Former President Donald Trump’s fascist performance art this past weekend in Vandalia, Ohio, was ostensibly a stump speech for someone else. But you could be forgiven for forgetting that. In what was effectively his first real rally since clinching the GOP nomination, Trump offered a grim vision of America and a patchwork of unhinged tirades against his usual targets. Yet there was more to it than that.
There is little value in fact-checking the former president’s words, given that the great majority of them bore so little relationship to reality that you quickly realize their purpose could only be to destabilize reality altogether. They simply restate dozens of well-worn lies, from birtherism up through the Big Lie, interspersed with a smattering of playground insults, projection, and a stew of misunderstood economic schemes and xenophobic delusions that do the work of standing in for policy ideas. This is a hole of lies that cannot be filled with facts.
But that doesn’t mean the speech wasn’t worth paying attention to. And, being of the reading sort, we suggest there is value in reading the text, not just rage-consuming the viral videos everyone has been rehashing.
We think all Americans need to take Trump’s speech both seriously and literally as the what-you-see-is-what-you’ll-get messaging of a would-be dictator. These are things that are actually being said, in public, by a person who has already occupied the world’s most powerful position and seeks to occupy it again. It’s an advertisement for autocracy that — give it this at least — complies with the notion of truth in advertising. And as Masha Gessen has reminded us, “Rule no. 1 is to listen to and believe the autocrat.”
What we look at below is how Trump’s rhetorical performance works, how it functions. In many of these examples, the “meaning” isn’t important, and that’s why the goal here isn’t to question his command of the facts. He’s making these statements without much pretense to knowing the facts in the first place; rather, he’s looking for maximum emotional impact. He fights entirely on the battleground of emotion, and that, Ruth Ben-Ghiat has reminded us, is pretty much what autocrats have always done.
Trump’s language here — from stabs in the back to dystopian visions of foreign nations seeking to flood the American body politic with their unwanted criminals — has plenty of precedent in the words of the strongmen of the past and present. He goes out of his way to praise Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, perhaps returning the favor for Orban’s snub of the sitting U.S. government on his recent visit to the U.S.
And it’s the fact that this speech follows that well-established playbook that demands we pay attention. His words may be murky. What he plans to do to us is clear.
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The Victim King
Because I’m being indicted for you and never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom.
I’m being persecuted. I think more than anybody, but who the hell knows? You know, all my life…you’ve heard of Andrew Jackson. He was actually a great general and a very good president. They say that he was persecuted as president more than anybody else. Second was Abraham Lincoln. This is just what they said. This is in the history books. They were brutal. Andrew Jackson’s wife actually died over it, they say, died of a broken heart, but she died over it. He was never quite the same.
But they say Andrew Jackson, they say Abraham Lincoln was second, but he had a, you know, in all fairness, he did have a civil war. So you would think that would cause a problem, right? So you could understand it. But nobody comes close to Trump.
Elementary school historical analysis aside, this passage is a reminder that, more than anything, Trump relishes playing the role of the Victim King. He’s casting attacks on him as attacks on his subjects, and valiantly stepping into the breach to block the slings and arrows so his loyal supporters won’t suffer. It’s part of the personalization of leadership that’s always been at the center of cults of personality — the devotional, movement-building side of authoritarianism.
The notion that the leader acts as both weapon and human shield is a central rhetorical tool in the arsenal of autocrats. And of course he’s done this better — or maybe just “more” — than anybody. More than Lincoln; more than Jackson.
Trump’s victimhood here is absolute. He’s devoted himself entirely to protecting his flock. An attack on him is an attack on them; a win for him a win for them.
We dig here more deeply into Trump’s pursuit of absolute power through his performance of weakness.
The Horst Wessel song
And you see the spirit from the hostages, and that’s what they are, is hostages. They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly. And you know that. And everybody knows that. And we’re going to be working on that soon. The first day we get into office, we’re going to save our country, and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots, and they were unbelievable patriots and are. You see the spirit, this cheering. They’re cheering while they’re doing that. And they did that in prison. And it’s a disgrace, in my opinion.
Here Trump returns the favor, in a sense, to his shock troops. The speech opened with a playback of “Justice for All,” the MAGA fundraising release by the “J6 Prison Choir” that interpolates Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over a backing track of the inmates singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The track is meant as a legal defense effort for the January 6 insurrectionists, but the role it plays here is to define those insurrectionists as true patriots, and to link Trump’s own persecution with that endured by his most devoted followers — the ones who’ve demonstrated their willingness to go into battle on his account. It’s a barter of martyrdoms.
