by Matt Taibbi
Donald Trump gave a Veterans’ Day speech late last year, with a provocative quote. “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” he said, adding that these vermin “lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
Instant Scanners-style displays of exploding-media-heads ensued:
“Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini,” wrote the Washington Post in a typical treatment. Added NPR: Why Trump’s authoritarian language about ‘vermin’ matters. After Calling Foes ‘Vermin,’ Trump Campaign Warns Its Critics Will Be ‘Crushed’ was the New York Times take, in a bit of a double-whammy (stay tuned to this space to see why). “It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk” from the New Republic and “Trump Compares Political Foes To ‘Vermin’ On Veterans Day—Echoing Nazi Propaganda” from Forbes were also much circulated.
Within a day, Biden spokesperson Ammar Moussa put out a statement:
On a weekend when most Americans were honoring our nation’s heroes, Donald Trump parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — two dictators many U.S. veterans gave their lives fighting, in order to defeat exactly the kind of un-American ideas Trump now champions.
The Biden campaign recommended a number of the headlines above as well. Old friend Adam Schiff got into the act in an interview with former White House spokesperson Jen Psaki on MSNBC, or White House TV, or whatever it’s called now. The clip below is worth a full watch because Psaki feeds Schiff the “Mussolini and Hitler” line, and though he takes a while, Schiff eventually feeds it back to her. In these canned outrage displays it’s seldom possible to tell who’s creating the content and who’s repeating it. The catch-phrases tossed back and forth between pols and media are like children wandering cult compounds: they don’t have one set of parents, but belong to everyone.
Calling one’s political enemies “vermin” would be a great sin indeed to pin on Trump, in the context of the last century of genocides, except for one thing, as the increasingly invaluable Matt Orfalea points out: the man’s own critics beat him to it. Orf’s “Rats!” compilation shows the years of Trump-as-rat and Republicans-as-treasonous-rats rhetoric that preceded this recent freakout. Rats are a great subject for illustrators and wordsmiths alike, and Trump critics went all-out with the imagery previously, and rightly so, since only a crazy person would take offense at this sort of thing. Of course, we have a lot of crazy people.
What the “vermin” episode really shows is that in the age of the coordinated media campaign, big deals can be made of anything. Also: you can probably find a way to compare almost any speech to Hitler or Mussolini, if you’re willing to be a dink about word usage. As Orf notes, MSNBC and Rachel Maddow were still hitting this theme as late as January, while CNN was calling for Trump, like a vermin, to be “destroyed.” This is tremendous mileage to get from your own invented controversy. All hail hypocrisy!
The Democ–Rat Party get lower and lower
Should have stuck with unbiased reporting.
Instead, they towed the leftist, Democrat, agenda and ran interference for socialist activism, while trashing anyone who even remotely opposed the lies and propaganda being dished out.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, suckers.
Have fun competing with vagrants and illegals for welfare, fools.
Of course, there is another difference between the targets of destruction. Trump, Republicans and Trump’s supporters have done nothing wrong. Well, nothing other than support Trump, a capital offense, apparently. But the “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs” have been behind and involved in most of the political violence that has occurred in the country over the past 20 years.