doesn’t count because they didn’t succeed?  Maybe you also feel that way about their other failures to pick up fascist merit badges. Like closing down universities — their flunkies are only doing that in slow motion, and we have to wait until they’ve finally figured out how to manage it before we can say, from the back of a police van, “OK, now it’s fascism.”

If that’s what you think I have to assume you’re either in on it, or you’re unable to face the truth. Or maybe you think it’s impolitic to say so out loud. If so, I’ve got news for you — despite what generations of neo-liberal trimmers would have you believe, we gain nothing by concealing the truth about these people.

(Let me sidebar a moment: There is no point in fretting over how your particular “Trump’s a fascist” statement might affect the general election. A lot of intelligent people like to roleplay as high-level Democratic campaign operatives whose rhetoric may have consequences in A Crucial Swing State, but in real life no one gives a shit and if the New York Times wants to ratfuck Harris by finding some Intemperate Leftists to embarrass her they have a whole rolodex of them they’ll get to before you. So knock yourself out.)

A lot of voters will understand why you properly call Trump and his goons fascists, and approve. Others may be confused because, alas, we have reached a point where the memory of the original global threat of fascism is largely lost and many voters don’t remember why fascism is bad. Imputations of fascism will land with such people like imputations of communism and socialism — as meaningless slurs. It would be nice if they knew what the words meant, but they’re just going to have to pick it up on the fly.

The fascists themselves will squawk, but not because you’re wrong nor because they’re not proud of it — you think Vance was complaining because he thought he’d been mischaracterized? No, he had two goals in mind: First, to cry foul in front of the Prestige Press and thus Work the Refs for sympathetic coverage. (It usually works!) Secondly, or rather relatedly, Vance hoped to bind his current fascist voters with that ever-reliable conservative equity, victim mentality. You say I’m a Nazi, so fine, I’ll be a Nazi if that makes you happy!

Either way, no loss. No one’s going to say “how dare you” except the fash themselves. And they’re not fooling anyone except the “8 experts weigh in” dipshits.

And oh, yeah, speaking of that: I’d go ahead and call them Nazis too. What the hell, at least one of their major candidates has already declared himself a Black Nazi. And Tubby’s obviously a Führer fan — check this from December 2023:

“They said Hitler said that,” Trump said Tuesday after he again told the crowd in Iowa that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America.

After insisting Hitler used the words “in a much different way,” Trump went on to make the “blood” reference again. “It’s true. They’re destroying the blood of the country, they're destroying the fabric of our country, and we're going to have to get them out.”

Maybe you’re reading that and thinking: Whoa, that’s some fucked-up Nazi shit, why have I not heard of it before? And the most likely answer is: You probably did hear it before — it’s just that, for one thing, he does it all the time so eventually you stop noticing; and, for another, cable news and big newspapers keep talking about him, even when he says shit like this, as if he and his followers are normal people.

But they’re not. They’re Nazis. Go ahead and say so. If nothing else you might shock a couple of people awake.