This, as with the rest of the rhetoric here, is a classic authoritarian strategy. If you consider the insurrectionists cast in the role of Sturmabteilung (“SA,” the original paramilitary forces of the Nazi Party) martyr Horst Wessel (Ashli Babbitt specifically, though the group as a whole plays the same part generally here), this patriotic mashup recalls the Nazi anthem.
The Big Lie
I happen to think we won most of the country. You want to know the truth. If the voting…if the voting were real, I actually think we won most of the country.
Central to Trump’s identity is infallibility, and, given that, his mass popularity is without question. Again, this is classic autocratic positioning. Thus his obsessions with ratings, with polls, with casting primary victories that were never in doubt as fantastic triumphs.
Jokes about huge numbers aside (and the speech is rife with riffs on poll results), there is simply no way that he could have lost a legitimate electoral contest, and any such contest he might have lost would be, by definition, illegitimate. One need only look to Vladimir Putin’s “landslide” victory this week for an example of the way elections function in an authoritarian state.
The Big Lie is Trump’s truth, and it’s not just a boast. It’s key to the story he’s trying desperately to sell to the crowd, the story of a guy who can’t lose.
I was asking Jim Jordan about it because he was commenting that we have the largest crowds in the history of politics. Nobody comes close. If Ronald Reagan came to a place called Dayton, Ohio — have you heard of it? If he came to Dayton, Ohio, honestly, J.D., if he had three or 400 people in a ballroom, that would be great. We get 25-30,000 people for a small rally…We had 88,000 people show up in South Carolina.
An addendum: In his bid for recognition as the greatest of all Republicans, Trump is even willing to throw Ronald Reagan under the bus if it helps make the case.
Not even people
They’re very smart, very streetwise. And I would do the same thing. If I had prisons that were teeming with MS-13 and all sorts of people that they’ve got to take care of for the next 50 years, right? Young people, they’re in jail for years. If you call them people, I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say…
We have so many people being hurt so badly and being killed. They’re sending their prisoners to see us. They’re sending and they’re bringing them right to the border and they’re dropping them off and we’re allowing them to come in. And these are tougher than anybody we’ve got in the country. These are hardened criminals. And we’ve got hundreds of thousands of them.
If you take Trump at his word here — and we think you should — the leaders of countries around the world are conspiring to conduct an organized invasion, deploying their criminals to the United States in order to submerge it in violence. On one level, there’s nothing here but racism and xenophobia, but this works on the level of the conspiratorial ideas of mysterious foreign threats to the body politic that have long been part and parcel of the autocrat’s appeal.
Migrants, in this account, aren’t fleeing refugees or people looking for a better life against all odds, but have been mobilized and directed against the U.S., a superhuman and yet subhuman army, “dropped off” by a shadowy cabal of foreign interests who aren’t content merely to sell us cheaper cars and fentanyl precursors.
Just insert “bankers” or “Jews” or “capitalist roaders” or even “globalists” here and you’re on the right track towards understanding what Trump’s trying to do.
Migrant crime
These are the roughest people you’ve ever seen. You know, now we have a new form of crime. I call it Biden migrant crime, but it’s too long. So let’s just call it migrant crime. We have a new category. You know, you have vicious crimes. You have violent crimes. You have all these. Now we have migrant crimes, and they’re rough. They’re rough. And it’s going to double up. And you see what’s happening.
You know, throughout the world right now, I don’t know if you know this. Crime is way, way down. You know why? Because they sent us their criminals. That’s why. It’s true. It’s true. They sent, you know, Venezuela is down 66 percent because they sent us their gang members and their gangsters. They sent us their drug dealers and their murderers. They’re all coming into our country. And Venezuela now, their crime is down 66 percent.
The supposed statistics here are just a “gish gallop,” in which the speaker simply overwhelms the opponent (or in this case the audience) with a flurry of inaccurate statements, knowing that the very attempt to correct them will both derail any reasonable argument and delay a response until the time has run out.
But this, again, is the story of the alien threat, here described as entering at the behest of their domestic collaborator, Joe Biden. It’s a “stab-in-the-back” accusation (there are several in the speech), in which a leader is identified as a secret traitor, betraying the nation to foreign interests.
The truth is that crime rates are down worldwide, and these statistics are pulled out of the air. The fear people have of the loss of control of the border, and of what it means to be “American” is real, however — even if Trump’s helped in its creation — and that’s what he’s playing to so effectively
For ways to think more constructively about immigration, see our discussion with Anat Shenker-Osorio; for some thoughts on the idea of an out-of-control border and how that idea is shaping U.S. politics right now, take a look at our talk with Dexter Filkins.
