The Terror of the Unforeseen. Henry Giroux
themselves [through the use of a language] that became an unthinking part of everyday life.98
Under the Trump regime, memories inconvenient to authoritarian rule are now demolished in the domesticated language of superlatives so that the future can be shaped so as to become indifferent to the crimes of the past. Trump’s war on historical memory sets the stage for what O’Gorman calls a “revival of intolerance and, in some cases, literally of fascism” along with “the direct affirmation of Nazi ideology recast in versions of white supremacy.”99 Trump’s unending daily tweets, his recklessness, his adolescent disdain for a measured response, his unfaltering anti-intellectualism, and his utter lack of historical knowledge are well known. For instance, he has talked about the Civil War as if historians have not asked why it took place, while at the same time ignoring the role of slavery in its birth.100 During a Black History Month event, he talked about the great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass as if he were still alive.101 Trump’s ignorance of the past finds it counterpart in his celebration of a history that has enshrined racism, tweeted neo-Nazi messages, and embraced the “blood and soil” of white supremacy.
How else to explain the legacy of white racism and fascism historically inscribed in his signature slogan “Make America Great Again” and his use of the anti-Semitic phrase “America First,” long associated with Nazi sympathizers during World War II?102 How else to explain his support for bringing white supremacists such as Steve Bannon (now resigned), and Jeff Sessions (also resigned), both with a long history of racist comments and actions, into the highest levels of governmental power? Or his retweeting of an anti-Islamic video originally posted by Britain First, a far-right extremist group — an action that was condemned by British Prime Minister, Theresa May?103
It gets worse: Trump created a false equivalence between white supremacist neo-Nazi demonstrators and those who opposed them in Charlottesville, Virginia. In doing so, he argued that there were “very fine people on both sides” as if fine people march with protesters carrying Nazi flags, chanting hateful slogans, and shouting: “We will not be replaced by Jews.” Trump appears to be unable to differentiate “between people who think like Nazis and people who try to stop them from spewing their hate.”104 Speaking to a group of students at the University of Illinois in September 2018, former President Obama called out Trump for his failure to condemn the violence led by white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. As Obama put it: “We’re supposed to stand up to bullies. Not follow them. We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination, and we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up clearly and unequivocally to Nazi sympathizers. How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?”105
Trump has stated without shame that he is a nationalist. For example, in one of his rallies, he urged his base to use the word nationalism stating, “You know…we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I am a nationalist, Okay? I am a nationalist. Nationalist. Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word.” Not only does Trump’s embrace of the term stoke racial fears, it ingratiates him with elements of the hard right, particularly white nationalists. After Trump’s strong appropriation of the term at an October 2018 rally, Steve Bannon in an interview with Josh Robin indicated, “he was very very pleased Trump used the word ‘nationalist.’”106 Trump has drawn praise from a number of white supremacists including David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys—a vile contemporary version of the Nazi Brown Shirts-and more recently by the alleged New Zealand shooter who in his Christchurch manifesto praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”107 Trump’s use of the term is neither innocent nor a clueless faux pas. In the face of a wave of anti-immigration movements across the globe, it has become code for a thinly veiled racism and signifier for racial hatred.
Trump’s lengthy history of racist comments and sympathy for white nationalism and white supremacy offers a clear explanation for his unbroken use of racist language about Mexican immigrants, Muslims, Syrian refugees, and Haitians. It also points to Trump’s use of language as part of a larger political and pedagogical project to “mobilize hatred,” legitimate the discourse of intimidation, and encourage the American public “to unlearn feelings of care and empathy that lead us to help and feel solidarity with others,” as Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes.108
Trump’s nativism and ignorance work well in the United States because they not only cater to what the American historian Brian Klass refers to as “the tens of millions of Americans who have authoritarian or fascist leanings,” they also enable what he calls Trump’s attempt at “mainstreaming fascism.”109 He writes:
Like other despots throughout history, Trump scapegoats minorities and demonizes politically unpopular groups. Trump is racist. He uses his own racism in the service of a divide-and-rule strategy, which is one way that unpopular leaders and dictators maintain power. If you aren’t delivering for the people and you’re not doing what you said you were going to do, then you need to blame somebody else. Trump has a lot of people to blame.110
Trump’s language, especially his endorsement of torture and contempt for international norms, normalizes the unthinkable and points to a return to a past that evokes what Ariel Dorfman has called “memories of terror … parades of hate and aggression by the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and Adolf Hitler’s Freikorps in Germany … executions, torture, imprisonment, persecution, exile, and, yes, book burnings, too.”111 Dorfman also sees in the Trump era echoes of policies carried out under the dictator Pinochet in Chile. According to Dorfman:
Indeed, many of the policies instituted and attitudes displayed in post-coup Chile would prove models for the Trump era: extreme nationalism, an absolute reverence for law and order, the savage deregulation of business and industry, callousness regarding worker safety, the opening of state lands to unfettered resource extraction and exploitation, the proliferation of charter schools, and the militarization of society. To all this must be added one more crucial trait: a raging anti-intellectualism and hatred of “elites” that, in the case of Chile in 1973, led to the burning of books like ours.112
The language of fascism revels in forms of theater that mobilize fear, intolerance, and violence and legitimates authoritarian impulses and further expands the power of the punishing state. Sasha Abramsky makes this point clear in his analysis of Trump’s endorsement of torture, his offering of cathartic violence to his audiences, his declaring “entire races and religions to be the enemy,” and his “interweaving of a host of fears — of immigrants, of Muslims, of domestic crime and criminals, of changing cultural mores, of refugees, of disease — and a host of deeply authoritarian impulses.”113 Abramsky is on target in claiming that Trump’s words amount to more than empty slogans. Instead, his language comes “with consequences, and they legitimize bigotries and hatreds long harbored by many but, for the most part, kept under wraps by the broader society. They give the imprimatur of a major political party to criminal violence.”114 Surely, the increase in hate crimes during Trump’s first year of his presidency testifies to the truth of Abramsky’s argument.
The history of fascism teaches us that language can operate in the service of violence, desperation, and the troubling landscapes of hatred; moreover, it carries the potential for inhabiting the darkest moments of history. By undermining the concepts of truth and credibility, fascist-
oriented language disables the ideological and political vocabularies necessary for a diverse society to embrace shared hopes, responsibilities, and democratic values. Trump’s language — like that of older fascist regimes — mutilates contemporary politics, empathy, and serious moral and political criticism, and makes it more difficult to criticize dominant relations of power. Trump’s language not only produces a litany of falsehoods, fears, and poisonous attacks on those deemed disposable, it also works hard to prevent people from having an internal dialogue with themselves and others, reducing self-reflection and the ability to question or judge to a scorned and discredited practice.
Trump’s fascistic language also fuels the rhetoric of war, a toxic masculinity, white supremacy, anti-intellectualism, and racism. Pathological “levels of hubris, demagoguery, and megalomania” are all present in his discourse, suggesting that the Trump administration marks a destructive moment in American history.115 What was once an anxious discourse about what Harvey Kaye calls the “possible