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tl;dr: FYI, Trump has evolved from the 2016 guy who said the Nazis at Charlottesville should be "condemned totally." He's now personally in favor of mass state killings if they're the most expedient way to do ethnic cleansing.
EDIT: Now that I can see the net karma on the "I hope you're right" comment, I've reconsidered whether winning this argument would be in my interests. I'm invoking Godwin's Law on myself to declare that I've lost and the thread is over. Nobody is, shall be, or ever has been, a Nazi.
There’s a Holocaust happening in China today. The Uyghurs, an ethnic group that includes, or included, 11 million people in China, are being rounded up arbitrarily and sent to “re-education camps,” where they are often killed or forcibly sterilized. More than a million, we think, are in camps now.
I used to believe that if anything on the scale of the Nazi Holocaust were to start up today, the rest of the world would rapidly respond and put an end to it. As a kid, I imagined enlisting. But China is too strong. Our leaders get away with not responding, because China simply denies everything. Sometimes with only the thinnest veneer of plausibility, like when they claimed to end the involuntary harvesting of prisoners’ organs, but the number of organ transplants kept rising steadily.
Joe Biden is not responding appropriately to this atrocity out of pragmatism, cowardice, or weakness. Maybe Kamala Harris will be different; we can at least hope.
But this started in 2017. Donald Trump did not respond appropriately either, because he approves of China’s actions.
Here’s Trump’s National Security Advisor at the time:
His administration felt differently, but there wasn’t much they could do. Mike Pompeo officially condemned the Uyghur genocide on his last day as Secretary of State, now that Trump couldn’t fire him. They also got him to sign a bill (co-sponsored by Harris) that sanctioned some Chinese officials for the ongoing atrocity.
Since then, people working for Trump have continued to condemn the genocide, and made pledges in his name to end it if he’s elected. But Trump himself has, as far as I can find, still declined to. In 2022, interviewers asked him whether he agreed with his staff, and he responded “I’d rather not say at the moment.” During his 2024 campaign, he’s said that Xi would be his first call as President, but he would not include human rights in his agenda for the call—in fact, one of his demands would be for them to increase the number of state executions for nonviolent offenses.
This is a consistent principle of his. Here’s President Trump excusing the massacres of Kurds on the Turkish border:
He’s going to try to do the same thing here in America.
Ever since being voted out of office, Trump’s language about immigration has shifted more and more towards the language of ethnic cleansing. He regularly tells crowds that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” There are about 15 or 16 million people here who shouldn’t be, he says, so “we got a lot of work to do.” More recently, he’s made it explicit that when he says “blood,” he means “genes.” It’s not a dog whistle, it’s not a gaffe, it’s not a malicious misreading of his ramblings.
This is identical to Nazi rhetoric. This is as harsh as Hitler was ever willing to be in his campaign speeches. He didn’t say he was going to round up the people poisoning his country’s blood and kill them. He said that he was going to deport them. Even once in power, when his government shifted policy toward extermination, they never admitted it.
A second Trump presidency will detain people suspected of being illegal immigrants, including those retroactively made “illegal,” and won’t be transparent about what happens next. How many of them survive detention will depend on logistics, on whether his new staff quietly rebels, and on how earnestly Trump tries to ensure that his preferred way of dealing with detainees is actually implemented. There are lots of ways this could end up not being a mass state murder. But “Trump disapproves of mass state murders” isn’t one of them.
(He wants pogroms, too. Just put people in charge who will look the other way, he says, and the problem will be solved immediately.)
I don’t think Trump started his political career as a Nazi. In 2017, he famously tried to have it both ways, saying of a rally led by white supremacists and containing avowed Nazis that it included some “very fine people,” but that the Nazis of course should be “condemned totally.” I think he just didn’t care one way or the other, and so was calibrating his remarks so that anyone could persuade themselves he agreed with them. Doing the politician thing, except most politicians don’t do that when it’s Nazis.
But in office, Trump got to know, and came to respect, Xi, and Erdogan, and Putin. His own attempts at mass deportation and building a wall were largely ineffective. But those guys. They knew how to get things done.
And now, after four years out of office, he’s rhetorically committed to the idea that there are millions of people here who shouldn’t be, because of their evil natures and evil genes. Now, all he’s willing to say against Nazis is that he’s never read Mein Kampf.
His Republican Party is, I believe and hope, not a Nazi party. As an institution, it’s not what the Nazi party was in the 1930s, just badly off-kilter. But Trump himself is a Nazi now. He doesn’t call himself that. But then, the Nazis didn’t use that word for themselves either.
For most of the past four years, I’ve tuned him out. I thought I knew everything I needed to know about him. Maybe you have too. But we were wrong—something has changed. People have been crying wolf for so long about Republicans being Nazis that now we just tune it out. Newspapers scared of looking like tabloids resort to headlines about “a fascination with genes and bloodlines.” So I missed it, and most people are still missing it.