Bloodbath
Those big monster car manufacturing plants that you’re building in Mexico right now, and you think you’re going to get that, you’re going to not hire Americans, and you’re going to sell the cars to us. No, we’re going to put a 100 percent tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars. If I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole…that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.
When Trump talks here about a “bloodbath,” he may be — as his proxy Steven Cheung claimed — doing it in a section of the speech discussing Chinese and Mexican competition in the auto industry. But that doesn’t do him any favors. His “bloodbath” language for Detroit is framed as just “the least of it” — suggesting that outside of the sphere of the automotive industry, things are likely to be even worse. Even more of a bloodbath? Only Trump can say. Best to leave the big threats somewhat ambiguous and looming in the distance.
In a country like the United States with both highly developed institutions and a hate-fueled authoritarian movement that is giving them the ultimate stress test, Trump is surprisingly deft at purveying a peculiar sort of modern, plausibly deniable fascism.
Considering everything else he has to say in this speech on “migrant crime,” and the notion that other countries are somehow collaborating on a multi-pronged invasion strategy using economic and demographic tools, that’s hardly a defense of this rhetoric. He also returns to his unique ability to fix problems (again, right out of the authoritarian playbook): this is what will happen, inevitably, “if I don’t get elected.”
He also goes on to suggest that he’ll punish imports of imported cars and heavy equipment with tariffs at 100 percent or above. His “theory” on the economic impact of this suggests he understands neither tariff policy or taxation: “And as tariffs on foreign countries go up, taxes on American workers and families will go very substantially down and will bring businesses back to our country because people are going to…they want to avoid paying the tariffs.”
Since the cost of tariffs will be borne by consumers in the form of higher prices, it’s difficult to see how any “bloodbath” — even if it is confined to economic life — could be seen as anything but the result of a self-inflicted wound. Trump, shooting himself in the foot, along with the rest of us.
MAGAnomics
With your vote, we will throw out the Bidenomics and we will reinstate a thing called MAGAnomics.
Crooked Joe Biden and his socialist thugs are looting trillions and trillions of dollars from the American people and giving it to radical left lunatics and friends. But Biden’s reign of plunder and terror stops the day I take the oath of office. The hardworking American taxpayer will once again have a friend and a fighter and a champion in the White House.
Biden’s socialist spending…his socialist spending is really what’s happening, is your Social Security is going to be gone. You know, they don’t say it. They never say it. They will not you will not be able to have Social Security with this guy in office because he’s destroying the economics of our country. And that includes Medicare, by the way. And American seniors are going to be in big trouble. I made a promise that I will always keep Social Security, Medicare. We always will keep it. We won’t be cutting it.
We have liquid gold under the ground. We’ll be drilling like a son of a gun, but we’re leaving your Social Security around. They won’t. And they can’t make that pledge because their economic theory is no good because they’re taking in millions and millions of people in this country and they’re spending, you know.
Trump’s argument here is that Biden is a criminal, looting the Social Security trust fund and threatening Medicare. But it’s also that Democratic “economic theory is no good” — that the real crime here is just plain old government spending. In the same sense that Democratic voter turnout is, by nature, cheating.
The double narrative here — which has been in play for decades on the right — is to divorce faith in popular programs (like Social Security and Medicare) from the nebulous threat of “tax-and-spend liberalism” or “government spending.” Leveling the threat against seniors — high-propensity voters who are dependent on government programs is, here, an angle letting Trump position himself as a protector of the vulnerable. That his actual policies threaten these programs is beside the point.
I know you are, but what am I?
We’re the only ones, and they know this, that can stop them. We’re the only ones. There’s nobody else around. If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country. Does that make sense? I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country.
If we don’t win this election, I don’t think you’re going to have another election or certainly not an election that’s meaningful. And we better get out or we better…I actually say that the date…remember this: November 5th. I believe it’s going to be the most important date in the history of our country. I believe that. This country is weaponizing law enforcement for high-level election interference against Biden’s top political opponent.
Trump depends heavily here, as he always has, on the twin rhetorical strategies of inversion and projection — he takes the accusations and indictments he’s “endured” and turns them on his accusers and prosecutors. It’s a classic schoolyard strategy you may be familiar with as, “I know you are, but what am I?”
And that’s basically what he’s asking here. In the same way that Trump reversed the notion of “fake news,” Trump (the actual author of an insurrection and the one who has refused to recognize election results) is recasting Biden as a dictatorial threat to democracy, as the one who threatens to disrupt elections.
For more on this dynamic, read our interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on the rhetorical tactics of aspiring strongmen.
