Tom Nichols on Trump’s Recent Rhetoric

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well now, as the U.S. gears up for next year’s presidential election, Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney is condemning much of her party, including the new House Speaker Mike Johnson, for their support for Former President Donald Trump. In her new memoir, she labels him the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office. Echoing these fears is staff writer at “The Atlantic,” Tom Nichols. In his piece, “Trump Crosses a Crucial Line,” He argues that the Republican frontrunner’s actions are more alarming now than ever. And he joins Michel Martin this discussion.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Tom Nichols, thanks so much for talking with us.

TOM NICHOLS, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Good to be with you.

MARTIN: So, here’s what we called you. You have been critical of Former President Trump in the past, but you were adamant that people should stop talking about him or stop calling him a fascist. You said, look, you know, he was a garden variety autocrat, a wannabe Caldeo (ph). But you said, look, you know, stop using that term. Why were you so adamant about that?

NICHOLS: Well, one is that before I was a writer, I was a professor of political science, and the word has meaning. It has a historically grounded meaning. So, as I admitted in the article, I’m a bit of a pedant about words, but I — but there was a deeper political reason, which is that you don’t want to wear people out with a term that should have really electric force when they hear it. You want people to hear that word and to react and to say, OK, we’re in a different situation. And I think that’s true of a lot of words. I mean, I’ve also made arguments that we overuse the word terrorism, for example, that we’ve justified everything as terrorism. And I worry that over — not just the past few years, but for decades, people in the United States especially have called all right-wing movements they don’t like fascism. And I think that wears people out because fascism is a unique danger. It’s something that people really need to, when they hear that word, think they kind of need to drop what they’re doing and think about what’s going on. And I was really concerned that the word was becoming abused and people were getting numb to it.

MARTIN: As a former political science professor, fascism has a specific kind of historical meaning and history. Could you just remind us briefly of what that is?

NICHOLS: Well, in the 1930s, you had a movement that went beyond merely authoritarianism and beyond a typical kind of dictator who says, look, if you just leave me alone, leave me in power, I’ll basically leave you alone. Let me get rich. Let me run the country and so on. What emerges in the 1930s is an ideology that says, the individual is nothing, and the state is everything. And the state represents glory and nostalgia and an idealized past that’s rooted in the glorification of military power, the identification of enemies everywhere, and that is embodied in a single leader who is the single embodiment of the state and the nation and the people, and that everyone should be directed towards supporting that rather than, again, just being obedient and being left alone.

MARTIN: It has to be said that there are people calling, you know, the former president a fascist even before he took office. I mean, they said his language was fascist. They — you know, and you said all along in your writings and sort of your teaching him to say, look, stop using that term, but something has changed for you, which is one of the reasons we called you because you wrote a piece about this. What has changed for you?

NICHOLS: Donald Trump crossed the line in the past month or two where he is now identifying his political opponents, not just overseas, he’s not just talking about foreign enemies, you know, immigrants and other nations, he’s talking about his fellow citizens as vermin, as subhuman, as people who will, in his words, be rooted out. And his list is pretty broad. He — I mean, basically it’s everybody who’s not supporting Donald Trump.

MARTIN: There was a speech on Veterans Day. OK. He says, 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. And then before that, he had this interview with this national pulse group where he referred to immigrants as poisoning the blood of our country.

NICHOLS: Right.

MARTIN: Were those the things that caught — and then explain again why you feel like this really crosses the line.

NICHOLS: Well, poisoning the blood is a direct Hitler lift. Adolf Hitler used this kind of language when talking about German race purity. And none of this, I think, at this point is accidental. I mean, first of all, Donald Trump has a very limited vocabulary and a very limited ability to deal with concepts. And so, he wasn’t going to cough up words like vermin or poisoning the blood on his own. And so, now, you have the makings of a core of an inner party around him who are pushing this Hitler like rhetoric. And again, I mean, I think it was a tremendous mistake early on, you know, the minute he was elected to say, well, he’s a fascist. Again, that’s — you know, I’m in my early 60s. I’ve heard Nixon was a fascist. Reagan was a fascist. Bush was a fascist. Bush too was a fascist. John McCain was a fascist. Well, you know, an actual fascist has shown up at this point, and I think, again, we’ve become inured to it. And I also think he’s gotten us used to it by simply getting us to write it off as, well, that’s just how he talks, that’s just crazy talk. And that’s why I flagged this moment, I said, this isn’t just his normal kind of crazy talk, this is different. He is using specific words that are getting either fed to him or that he’s picking up somewhere that are distinctly related to the experience of fascism in the 1930s.