Sources https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ChinaTribunal_JUDGMENT_1stMarch_2020.pdf https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-refused-to-say-whether-china-was-abusing-uyghurs-2022-4 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/elections-2024-trump-xi-us-presidential-call-09232024232901.html https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1184897777941307392 (video) https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-bad-genes-immigrants-hugh-hewitt-rcna174456 https://archive.is/nwOXF
Are you saying that nobody can ever again organise large-scale deportations of illegal immigrants because Hitler once used it as an excuse 80 years ago? Or that they can only do it if their arguments are purely economic and make it clear at all times that they love and approve of immigrants & hate Nazis and Xi?
(And of course everyone will take these professions at face value and not at all accuse him/her of being a secret Nazi trying to sound harmless.)
Other than mass amnesty, what is your proposed policy?
Kind of the second one? I'm saying we should have a firm ethical principle that we never authorize putting large numbers of people at the mercy of the state unless we're confident that all of the relevant decision-makers prefer positive outcomes for those people, either inherently or via incentives. (To me that's a core American value.) And, as a special case of that, that because of what Hitler did and said, we should treat any willingness to speak like Hitler and court the pro-ethnic-cleansing vote as disqualifying. I'm not saying that anyone should be able to veto any policy or politician by accusing a politician of being secretly Hitler (everyone I've ever voted for has had a non-zero chance of being secretly Hitler), but yes I do think somebody proposing retroactive illegalization and mass deportation should have to spend a lot of time credibly signaling that they're not secretly Hitler, enough that 50%+1 of voters believe them. Trump is more focused right now on signaling that he is, if anything. His response to being called a fascist by his ex-Chief of Staff was to call him a lying degenerate, not even to rotely say "I believe in freedom and compassion" as used to be the bare minimum standard for running for elected office.
What's your position on the current crisis taking place in Palestine? If you're really concerned about ethnic cleansing and minorities being rounded up into concentration camps there's a much more motivated effort taking place over there with Harris/Biden's full support. If you're seriously concerned about these issues then you're also going to have to take a firm stand against the left as well.
Discussed elsewhere in this thread.
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Thank you for giving a serious and clear answer (to both posts). I respect your conviction, but I think that there is no realistic chance of Not-Hitler satisfying your conditions.
The only positive outcome for these people is being allowed to stay where they are; they know it and we know it. That’s why the destroy all of their original documentation. So anyone who can credibly promise to deport people is going to be someone for whom positive outcomes for natives ultimately trumps (ha) positive outcomes for immigrants.
I’m fine with this, but it depends on where you set the bar for credible. As far as I’m concerned, all modern Western first world societies (including Trump’s America) hit this bar by default. Note that China isn’t deporting anyone, they’re dealing very harshly with a permanent population, which I would expect to encourage more cruelty rather than less. Once you deport people you don’t have to worry about their future behaviour.
Personally, I don’t believe that Trump is secretly Hitler.
This is just standard politics. Saying “I believe in freedom and compassion” makes you sound like Hitler being mealy-mouthed. Being made to recite slogans is a standard feature of any show trial because it’s humiliating and it makes you look guilty. Calling your accuser a liar is the better look, regardless of your political inclinations.
Por qué no los dos? I agree that Trump can no longer manage to say anything anti-Hitler that sounds strong and sincere, or emphasize part of his platform that is blatantly un-Nazi, that's kind of the point.
I'm saying that for twenty years now right-wingers have gone up on platforms and said variations on, "I think maybe the immigration rate should be a little lower. I don't dislike immigrants, I'm not Hitler, I have immigrant friends please don't hurt me". It's a humiliation ritual that doesn't stop people calling them Nazis and makes them look pathetic. Raw politics is about impressions a lot of the time, and repudiating views you genuinely don't hold looks bad. It looks defensive and makes you dance on other people's strings.
In short, even though Trump is not a Nazi and has a platform that is definitely un-Nazi, it is not a good political move for him to spend time repudiating Nazi accusations.
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As an existence proof that you can be a pro-freedom and pro-compassion right-wing opposition leader and not sound weak and performative, have some Churchill.
I'm sorry, did you just refer to Winston Churchill as pro-compassion? Churchill the same guy whose inaction during the Bengal famine probably caused millions of additional deaths, and who stated that any relief efforts sent to India would accomplish little to nothing, as Indians were "breeding like rabbits"?
On Native Americans and aboriginals:
On migration to the UK:
On Arabs:
On the Chinese:
More on the Chinese:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Winston_Churchill
The fact that you're arguing "Trump comes off as so racist and cruel - he should be more like Churchill" leads me to wonder if this entire thread is just an elaborate troll. Or if you're really just that historically illiterate.
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This implies we should never go to war, even defensively.
