Apparently someone on staff or on Donald Trump's television programs got it through his thick head that being the instigator of a new American fascist moment is one line crossed too many, and so now Trump is attempting, barely, to distance himself from a crowd that chanted, "Send her back!" at a rally he held yesterday in North Carolina as he again blasted, at length, American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
Asked by reporters in the Oval Office this morning why he did not attempt to stop his supporters' racist chanting, Trump claimed, "I think I did. I started speaking very quickly." He also offered, "I was not happy with it. I disagree with it."
There is video of the moment, and it shows that he is lying. Trump backed away from the microphone as the chant began; he in fact delayed speaking his next lines while the volume of the chant built up. When he resumed his speech, he continued to attack Omar.
Trump's claim that he was "not happy" with the crowd's convulsion of racist nationalism—one that only came after Trump had harangued them with an extended, pre-written attack on Omar and her alleged anti-Americanism—may seem familiar, because it is the same thin defense Trump used to deflect blame for the "Lock her up!" chants against Hillary Clinton that soon after came to define his campaign. He followed up that expression of disapproval by making the chants a staple of his future rallies, soon adopting both the sentiment and the phrase himself.
So this is all part of the usual pattern. As the better parts of America recoil from what looked, to many, like a bargain-bin Nuremberg rally, Trump attempts to detach himself from the consequences of his own rhetoric with a vague noise of disapproval. As reviews from his white nationalist base come in and as Republican lawmakers jump, reliably, to defend him from even this, he will soon be convinced that the new expression of open white nationalist fervor is in fact rallying Americans to his side and will seek to repeat the spectacle. And then he himself will double down. He has already tweeted that Omar and other of his American opponents should "go home"; expect him to escalate further. Republicans are making it clear that they will exact no price for any of this.
We are in a new dangerous moment built on top of a hundred previous dangerous moments. Rep. Omar is getting death threats; a self-absorbed and self-promoting national leader is stoking an aggrieved, openly racist new nationalism for his personal entertainment and political gain. Trump has inadvertently or intentionally stumbled into each of the core planks of fascism, one by one, and as he adopts each, the Republican Party, and Republican lawmakers, shift their own declarations and demands to mirror and expand upon his.
