Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023, in Claremont, N.H.
In a statement Saturday on his social media platform and then in a campaign speech that night in New Hampshire, ex-President Donald Trump made his most explicit threat so far to jail or kill his political opponents if he returns to the White House, denouncing “radical left thugs that live like vermin.”
In the final words of a nearly two-hour-long speech, Trump declared, “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. They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
He went on to voice the real fears of the American capitalist class that its most dangerous enemy is inside the United States, not outside: “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.”
The fact that Trump, the former president and current frontrunner in the Republican primary, is publicly announcing plans to establish a presidential dictatorship must be taken as a warning by workers and young people. Sections of the US ruling class, confronted with a growing strike wave and mass anti-war protests, favor the creation of a fascist dictatorship.
The Veterans Day speech was Trump’s most open use of Hitlerian language in threatening to destroy his enemies if he returns to power. A series of commentaries in the corporate press noted the similarities between his speeches and those of the fascist leaders of the 1930s. One column in the Washington Post quoted passages from Mein Kampf and their parallels in Trump’s recent speeches, including the description of opponents as “vermin,” characterizing a targeted group (Jews for Hitler, migrants for Trump) as “poisoning the blood” of the nation, and warning that the most dangerous enemy of the nation was within, in the socialist and communist left, not outside.
None of these commentaries, however, suggested that Trump’s parroting the speeches of Hitler is not coincidental, but conscious and deliberate. He is a longtime admirer of the most monstrous figure of the 20th century. At least one of his ex-wives told a biographer that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. His father Fred had belonged to the KKK and was known to have Nazi sympathies, which he passed on, along with a billion dollars, to his son.