The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Susan Young is the Bangor Daily News opinion editor.
I wanted to write something happy this week, I really did. It is the weekend after Thanksgiving after all, a time for gratitude and goodwill.
But I can’t stop thinking about vermin.
That’s what Donald Trump called people who disagree with him.
“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,” Trump said at a rally in New Hampshire earlier this month.
If the phrase sounds familiar, Adolf Hitler used it. He likened “inferior” races to vermin.
It is not only offensive to compare people to rats, bugs and other actual vermin. It is dangerous because you exterminate actual vermin. And, as we know, the Nazis became very efficient at exterminating people. During the Holocaust, they murdered more than 11 million people that they considered “vermin,” including 6 million Jews, many of whom were held and killed at concentration camps.
“This language of rooting out vermin — the reason why authoritarian leaders use that is because it does dehumanize their political opponents,” Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently told NPR.
“The dehumanization of political opponents are the bricks that pave the road to political violence,” he added.
The vermin comments follow a recent interview with the far-right website The National Pulse, in which Trump, whose grandparents and mother immigrated to the U.S., said that immigration is “poisoning the blood of our country.”
This is also incendiary and offensive language that echoes the claims of Nazis, white supremecists and many authoritarian leaders throughout history.
Is it a coincidence that Trump, who has long professed admiration for authoritarian leaders, used this language? Maybe, but not likely.
“The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told the Washington Post last week. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.”
When asked about the “vermin” comments, Trump’s campaign doubled down. The Post reported that Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, told the paper that “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
Cheung later clarified that he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence,” the Post reported. Maybe because saying someone’s “entire existence” will be crushed sounds too much like exterminating vermin?
Beyond the vileness of Trump’s comments — and his campaign’s pathetic defense of them — the timing of them is also abhorrent. The vermin comments were part of a speech that Trump gave on Veterans Day. A day set aside to honor the men and women who have bravely served their country, sometimes fighting against the very authoritarians that Trump admires and hopes to emulate if he is returned to the White House.
Many veterans, including my father who served as an Army medic in Europe in World War II, fought in a war to stop Hitler’s horrors and to end a regime that considered many other people to be vermin.
To import that same thinking, the same verbiage, to America is an insult to those veterans and to everyone who was targeted by Trump’s speech.
The fact that Trump is the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination is horrifying. A few Republicans, notably former Wyoming U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, who was once a Republican leader in the U.S. House, and former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele, have been highly critical of Trump’s comments. But, far too many, including current Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, have either dodged the question or simply sought to distance themselves from Trump and his rhetoric.
When the party’s presumptive stand bearer is pledging authoritarian, even Hitleresque actions against fellow Americans, silence is complicity.
