As Donald Trump continues to dominate the 2024 Republican Party presidential primary campaign, he faces a total of 91 charges in four different criminal cases. They include 44 federal charges and 47 state charges, all of them felonies. Trump, who denies wrongdoing in each case, is the first former president, or presidential candidate to face prosecution for felony crimes.
On the campaign trail, Trump has labeled his political enemies as “vermin,” vowing to “root out” what he called “the threat from within.” In recent speeches Trump has also accused undocumented immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing the toxic rhetoric used by World War II era fascist dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. At a Dec. 5 Fox News town hall event in Iowa Trump declined to rule out abusing power if he’s re-elected, and said he’d be a dictator only on “day one” if he returns to the White House.
While several major media outlets have raised the alarm about Trump’s extremist rhetoric and detailed plans to institute an authoritarian or fascist regime, most Republican party politicians have dismissed these concerns or remained silent. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Amanda Marcotte, a senior politics writer at Salon.com, who talks about her recent article, “Trump is hiding his fascist plans in plain sight,” and describes the threat posed by a second Trump presidency.
AMANDA MARCOTTE: At every rally, he talks about retribution that he is going to use the White House to enact revenge on all his enemies. He makes “winking” promises to abuse this power. He went on Fox News and when directly asked if he would be a dictator, he jokingly said, “Only on Day One,” which was his way of saying “yes” to his audience of supporters while creating plausible deniability to others.
More importantly, he and his campaign have been leaking plans to the press to let the people know that he is serious. He’s going to be a dictator. They leaked plans to Axios about his potential Cabinet picks, which included Tucker Carlson for VP, Stephen Miller for attorney general, things like that. They leaked plans to The New York Times showing that Trump really wants to remake the federal government to remove all law-abiding bureaucrats and instead install “opportuniks” who are going to just do his will, whether it’s legal or not.
It’s so classic fascist handbook stuff that you can tell that they are trying to send the message that this is going to be a fascist government. That’s the plan. They’re going to try to go as hard and fast in that direction as they can and see if they can break the system. And there have been all these very alarmed articles coming out in Axios, The New York Times and stuff recounting this.
And I think it’s really important for listeners to understand that this information is coming from the Trump campaign. They aren’t hiding this. They are deliberately seeding this information because they are trying to scare people.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. And you have your interesting take on why that may be the case here with telegraphing exactly what they’re planning to do, as threatening as that might seem to many of us. But just to take a step back on what is being done not only in the Trump campaign itself, but the Heritage Foundation has got something called Project 2025, where they’re planning to implement all sorts of things and loyalty tests with their ultimate goal of destroying the “administrative state.”
Maybe you want to just briefly address what these other pieces of the Republican and Trump-aligned apparatus are doing.
AMANDA MARCOTTE: Yeah, when I was talking about the Trump campaign leaking that stuff, that was part of what I was thinking. We really need to see the Heritage Foundation and the Trump campaign as one and the same. They’re working together hand-in-glove. The Heritage Foundation is using kind of traditional Reaganite excuses like this anti- administrative state rhetoric that’s always been kind of dangerous, but never taken super seriously by the mainstream media.
They’re using that as kind of cover to create what would actually be not a destruction of the administrative state, but remaking it in a fascist image. So basically getting rid of everybody that is loyal to the Constitution and not to Trump personally. Which is to say, getting rid of everybody who would obey the law and do their job instead of redo their job to enshrine Trump’s power and put his power as far out of the hand of voters as possible.
This is something that happens in a lot of authoritarian governments, probably like all of them. For listeners, I think that the most obvious way this would play out is go to the Department of Justice, for instance, fire literally everyone who’s interested in enforcing the law and just replace them solely with people who will abuse their power to harass people considered leftists — or on the left at all, just Democrats, probably, with illegal, arbitrary arrests, legal harassment, that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, there would be a free pass to anybody that’s considered loyal to Trump. So the domestic terrorists that were involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection, no more prosecutions of them. No more prosecutions of anybody probably doing domestic terrorism on the right.
So think about what that means for abortion clinics, for drag shows, for anybody trying to be gay in public. And you begin to get a real good idea of why this is straight up fascism. This is exactly what fascist governments do, they create a legal system that is a permission structure to extra-legal, self-appointed, you know, arbiters of public morality, right?
The kind of brownshirts saying, you know, you can see that the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys are ready. They’re ready to take advantage of a system where the federal government says you can do whatever you want to anyone you want and we will look the other way.
Amanda Marcotte, a senior politics writer at Salon.com, writes the biweekly politics newsletter, Standing Room Only and is the author of “Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters.”
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Amanda Marcotte (22:47) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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