Social movements are creating powerful new languages for confronting tyranny. We must resist the plague of silence.

his week’s revelation that Donald Trump is already plotting new ways to try to put himself permanently above the law is just the latest reminder of the looming threat of lawless and emboldened right-wing forces in the United States. Trump’s new scheme to expand a Nixon-era policy memo to prohibit the Justice Department from prosecuting presidents, even after they leave office, is just a tiny hint of the greater threat. In recent months, several scholars have sounded the alarm that the United States is “sleepwalking towards authoritarianism.” The concern is not unfounded given that in his run for the presidency in 2024, Trump has boldly telegraphed his aspirations to impose an authoritarian future on the United States. He has repeatedly injected authoritarian language, extremist ideas and threats of violence into the mainstream. Moreover, he has done so to “create a climate of trepidation and powerlessness that discourages mobilization by the opposition,” in the words of scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Forecasting his authoritarian intentions, Trump has openly stated that he intends to terminate portions of the U.S. Constitution, calls his political enemies “vermin” and boldly proclaims he will make himself a dictator “on day one.” On Truth Social, he claimed without irony that a president should have blanket authority and total immunity “even for events that ‘cross the line.’” He has repeatedly stated that if he regains the White House, “it will be a time for retribution” and revenge.

Taking pages from Hitler’s speeches, Trump has also said that the biggest threat to the United States “is from within.” In this instance, he reproduces a version of McCarthyite slander with his claim that the country is being overrun by “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, and need to be rooted out.” His constant attacks on what he labels as the “enemy within” are meant to incite his MAGA followers to wage violence against people of color, critics, progressives, LGBTQ+ Americans, news networks, immigrants, feminists, and any other group that does not buy into Christian nationalist, white supremacist views.

Trump’s discourse overflows with the genocidal language used in the Third Reich. The historian Heather Cox Richardson rightly notes that Trump’s “use of language referring to enemies as bugs or rodents has a long history in genocide because it dehumanizes opponents, making it easier to kill them. In the U.S., this concept is most associated with Hitler and the Nazis, who often spoke of Jews as ‘vermin’ and vowed to exterminate them.”

Trump has claimed that immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country” and polluting his notion of white Christian culture, and he’s indicated that, if reelected, he plans to make them undergo “ideological screening” in order to enter the country legally (assuming here that he wants to make sure they would not vote for the Democratic Party). If his vision were carried out, millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country while others would be rounded up, put into what amount to Gulag camps, and subjected to unimaginably harsh policies. Given Trump’s calls to shoot shoplifters, impose death penalties on drug dealers, and his suggestion that his former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, “deserves to be executed,” there is no reason to doubt Trump’s authoritarian designs.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly echoes the language of autocrats such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who embraces the concept of “illiberal democracy,” and claims, as The Guardian points out, that the biggest threat to Hungary and other nations is “the ‘mixing’ of European and non-European races.” Trump and the GOP, like many of the authoritarian politicians they admire, believe that equality is a weakness endemic to democracy and destroys society. Trump’s contempt for the law and desire for absolute power is not only evident in his remarks about wanting to be a dictator; it was also on full display when his legal team argued before a D.C. Circuit Court that unless Trump is impeached, he could not be held responsible for “selling pardons, military secrets, or simply having people assassinated.” As Thom Hartmann put it, “Trump’s lawyer argued before the DC Appeals Court that if Trump became president again, he could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate Joe Biden or Liz Cheney and nobody could do anything about it.” While Trump’s lawlessness is central to his grab for unchecked power, there are also displays of the delusions and aspirations of a Nazi-infested politics.

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