We should never fight a war wherein our leaders want the enemy dead as a terminal goal, only as a regrettable instrumental one.
I don't think the rightness or wrongness of an action can be determined solely on the basis of which moods are missing.
Alternatively:
Followed by literally zero difference in the military strategy and tactics the IDF pursue.
I think you're putting far too much stock in the (intrinsically unknowable) motivations and psychological states of political leaders, as opposed to the actual actions they undertake. You seem to be saying that a just war, conducted with humility, a clearly defined goal and taking care (insofar as is practicable) to minimize civilian casualties is wrong if the people behind it are pursuing the destruction of their enemy as a terminal goal; whereas a brutal, bloodthirsty war, with no clearly defined end state, in which war crimes are a commonplace, and displaying utter callousness towards collateral damage - such a war could be a-ok in your book, provided the leaders make the right noises about the military action being "regrettable". (I leave it up to you to decide whether Israel's military action in Gaza is better described by the latter or former.) It's politics of the symbolic, again.
Not quite. I'm saying that it's wrong to support a war you expect to be brutal, bloodthirsty, etc. and that one of the fallible-but-important heuristics feeding into that is if the people who would be leading it are saying brutal and bloodthirsty things. Also that "vibes" are the main thing that determine whether your occupying armies so kind they inspire cults praying for their return or whether they tend to massacre civilians in their downtime. But yes I only care about vibes to the extent that they're predictors or causes of actions.
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Putting aside our inability to read minds, if they conduct the war the same way the latter speech does seem preferable to the former. Rage and hate are pretty unpalatable in anyone not already firmly on your team.
No they aren't.
Remember Scott's article about not sounding like a robot. Refusing to express rage when you've been grievously wronged makes you sound like a robot and reduces sympathy for you.
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Per my earlier comment, the Biden administration repatriated as many or more immigrants than the Trump administration. By any objective measure, Biden has done as much or more to promote "ethnic cleansing" in the last four years than Trump did in the four years prior. But that's okay says you, because while Biden's actions may have promoted ethnic cleansing, he wasn't "speaking like Hitler" while doing it. He refused to "court" the pro-ethnic-cleansing vote in his speeches or public statements - he merely gave them a significant chunk of the policy package they wanted.
This is politics of the symbolic from top to bottom. You can do whatever you want as President, as long as you're "nice" and "civil" about it, and don't remind people (even inadvertently) of old Adolf.
I'm not sure how to democracy if I can't use "this politician seems like he might do X" to inform my voting decisions. I disapprove of the deportations under Biden, but I mostly attribute them to weakness, not ideology. This ultimately matters, because, again, I don't want the state to kill millions of people due to a very well-known failure mode of ideology. And I don't trust anybody who's unusually willing to tapdance on the edge of that cliff, because even if they don't end up falling, they're betraying a fundamental lack of moral center.
When Trump ran in 2016, I was mainly worried that he was shifting the Overton Window and otherwise laying the groundwork for the next President like him to be significantly worse. Give or take the Grover Cleveland of it all, this is basically still what I'm afraid of.
Of course you can and should use "this politician might do X" to inform your voting decisions. I'm just countenancing you that you ought to consider the fact that Trump has already been in office for four years and nothing remotely like the sequence of events you're describing transpired.
How convenient, that whenever Republicans do something one disapproves of it's because they're moral mutants, but whenever Democrats do something one disapproves of (up to and including literally the same thing you were just criticising Republicans for) it's because their hands were forced. It couldn't possibly be that Biden (who co-authored the 1986 bill introducing sentencing disparities for crack vs. cocaine, widely criticised as racist; and who once eulogized a former Exalted Cyclops in the KKK) is more racist than he presents himself, or that spending 8 years as VP for a President who got elected on an anti-immigration platform might have rubbed off on him? No, perish the thought.
Fundamental attribution error in a nutshell. Out of curiosity, is there anything a Democrat President has done which you disapprove of and which you believe represents a moral failing on their part?
All of the negative things I've attributed to Biden are ones I see as (partly) moral failings, as well as the big one where he insisted on running for re-election, and still hasn't stepped down from his office, despite being increasingly incapable of performing his duties, out of what seems to be selfish pride. And yes, totally agree that he's at least historically been racist. Most of the immigration policies I hate were put into place under Bill Clinton, and I think that's at best him callously sacrificing people he didn't need to sacrifice in pursuit of largely imaginary gains. I could definitely go on.
I don't know, I feel like I probably don't need to be in this thread anymore since Harris and Trump seem to be making basically the same case as their joint closing argument. I guess I am curious to hear your account(s) of why A: lifelong/devout Republicans who have worked with Trump closely seem to be making the same attribution error as I am, despite coming from completely different biases, and B: why Trump can talk about the degenerate traitors saying he likes concentration camps all day and never get around to saying "concentration camps are bad."
I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you're asking me by questions A and B.
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