Resurrecting Operation Wetback
When I’m president of the United States, we will demand justice for Laken. On day one, my administration will terminate every open border policy of the Biden administration. We’ll begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. Larger than that, by far, of Dwight Eisenhower.
This is more than a dog whistle. As a would-be dictator, Trump’s solutions need to be bigger and better, more definitive than anything that’s come before. And that’s pretty much all this statement is good for, though the added benefit of this line of argument is that the policy he recalls here is one of the country’s most draconian, outright racist anti-immigration operations, right down to its name.
Eisenhower’s 1954 Operation Wetback was, of course, notorious for the fact that the dragnet-style strategy scooped up and deported many U.S. citizens. Also it involved grabbing people off the streets and packing them like sardines into trucks. And even so, it didn’t actually make a dent in undocumented migration, since the demand for cheap labor along the southern border was unchanged.
The (sad!) reality is that Trump’s own deportation programs were on a smaller scale than those that were in place during former President Barack Obama’s tenure. It’s not that he alone can fix it; it’s just that this simple self-inflation, with extra racism as a bonus, doesn’t even capture the context of just how off target border policy has been for the last century. One wonders if the audience gets the reference here, but there’s no doubt the speechwriters do.
Blood and honor
One week ago, I met with a family of 22-year-old nursing student. Incredible person, Laken Riley, who was brutally murdered in Georgia last month while out on a morning run. She was so badly beaten up, unrecognizable. Can you believe it? Laken’s killer was set loose into the United States through Joe Biden’s program of releasing military-age males into our communities after they’ve illegally crossed our southern border. And that’s what happened. And this animal came in.
Laken Riley would be alive today if Biden had not unleashed a savage attack on America. And that’s what he’s done. But instead of apologizing to Laken’s family, Joe Biden apologized to the killer for calling him illegal. “I shouldn’t have done that. Oh, oh, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have called him illegal. Oh, I’m so sorry. I’d like to apologize to the killer.” He’s more concerned with the killer. He couldn’t even pronounce her name right.
This is a lie wrapped in a dog whistle. The dog whistle is the mention of Laken Riley (he mentions her by name eight times during the speech, with several other more oblique allusions to her murder). This is an expansion of a strategy used by Trump’s MAGA allies at the State of the Union, where multiple right-wing legislators wore buttons in purported support of justice for Riley.
In another instance of the inversion/projections strategy Trump and MAGA activists have been deploying, they’ve also co-opted the phrase “Say her name,” employed originally by activists working to stop violence against Black women. They even managed to get Biden to do so at the State of the Union (and that’s the reference he makes here).
Yes, Riley’s murderer was undocumented. But there’s actually no relationship between immigration and crime rates (in fact, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Not that it matters for this audience, who know what Trump actually “means” here — it means that he’s fighting for them against alien invaders.
Keeping the border in play
I was saying the other day that, in 2016, one of the biggest issues was the border.
And I sort of won on the border, I guess, maybe. And we fixed the border. We fixed it so good that I couldn’t even use it in 2020, even though we got millions and millions more votes in 2020. But we couldn’t even talk about it. I’d say, “I want to talk about the border. Tell them what a good job.” They said, “Sir, you fixed it. Nobody cares.”
That border was a tiny fraction of what this border is. This is the worst border in the history of the world. There’s never been anything… Millions and millions of people are pouring into our country. Probably 15 or 16 million people. That’s almost larger than any state we have in the union. And they’re coming in from places you don’t want to know about.
A hallmark of the autocrat’s bid for legitimacy is the notion that only he can fix the problems that challenge the nation. Immigration, for Trump, is very clearly among those problems. He also can’t stay away from the Big Lie here; that comes up again and again as a hinge for multiple arguments (or whatever these are).
Here, he’s running on the border crisis he’s busy perpetuating, most obviously by his explicit derailing of Biden’s proposed border deal even after bipartisan negotiators had come to an agreement.
The numbers are an overstatement, as usual, and that’s beside the point. Of course, a few states — including the one Trump lives in now, and the one he long called home — have a lot more than 14 or 15 million residents.
For some thoughts on Trump’s scuttling of the bipartisan border deal and the dysfunction of the divided government, take a look at our interview with Congressman Joaquin Castro.
The party of the working class
With his open border policy, Joe Biden has repeatedly stabbed African-American voters in the back, including by granting millions and millions of work permits taking their jobs. The African-American community, the Hispanic community, are going to be the ones that suffer the most. And you know who else? Unions. Because unions are getting good, solid, high pay. And guess what’s going to happen?