MARTIN: Well, the other thing that you pointed out in your piece is it’s not just that he’s using inflammatory language, which is frankly, I mean, has been his M.O. since he announced his run for the presidency. But you’re saying that the specific difference here is also that he has a specific program that he’s talked about in order to fulfill this agenda. What are some of those things that caught your attention?

NICHOLS: Well, remember, Trump doesn’t have programs. Trump has kind of half-baked ideas that get turned into programs by people around him. And some of those are ideas, for example, to use the military. He has very dangerous plans for how to use the United States military against its own citizens. People who support him, people on his team, are drawing up plans, for example, to invoke the Insurrection Act on Inauguration Day, not because they’re worried about civil disorder, but simply to intimidate American citizens and to put down any protests against his inauguration if, God help us, he is re-elected. He is talking about camps, large camps for detaining immigrants. And he’s talking about using the Justice Department against his enemies. He said, well, you know, people are challenging me, I’ll just indict them. You know, this is also something that goes back to the experience with fascism, where the early fascists seized — they found they kind of burrowed into government structures either through appointment or, you know, kind of fluke election and then seize the machinery of government to exterminate their opponents, politically and sometimes physically. And Trump’s making no bones about it. He’s not even pretending. He’s not even trying to cloak his language. I mean, he’s being very clear about it.

MARTIN: Do you have a theory about why it is that more people aren’t disturbed by this?

NICHOLS: There are three reasons. One is that the media has a normalcy bias, which is that it’s just impossible to report on this as if it’s not just another normal horse race because the media — I think much of the media has internalized the rights criticisms of about bias. And so, they’re terrified of saying this is not a normal candidate. This is not a normal election. I think the other reason is that, unfortunately, it has to rest with the voters who I think have decided not to take things seriously. If you’re a citizen in a democracy, you should have at least enough bandwidth to know that a major party candidate is talking like a fascist. You don’t have to spend all day watching the news to be an involved enough citizen, but I think people kind of shrug and they say, well, it’s fun. It’s reality TV. People who voted for him the first time, many of them said point blank, I just wanted to see what would happen. And I think that first term, they’ve said, well, how bad could it be? And they don’t realize how close we came. And I think the third reason is that Trump himself just got us used to it. There’s a kind of frog boiling here, you know, where you boil the frog degree by degree in a hot pan, and Trump just got us used to saying crazy things. And I think a lot of people now they hear him talk about vermin and extermination and he said — and they say, well, what are you going to do? That’s the way he talks. And that’s a dire mistake in my view.

MARTIN: Is it that you feel that the sort of legacy media writ large just can’t figure out how to talk about this?

NICHOLS: Yes. I think there’s a real problem. And look, this is not as much a criticism of the media as it seems. I mean, I think that there is a real concern about appearing impartial, unbiased, not taking sides with one group of Americans against another, but that leads, again, to this kind of sense, this predilection for normalcy, like this couldn’t possibly be an election between an unhinged delusional fascist and a kind of ordinary garden variety Democratic Party nominee. It has to be, we have a Republican nominee, and we have a Democratic nominee. And this election is a totally normal election, just like 1996 or 1984 or 1972. And I think that there’s a problem of not a feeling like they — that if there’s a — pointing out how — what Trump is doing, that it looks like taking sides. And I understand that dilemma, but we are not living in normal times.

MARTIN: I hope you don’t mind my pointing out because you’ve written about this, is that you were Republican until fairly recently. And where you decided to declare yourself as an independent because you found a number of things no longer tolerable. But why do you think so many of your kind of former co-partisans, as we could put it, many of whom do have a deep understanding of history, many of whom cite history as the reason for their belief system don’t find this objectionable? I mean, I know throughout the, you know, my time covering politics, when I ask people what’s the — sort of the origin story of their beliefs, they’ll cite the former Soviet Union, they’ll cite the repression of the former Soviet Union, you know, they’ll cite the — you know, the Nazi era as a reason to sort of stand vigilant when it comes to both individual rights and dignity and not allowing the state to kind of overwhelm, you know, the imperatives of the individual.

