Donald Trump’s fascist quest for power is steeped in age-old antisemitic & xenophobic tropes

What very likely could have come out of the mouths of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini in their representation of Jews, Donald Trump spewed out at a recent campaign rally:

“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 that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

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Ever the self-avowed victim, Trump shouted, “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”

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Trump went on to argue that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

Trump then asserted that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

“Vermin” as an antisemitic and xenophobic trope

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” -Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis.”

On a usual day in Germany in 1940, Jewish people discovered upon waking that they had been changed in the public’s mind into filthy and diseased vermin as represented by their government in the Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew).

Presented as a documentary, this antisemitic film, directed by Fritz Hippler and narrated by German actor Harry Giese, was conceived and produced by Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda and Education.

The film included scenes of people in the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos with stereotypical Jewish feature like large noses, bulbous, cunning eyes, receding foreheads, and men with long dark bushy beards.

The Nazis’ purpose in producing and widely circulating The Eternal Jew was to frighten and turn the so-called “Aryan” German population even further against their Jewish neighbors.

The film depicts Jews as race polluters and destroyers of German culture and economy. It falsely charged that 47% of robberies were conducted by Jews and said 98% of prostitutes were Jewish. The narrator argues: “The Jews are only 1% of the population, but they know how to terrorize a great, tolerant nation by controlling finance, the arts, education, and the media.”

It portrays the Jews of Poland as corrupt, filthy, lazy, ugly, and perverse, as an alien people bent on world domination by manipulating and co-opting international systems of banking and commerce.

“Blood” and “disease” as antisemitic and xenophobic tropes

Trump’s argument that undocumented immigrants (“aliens”) are “poisoning the blood of our country” continues his want-to-be strongman reverberations of failed fascist dictators.

“Where rats appear,” announced the narrator of Der ewige Jude, “they bring ruin by destroying mankind’s goods and foodstuffs. In this way, they spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, and so on. They are cunning, cowardly, and cruel and are found mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an insidious, underground destruction – just like the Jews among human beings.”

Der ewige Jude ends with Hitler’s notorious speech to the German Parliament (Reichstag) on January 30, 1939: “If international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war,” shouted the dictator, “then the result will not be the…victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

The film further intensified the harassment and violence directed against the Jewish people in Germany and throughout the Nazi realm. Mobs continued to torch Jewish businesses and places of worship. They grabbed Jewish men on the street and forcefully cut or painfully plucked out their beards, scrawled graffiti on their structures, and engaged in other forms of public humiliation. The German “Aryans” had the safety to do so under direct government sanction.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has thrown his hat into the U.S. Democratic presidential sweepstakes, has also fallen face-first into the conspiratorial muck for which he is now famous. At a recent dinner in New York City, he was recorded asserting that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain ethnic groups while sparing Ashkenazi (central and eastern European) Jews and Chinese people.

“COVID-19. There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he continued, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact.”

Kennedy, Jr. added to the perennial cycle of antisemitic tropes that Jews traffic in death and the spreading of disease.

A 13th-century law, for example, purported the idea that Jews were diseased and less than human by explicitly stating that Christians who had sex with Jews were the same as Christians who had sex with animals.

During the Middle Ages, Christians characterized Jews as having tails concealed beneath their garments and a peculiar smell. This led to reports that they were in the service of the devil, and actually that the Devil was their father.

The Judensau, an anti-Jewish motif that was used in medieval texts and even carved on several churches in Central Europe, depicted a Jew sexually entwined with a pig, sucking the sow’s udder and eating and drinking its excrement.

The ravages of the Black Death throughout Europe, which wiped out an estimated one-fourth to one-half of the population in the 12th and 13th centuries was also blamed on Jews, who were accused of poisoning drinking wells.

Christians charged Jews with transmitting other diseases as well, most notably syphilis, which they referred to as “the Jewish disease” throughout Europe in the 19th century, even though the incidence of syphilis within the Jewish community had been no higher than in the larger population.

Medical literature of the time alleged that syphilis was spread to newly circumcised Jewish infants through the practice of metzitzah b’peh, the sucking of the penis by the mohel (the ritual circumciser) to stop bleeding. This became not only a marker of “perversion” but also a sign of the Jewish transmission of disease.

Ironically (or paradoxically), a Jewish doctor, bacteriologist, and hygienist, August Paul von Wassermann, developed the first blood antibody test for syphilis and the first nontreponemal test (NTT) category in 1906, thereby advancing the scientific method in detecting and eventually eradicating diseases.

A crucial point in the psychology of stereotyping and scapegoating is the representation of minoritized groups as, in historian John Boswell’s words, “animals bent on the destruction of the children of the majority.” Dominant groups have long alleged that Jews acted as dangerous predators of young people.