The unions are going to go out. The Teamsters are in trouble. I’m dealing with the Teamsters. They should endorse me. I don’t know if they will or not. I know the Teamsters are going to vote for me. The Teamsters, the real… the Teamsters that do the work. The head Teamsters, Sean and everybody. They’re good men.
They’re good people. And I hope they’re going to endorse Trump. I think it would be nice. It’s been many decades before that’s happened. But if you look at the United Auto Workers, what they’ve done to their people is horrible. They want to do this all-electric nonsense where the cars don’t go far. They cost too much, and they’re all made in…they’re all made in China. And the head of the United Auto Workers never probably shook hands with a Republican before.
Since this passage is built around such a series of leaps of faith, it’s a little difficult to parse. Trump is trying here to appeal to union voters, to Black and Latino voters (imagined as solely working class), and also trying to define one of the major union forces — the Teamsters — as within the MAGA orbit and the UAW as outside it.
The background here is that the UAW (along with the AFL-CIO) has endorsed Biden, while the Teamsters have donated equally to both parties’ convention efforts. The reality is that organized labor understands that both parties need to earn the votes of their members. From the labor movement perspective, the question is not what the unions can offer the political parties, but what the political parties have to offer the unions.
That said, the word salad circles around the Republican Party’s bid to redefine itself as the party of the working class, and in particular the one best poised to represent a multiracial populist working-class coalition against the “elites” — an argument they are making on cultural grounds, not economic ones, aside from protectionism.
For a better take on what the unions are looking for from the Republicans and the Democrats, read our interview with Kim Kelly on the significance of the current labor revival.
Insults
Gavin Newscum. Does anyone ever…Gavin Newscum? S-C-U-M is his last. No, Gavin Newscum. This guy, he’s always talking about, “Oh, California, it’s great.” They’re losing a fortune. People are moving out. I have property there. I love California. One of the most beautiful places. They’re destroying it. They’re destroying California.
My father’s looking down and my mother was such a beautiful woman. And she’s looking down with my father. And she’s saying, “How the hell did our boy get four indictments?” And not only that, all these local cases like Fanny. Funny. It’s spelled “fanny.” It’s spelled “fanny” like your ass, right? Fanny.
And how about this guy? He may end up being a United States senator, right? Shifty Adam Schiff. Think of it. Can you believe it? He may end up being a senator. This is one of the most dishonest human beings.
MSDNC, MSNBC, a bunch of fakes.
And Nancy Pelosi, who’s a major sleaze, by the way, a major sleaze.
Trump’s criticisms of political opponents are expressed mostly as belittling playground insults, a strategy that functions on two levels. First, it dismisses criticism, as if there could never be any legitimate reason for opposition to his benevolent leadership, his faultless actions.
But while the reliance on the insult may appear childish or simply chaotic, ridicule — especially when employed as a tool to throw off legitimate criticism — is a key strategy in authoritarian tactical speech. Just look to Germany, where a part of the far-right AfD’s approach to parliamentary debate has been to derail it altogether with heckling and personal insults against lawmakers.
We have our own home-grown equivalent of this worsening problem. Joe Wilson’s heckling of Obama was a shock in 2009; these days even Marjorie Taylor Greene is simply part of the background noise.
It’s not just style. It’s part of an overall attack on norms, which form the basis of more societal and institutional functions than we commonly acknowledge.
Birtherism at the root
Joe Biden won against Barack Hussein Obama. Has anyone ever heard of him? Barack Hussein Obama. Or as Rush Limbaugh would say, Barack Hussein Obama. He used to scream out the name Hussein. But he…he was…think of this. Just think of this. Every swing state, Biden beat Obama, but every other state he got killed. You think that’s an honest election? I could give you 100 different things.
There’s a lot going on here in this passage, wherein Trump attempts to have his cake and eat it, too, casting Biden — whom he’s excoriated throughout the speech as both a master manipulator and as an incompetent — as the victim of Democratic electoral malfeasance. Trump also returns — again with taunts — to the conspiracy that reanimated his political career in the first place: birtherism, the racist framing of former President Obama as alien interloper (Biden here is a victim; elsewhere in the speech, he’s framed as a collaborator).
On another level, Trump alludes to a theory that only Republican voters really matter. Obama, in this telling, could only prevail in the purely blue states. The “swing states” obviously include fewer committed Democrats, and thus are more legitimate venues.
For more on how Republican rhetoric defines which voters really matter, read our interview with Paul Waldman.
As always, Trump’s reading is…selective at best
I only read polls when they’re good, by the way.
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
This post was originally published on The.Ink.