NICHOLS: Well, I think there’s — you have to make distinction here between the Republican base that’s enthusiastically voting for Trump and elected Republicans and a lot of others like me who left, as you know, for many of us, the Cold War was formative and the first group that really rose in opposition to Trump within the Republican Party were people like me who had worked in national security organizations. I taught for many years at the Naval War College. And I think elected Republicans are appalled, but they’re afraid, and it’s just — it’s a matter of cowardice. They like their jobs. They want to stay in Washington. They don’t want to get death threats from their constituents, which is now something that is just a normal part of the Republican landscape, and they’re into denial. They’re hoping to keep their head down and that somehow this storm will pass. And I think with the base, that’s a different matter. Older white, middle class, not — these are not — you know, the — this army of unemployed factory workers that Trump likes to pretend is out there, but there is a cultural and social resentment. They’re getting older. They don’t like change in the country. They don’t like that the country is getting younger, browner, less Christian, and it — and this is their way of striking back. And they don’t really care what Trump says as long as he makes the — as long as he hates the same people they hate. And they don’t think that when repression finally arrives, they think they’re going to get a pass. And they just don’t — because they’ve never really lived under a repressive government. They’ve never seen it. And so, they just don’t know what they’re in for, unfortunately.

MARTIN: You say in your argument about why people should stop throwing around fascism until the — until now, you said, “Fascism is not mere oppression. It’s a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality, glorifies hyper nationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances.” OK. These were all themes that the former president signaled when he ran for office. So, I guess what I’m asking you, as somebody who is a close observer of our politics and our history, is why did it take you this long to see that this was dangerous, when there are a lot of people who said at the very beginning that this is just not — this is not the leader of a liberal diverse democracy?

NICHOLS: I identified Trump as highly dangerous the minute he appeared on the scene. And I was writing about the importance of voting for Hillary Clinton to stop him. But I’m still objected to the notion that this was fascist because all politicians run on nostalgia. What Trump has done in the past year has turned that into a really malevolent and violent movement. And I think particularly after January 6th, if I’m a little late to this usage, maybe January 6th was the time to start talking about it. But even January 6th was just such a chowder headed rebellion of people that just wanted to trash government offices that it was — I don’t think there was a coherence to it yet. And I think Trump now — after finally being turned out office, I think Trump’s rage and his narcissistic injury has finally led him to talk about his fellow citizens, rounding them up as vermin, rooting them out, expelling them. And that — you know, there — he always had a nativist nationalistic kind of approach, but he also — in 2016, he flipflopped on issues basically depending on where he felt he needed to be in any given moment. One thing I would point out in all this discussion about fascism, fascists tend to be pretty consistent, they tend to be workaholics, and they tend to be, you know, like it or not, pretty brave people when it comes to the streets, and Trump is none of those things. But he’s starting to build that movement around him and use that kind of rhetoric and that’s why I think it’s time to start really waking up to the impact of that word.

MARTIN: What do you see as your role right now and going forward?

NICHOLS: I sometimes see myself just a, you know, cranky old guy yelling and shaking my fist from the rafters and saying, you know, pay attention. I think it’s important for all of us as citizens for — here in the United States, it’s important for citizens simply not to shrug this off and to go about their day as if we’re living through a normal time. Now, that doesn’t mean everybody has to get up every morning with their hair on fire. We have to take care of our kids. We have to go to work with our jobs, you know, buy groceries. But the notion that this kind of cynical decadence that says, well, nothing really matters and nothing’s really important, I think we have to be through at that and I think we have to hold each other responsible for not letting ourselves fall into that, because that’s a big part of how we got here.

MARTIN: OK. And for what about people who aren’t just — as you sort of put it kind of, you know, dorm room indifference, right? People who just say, look, you know what, inflation is still too high, the border is a mess, you know, crime in major cities is unacceptable, and I just don’t like what the current guy is doing. And, oh, by the way, he’s old. What would you say to them if you had the opportunity to do so?

NICHOLS: I find those narratives frustrating because inflation is, you know, 3 percent. You know, violent crime has been dropping for years. It’s now below the pre-pandemic levels. I mean, in a way, to even have those arguments is to wade into this thicket of hallucinatory stuff where you’re just arguing about things that aren’t true. And so, my response to all of that is say, look, nothing’s perfect. Country has problems. We can always do better. Is your solution to vote for a fascist?

MARTIN: Tom Nichols, thank you so much for talking with us.

NICHOLS: Thank you.