When Donald Trump declared “I’m a nationalist” on a Houston stage Monday night, he didn’t say the word “white.” He didn’t need to. Racism, xenophobia, and chauvinism are baked in to the term ‘nationalist.’ They don’t even require a dog whistle, because the word itself is a bullhorn.
As the Washington Post reports, Trump has previously flirted with the term, but shied away from the kind of all-out embrace that he employed this week. His open declaration of nationalism just two weeks out from the coming election is not an accident. Trump has previously given white nationalists in the U.S. and elsewhere moments of rapture by mouthing their catchphrases and evoking their causes, but had previously pulled back from embracing the “more troublesome elements of the hard right” including Steve Bannon, Proud Boys, and tiki-torch Nazis.
But now Trump is going there. And it’s not by accident.
Trump has already declared that this election is about “Kavanaugh and the Caravan”—that is, the issues that the Nationalist Party is running on are chauvinism and xenophobia. This is not a secret. As Masha Gessen stated in the rules for living in an autocracy:
Rule #1: Believe the autocrat.
When Trump says he’s an “old-fashioned” nationalist. He means it. When he says this election is about defending the rights of wealthy white men against the threat posed by providing equality to women and people of color, he means that too. That’s exactly the point of his definition of this election. He’s not being coy, or obscure. His statement in Houston was just an extra crack across the skull for the few that might have missed his earlier statements that he was all in on sexism, racism, and the rule of men rather than the rule of law.
The October surprise is just how overt Trump is willing to be in shredding any illusion that what remains of the Republican Party is not the Nationalist Party, discarding any hint of traditional conservative principles in favor of overt fascism.
In a 1993 survey, 24 percent of Americans rated nuclear war as the biggest threat facing the nation. Another 18 percent chose climate change or other environmental threats. But 27 percent declared that nationalism was the largest threat. And those 27 percent are still right a quarter of a century later, because Donald Trump has demonstrated that with nationalism, you actually get all three.
Nationalism isn’t patriotism. It’s not about loving your country. It’s about hating other people. A nationalist like Trump not only isn’t concerned about global conditions, he’s willing to burn down his own house … so long as everyone else goes down with him. For a long time, there has been concern that some obscure dictator, someone like Kim Jong Un, might be crazy enough to start a nuclear war even though it meant certain doom. Donald Trump is exactly that crazy.
By seizing the label of nationalist, and doing it exactly at this moment, Trump is determinedly doing what all those Russian troll farms are also laboring to achieve: widening the fissures that divide America and increasing hatred. Because for nationalists, hatred and enthusiasm are identical.