In 1144 began the so-called “Blood Libel” in England, when Christian leaders accused Jews of slaying William of Norwich, a Christian male child, to use his blood in the making of the sacred Jewish matzo.

Many Christians believed that Jews used the blood of Christian youth because it was virginal and innocent and therefore was the most potent medication to heal hemorrhoids, to relieve pain during circumcision, to increase fertility, and to cure the so-called “stink of the Jews.”

They also connected their claim to the assertion by Christian leaders that Jewish men were feminized and that they menstruate because they practice circumcision, concluding that Jewish men and women need the blood from Christian youth to replenish their bodies of the blood lost during menstruation.

In 1475, Simon of Trent in Northern Italy, the son of a tanner and barely three years old, was allegedly killed by the Jews for his blood. Christians also accused Jews of slaughtering Christian male youth because they wanted to symbolically re-execute Jesus.

In Trent, local leaders falsely indicted several Jews for Simon’s death, and they killed Jews in the area. Christian clergy have also accused Jews of inflicting circumcision on Christian infants as a means of inflicting involuntary conversion to Judaism (“recruitment”). The charge of ritual murder continued into the 20th century.

The Great Replacement Theory

The Great Replacement Theory has its origins in Europe. The reiteration is a racist trope that dates back to Reconstruction in the United States. Replacement ideology holds that a hidden hand (often imagined as Jewish) is encouraging the invasion of nonwhite immigrants and the rise of nonwhite citizens to take power from white Christian people of European stock.

When white supremacists marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”

The shooter of the horrific murders at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 parishioners and wounded 6 others, including four police officers, blamed Jews for bringing in an invasion of nonwhite immigrants to the United States who would supposedly diminish and slaughter the white race.

“The Washington establishment and the financial and media corporations that fund it exist for only one reason: to protect and enrich itself,” stated Donald Trump in his rally speech in West Palm Beach, Florida on October 14, 2016.

He continued: “For those who control the levers of power in Washington, and for the global special interests…[i]t’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities… This is a conspiracy against you, the American people, and we cannot let this happen or continue. This is our moment of reckoning as a society and as a civilization itself.”

Trump certainly has no general grasp of history, but he definitely understands how to use the propaganda of fascism to sway public opinion.

While his wife, Melania, finally admitted to plagiarizing the words of Michelle Obama in her speech before the delegates at the Republican National Convention in the summer of 2016, Donald will never admit to lifting sentiments and words verbatim from the notorious antisemitic Protocols (Minutes) of a Meeting of the Learned Elders of Zion.

The scapegoat

A stereotype is an oversimplified, preconceived, and standardized conception, opinion, affective attitude, judgment, or image of a person or group held in common by members of other groups. Originally referring to the process of making type from a metal mold in printing, social stereotypes can be viewed as molds of regular and invariable patterns of evaluation of others.

Stereotyping can and often does result in singling out individuals and groups as targets of hostility and violence, even though they may have little or nothing to do with the offenses for which they stand accused. This is referred to as scapegoating.

With scapegoating, there is the tendency to view all members of the group as inferior and to assume that all members are alike in most respects. This attitude often leads to even further marginalization.

The origin of the scapegoat dates back to the Book of Leviticus (16:20-22). On the Day of Atonement, a live goat was selected by lot. The high priest placed both hands on the goat’s head and confessed over it the sins of the people.

In this way, the sins were symbolically transferred to the animal, which was then cast out into the wilderness. This process thus purged the people, for a time, of their feelings of guilt, shame, and fear.

When stereotyping occurs, people tend to overlook all other characteristics of the group. Individuals sometimes use stereotypes to justify the subjugation of members of that group. In this sense, stereotypes conform to the literal meaning of the word “prejudice,” which is a prejudgment, derived from the Latin praejudicium.

From the time he first descended Trump Tower’s golden escalator to announce his presidential run in 2015, Donald Trump continually demeaned, stereotyped, and scapegoated Muslims and Latinx people. He initially stated: “The US has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems. [Mexico is] sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and they’re rapists.”

Trump eventually enlarged his dehumanizing representations to include all people of Latin America. In his January 19, 2019 White House speech on immigration, he continued attempting to metamorphise people desperate for a better way of life into deranged and dangerous rapists, gang members (“found mostly in large packs” according to The Eternal Jew), human traffickers, and drug smugglers out to subvert good Americans (read as white people).

While Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s drama eventually succumbed to his inexplicable metamorphosis, his sister, Grete, transformed into an empowered, emboldened, and stronger woman in her maturation process stemming from the new challenges and responsibilities imposed on herself and her family by Gregor’s condition.

We in the resistance take notice and strength from Grete Samsa by committing never again to allow any individual or government to change our awareness or our sense of self and community into anything other than a just and peaceful universal existence.