Before we get to that, let’s just record what he wrote and said. On Saturday at 10:25 a.m., he posted on Truth Social:
“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”
Then, at a rally in New Hampshire later that day, he repeated those words essentially verbatim—promising to “root out ... the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”—and then doubled down on it:
“The real threat is not from the radical right, the real threat is from the radical left, and it’s growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”
(1942) “Nature is cruel; therefore we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?”
Sources: Adolf Hitler, quoted in Hitler, by Joachim Fest, Vintage Books Edition, 1974, p. 679-680; Yad Vashem www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...
Trump, let us clarify, does not mean Jews. He means some Jews—the ones who aren’t for him, which come to think of it is most Jews. And by the way, to drop that rhetorical bomb at this time, when antisemitism is raging across the country because of what’s happening in the Middle East, is especially outrageous. But Trump’s vermin are not a racial category. No, Trump’s rats are a much broader category, and in that sense an even more dangerous one—he means whoever manages to offend him while exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to register dissent and to criticize him.
newrepublic.com/...
Characterizing people as vermin has historically been a precursor to murder and genocide. The Nazis built on centuries-old hatred of Jews as carriers of disease in a film titled “Der Ewige Jude,” or “The Eternal Jew.” As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum notes on its website, in a section helpfully titled “Defining the Enemy:” “One of the film’s most notorious sequences compares Jews to rats that carry contagion, flood the continent, and devour precious resources.” forward.com/...
Former President Donald J. Trump, on a day set aside to celebrate those who have defended the United States in uniform, promised to honor veterans in part by assailing what he portrayed as America’s greatest foe: the political left.
Using incendiary and dehumanizing language to refer to his opponents, Mr. Trump vowed to “root out” what he called “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
www.nytimes.com/...
