The Terror of the Unforeseen. Henry Giroux
deserve accountability and respect,” he spent ample airtime equating undocumented immigrants with the criminal gang MS-13, regardless of the fact that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens do. As Juan Cole points out, “Americans murdered 17,250 other Americans in 2016. Almost none of the perpetrators was an undocumented worker, contrary to the impression Trump gave.”43 According to Cole, “Where the race of the perpetrator was known in 2016, about 30 percent were white and 36 percent were black; less than two percent were known to be of another ethnicity. However, Trump foregrounded murders by immigrants. Homicide tracks pretty closely with poverty, not with race.”44 For Trump, as with most demagogues, fear is the most valued currency of politics. Moreover, he delivered it in spades, suggesting that the visa lottery system and “chain migration” — in which individuals can migrate through the sponsorship of their family — pose a threat to America and “present risks we can just no longer afford.” He suggested even DREAMERS were part of a culture of criminality and in a not too subtle expression of derision stated “Americans are dreamers too.” White nationalists such as Richard Spencer and David Duke cheered Trump’s remark. This was one of many gestures well-suited to his white nationalist base.
Trump proudly declared that he was not going to close Guantánamo and once again argued “terrorists should be treated like terrorists.” The ruthless policy of “extraordinary rendition” and torture, rather than being seen as war crimes, fan the paranoia, nihilist passions, and apocalyptic populism that feed his base. Pointing to menacing enemies all around the world, Trump argued for expanding the nuclear arsenal and the military budget. He also called on “the Congress to empower every Cabinet secretary with the authority to reward good workers — and to remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people” — in other words, to rid the federal workforce of those who disagree with him, allowing him to fill civil service jobs with friends, families, cronies, and sycophants.
His insistence on “loyalty” instills fear in those he appoints to government positions if they dare to hold power accountable. This is what happens when democracies turn into fascist states. As Jacob Levy points out:
[Trump’s call] on Congress to allow Cabinet officials … to fire civil servants on grounds of political disagreement, ending the century-old rule of a professional and apolitical civil service that stays on as political appointees come and go. This is of a piece with the months-long rhetorical assault on the so-called “deep state” by Trump and the Trumpist media. Maybe there will be no such legislation. But Trump saying it matters. House Speaker Paul Ryan echoing the call for a “purge” at the FBI matters. Fox News’s constant public delegitimation of the civil service matters. It matters in particular for the Russia investigation, of course. Trump means to push out anyone who isn’t on “his team” in a way that the FBI and the Department of Justice are really not supposed to be, and that process is underway in front of our eyes. But it also matters more broadly for the character of the American state and bureaucracy. By discouraging professionals and encouraging politicization, Trump is already changing the civil service by his speech.45
None of this is entirely unexpected. As Michael Tomasky puts it, “Honestly, who couldn’t have imagined any of this? To anyone who had the right read on Trump’s personality — the vanity, the insecurity, the contempt for knowledge, the addiction to chaos — nothing that’s happened has been surprising in the least.”46 Nevertheless, Trump is worse than almost anyone imagined: he is not only the enemy of democracy, he is symptomatic of the powerful political, economic, and cultural forces shaping this new American fascism.
Roger Cohen, writing for The New York Times, argues that Trump has so degraded and soiled public discourse that people have become numb and exhausted. How else to explain the sycophantic posturing of the mainstream press and much of the American public in the face of Trump’s racist State of the Union Address? As Cohen observes:
Many commentators swooned. It was enough that Trump did not go on walkabout. For NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, “It was optimistic; it was bright; it was conciliatory.” Frank Luntz, a respected Republican pollster, thought that only one word qualified: “Wow.” He tweeted that the speech was a “brilliant mix of numbers and stories, humility and aggressiveness, traditional conservatism and political populism.” Jake Tapper of CNN discerned “beautiful prose.” Even the Washington Post saw “A Call for Bipartisanship” (its initial Page One headline) lurking somewhere. Three in four American viewers approved of the speech, according to a CBS News poll.47
There are some critics who claim that Trump is simply a weak president whose ineptness is being countered by “a robust democratic culture and set of institutions” and not much more than a passing moment in history.48 Others, such as Wendy Brown and Nancy Fraser, view him as an authoritarian expression of right-wing populism and an outgrowth of neoliberal politics and policies,49 while historians such as Timothy Snyder and Robert O. Paxton analyze him in terms that echo some elements of a fascist past. Some conservatives such as David Frum view him as a mix between a modern day, self-obsessed, emotionally needy narcissist and demagogue whose assault on democracy needs to be taken seriously and asserts that whether or not he is a fascist is not as important as what he plans to do with his power. For Frum, there is a real danger that people will retreat into their private worlds, become cynical, and enable our collective slide into a form of tyranny that would then become difficult to defeat.50
Corey Robin argues that we overstep a theoretical boundary when comparing Trump directly to Hitler. According to Robin, in comparing Trump to Hitler or the policies of the Third Reich, we not only exaggerate the threat that Trump poses to the values and institutions of democracy but overestimate the growing threat of authoritarianism in the United States. For Robin, Trump has failed to institute many of his policies, and thus is just a weak politician with little actual power. He contends that George W. Bush’s policy decisions were far worse than anything we have seen in Trump’s emerging administration and concludes that while Trump talks like an authoritarian, he never really gets what he wants. Jacob Levy sums up Robin’s argument, “A year later, we’re still in NAFTA and NATO, there haven’t been mass deportations, Hillary Clinton hasn’t been thrown in jail, the separation of powers is intact, and so on. Just ignore his words.”51
But words matter. They matter because they not only provide the ideological and affective scaffolding for policies but also because they function as pedagogical tools to define social relations, mobilize desires, create modes of identification, and shape one’s relationship to others and the larger world. Thus, Trump’s racist language has enabled the rise and increasing normalization of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and a surge of white nationalism. His rhetorical attacks on the critical press, journalists, and others who criticize him send a chill through American society and undermine the foundations of dissent. His verbal attacks on undocumented immigrants and Muslims enable and encourage the proliferation of hate crimes. His impetuous insults aimed at allies work to undo the liberal international order. His praise for the uber-rich and corporate elite breathes new life into a criminogenic casino capitalism.52 As Hannah Arendt has argued, language is a form of action, and that action is often pedagogical. Trump’s discourse makes clear that education is at the heart of politics; it carries the weight of weapons forged in the realm of the symbolic and pedagogical, and changes how people see things, how they invest in themselves and others.
As Jeffrey C. Isaac notes, whether Trump is a direct replica of the Nazi regime has little relevance; more important is the threat he poses to the DACA children and their families, to poor, undocumented immigrants, and a range of others.53 The oppressive and regressive policies already put into place by the Trump administration — the expansion of the military-industrial complex, the elimination of Obamacare’s individual mandate, the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and a range of deregulations that will impact negatively on the environment for years to come — will have long-term effects on United States and the world. As Richard J. Evans has noted, “Violence indeed was at the heart of the Nazi enterprise,” and “Every democracy that perishes dies in a different way, because every democracy is situated in specific historical circumstances.”54 Our circumstances include the threat of a nuclear war, the disappearance of health care for the most vulnerable, the attack on free speech and the media, the rise of the punishing state and the increasing criminalization of social