Trump’s 5 steps to fascism
Last Friday, Trump posted a video featuring an image of President Biden hog-tied — with hands and feet bound together. Trump has previously posted doctored photos and videos depicting him physically attacking Biden, such as hitting Mr. Biden with golf balls.
It’s all part of Trump’s 5-step fascist plan:
Step 1: Use threats of violence to gain power.
Hitler and Mussolini relied on their vigilante militias to intimidate voters and local officials. We watched Trump try to do the same in 2020. Even before he incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol, he said on national television: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”
Now, Trump is vilifying his political opponents as “vermin” who needed to be “rooted out.” He shows an image of Biden hog-tied.
Meanwhile, Republican election officials have testified to the threats they faced when they refused Trump’s demands to falsify the 2020 election results. Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who refused Trump’s demand to “find” the votes needed to flip the state into Trump’s hands, said “my email, my cell phone was doxxed.”
Step 2: Consolidate power.
After taking office, a would-be fascist turns every arm of government into a tool of his will. One of Hitler’s first steps was to take over the civil service, purging it of non-Nazis.
In October of 2020, Trump issued his own executive order that would have enabled him to fire tens of thousands of civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists. He never got to act on it, but he’s now promising to apply it to the entire civil service if reelected.
Trump has urged making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States. This has become the centerpiece of something called Project 2025, a presidential agenda assembled by MAGA Republicans, that would, as the AP put it, “dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision.”
Step 3: Demonize a group of people and establish a police state to round them up into detention camps.
Hitler used the imaginary threat of “the poison of foreign races” — mostly Jews — to justify taking control of the military and police, placing both under his top general, and granting law-enforcement powers to his civilian militias. Now Trump is using the same language to claim he needs similar powers to deal with immigrants. Trump says they’re “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Recently, Trump warned that the country would face a “blood bath” if he lost the election (he then walked back the claim, saying he was referring to losing the auto industry). A few days later, he attacked Jewish Democrats in a radio interview, saying that Jews who vote for Democrats hate their religion and Israel.
At a rally on March 16, Trump baselessly claimed that other countries were sending gang members and other undesirables to the United States: “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” He then referred to them as “animals.”
Trump plans to deploy troops within the U.S. to conduct immigration raids and round up what he estimates to be 18 million people who would be placed in mass-detention camps while their fate is decided.
Step 4: Jail the opposition.
As Putin and other of the world’s dictators do, Trump is now openly threatening to prosecute his opponents and looking to remake the Justice Department into a tool for his personal vendettas: “As we completely overhaul the federal Department of Justice and FBI, we will also launch sweeping civil rights investigations into Marxist local district attorneys.”
In the model of Hitler and Mussolini, Trump describes his opponents as subhuman: “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country …”
Step 5: Undermine the free press.
As Hitler well understood, a fascist dictator needs to control the flow of information. Trump has been attacking the press for years, calling them “the enemy of the people.”
He’s threatening to punish news outlets whose coverage he dislikes. On his “Truth Social” platform, he wrote: “Our so-called ‘government’ should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity. Much more to come, watch!”
We must take Trump’s 5-step fascist plan seriously and do everything in our power to stop it.
Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
On the night of Dec. 5, 2020, Jocelyn Benson and her 4-year-old son had just finished decorating their Detroit house for Christmas. Just as he was sitting down to watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” Jocelyn heard a growing ruckus outside.
The noises got louder and louder and eventually Benson could see there was a mob of dozens of protesters standing on her front lawn. Some were armed with guns.
They shouted obscenities. Some chanted on bullhorns. At least one person yelled “You’re murderers!” within earshot of her son’s room. Another: “Your neighbors will not get no sleep — you need to come out now!”
Benson was — and still is — Michigan’s secretary of state. A month before Trump supporters descended on her property to harass and intimidate her family, the head of the Republican National Committee — Ronna McDaniel — went on Fox News to tell a national audience that the election results in Michigan may have been fraudulent. She accused Benson of being “dishonest,” and an election worker of trying to rig the election.
She said the RNC was pursuing “very serious” reports of “irregularities” in Michigan, and described “hundreds of witnesses who talk about being disenfranchised and being removed from counting centers.”
Even as Fox hosts pressed her for evidence that they hadn’t found — “There’s all kinds of stuff flying on the internet, but when we look into it, it doesn’t pan out,” — she urged them to “be patient.”
Evidence of voter fraud in Michigan never appeared. But McDaniel’s baseless allegations against Michigan election workers and Benson had already done what they were supposed to do: get Trump voters mad.
Mad enough that two months later they’d storm the U.S. Capitol, hoping to overturn a democratic election, shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” and “Where’s Nancy?”
McDaniel shamefully called the violent insurrection “legitimate political discourse.”
Benson was hardly the only victim of Trump and McDaniel’s dangerous lies. State officials and election workers all over the country were targeted, all so that Trump could cling to power.
So, there’s well-deserved angst over the hiring of McDaniel, who just resigned as head of the RNC, by NBC News, both inside its cable property MSNBC, and among journalists everywhere.