Trump's Recreating Actual Racist History Not Just Remaking 'The Purge'
Why you should know about Kristallnacht and Wilmington.
Donald Trump has entered the rabid dog phase of his campaign. He’s vicious and so unhinged no leash can contain his madness. Yet the mainstream media continues treating him like a normal political candidate who has actual policies. An Axios headline from a couple days ago read: "Trump pounds immigration message after Harris' border visit." Bloomberg declared, “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a political vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Even worse, The New York Times ran a love story about Trump and his “real-life apprentice” JD Vance that was more suitable for the Sunday Styles section.
However, Trump had spent the weekend foaming at the mouth. He laid on the Sturm und Drang at a rally in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin where he called migrants “animals” and said he’d “liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members. We’re going to liberate our country.”
“You gotta get these people back where they came from,” Trump raved. “You have no choice. You’re gonna lose your culture.”
The Guardian’s headline simply read, “Trump leans into anti-immigrant rants and Harris barbs at Wisconsin rally.” (His “barbs” were overtly racist and not worth repeating.)
Aaron Rupar at
provided full coverage of Trump’s remarks without a sanewashing filter. (Watch below.)Vice President Kamala Harris was correct when she described Trump’s rallies as boring and exhausting. His Nazi rhetoric isn’t all that neo. Nonetheless, a potentially overwhelming majority of white Americans will cast a ballot for him next month. They are either oblivious to history or are eager to repeat it.
Make lynchings great again
During his other hate rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump — a convicted felon currently out on bail — waved his law-and-order flag and complained about the lawless dystopia that America has become, one where adjudicated rapists indicted for multiple serious felonies can freely run for president.
“What the hell is going on?” he said, which is what normal people might wonder after listening to him. “See, we have to let the police do their job. And if they have to be extraordinarily rough. And you know, the funny thing with all of that stuff, look at the department stores, same thing, they walk into it. You see these guys walking out with air conditioners, with refrigerators on their back. The craziest thing. And the police aren't allowed to do their job. They're told if you do anything, you're gonna lose your pension, you're gonna lose your family, your house, your car.”
Trump has blamed Kamala Harris for a California law he says lets shoplifters walk out of stores with up to $950 without consequences. It’s a true supermarket sweep, where the criminals carry calculators to make sure they don’t go over the legal limit. This is of course a lie. Not only does misdemeanor shoplifting still carry a penalty, but there are Republican-run states such as Arkansas, Nebraska and Texas with even higher thresholds for charging shoplifting as a felony.
Of course, Trump is hardly one to denounce stealing items that don’t belong to you. He walked off with classified documents that he stored half-assed in the bathroom where his full ass does its business. He refused to return the documents and lied to authorities about having them in the first place. He was indicted under the Espionage Act, but the Supreme Court justices who are soft-on-Trump-crimes helped him skate on those charges.
However, Trump insists the system’s just too easy for the real criminals out there who are both browner and poorer than he is. He thinks we need a law-and-order holiday, just one day out of life, where cops can beat the crap out of criminal suspects, regardless of any constitutional amendments that don’t start with “Second.”
“You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day,” he said. “One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it’ll end immediately.” (Watch clip from Aaron Rupar below.)
CNN reported this as “Trump says one ‘real rough hour’ of policing would end crime,” as if it were a legitimate policy proposal from a normal political speech instead of one of Cobra Commander’s televised rants.
Trump’s supporters cheered like lunatics over the proposed Day of No Due Process, even though they aren’t personally experiencing the ravages of out-of-control crime. All verifiable data show that crime rates have decreased, so why would people desperately want to believe their world is on fire when it’s not? The answer is that they crave any excuse to unleash hell on the people they hate.
What’s in a name, other than actual history?
Aaron Rupar compared Trump’s call for extrajudicial police violence to the German Kristallnacht or the “Night of Broken Glass” when Nazis led a violent riot against Jews as German authorities stood and watched. Nazi paramilitary forces ransacked Jewish homes, hospitals and schools. They destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. More than 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
Despite this obvious connection, the media consistently invoked The Purge, a 2013 movie and film series that is not an actual documentary. I’ve seen it argued on social media that The Purge is a better reference because the average person understands it and this isn’t “a history seminar at Dartmouth.” That’s a little depressing. It’s like if we were facing an impending alien invasion and the media kept referencing Independence Day instead of the more entertaining Mars Attacks or, you know, the actual alien invasion that had occurred in the 1930s.
It’s not even clear that people making this reference have seen The Purge. The whole point is that for a 12-hour period each year, all crime is legal and the police are unresponsive, as if everyone lives in the ghetto. This somehow results in almost no crime and low unemployment. The economy is booming thanks to increased weapons sales and the vibrant home security industry.
Although the wealthy were best suited to ride out the Purge unscathed, they still feared for their lives each year. Trump isn’t proposing anything quite so equal opportunity. He’s specifically targeting people who aren’t white, which is why Kristallnacht is such a relevant historical comparison. It all connects with Trump’s demonization of immigrants in ever-more dehumanizing terms. In Wisconsin, he claimed that immigrants “will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
Post-Reconstruction, Black men were explicitly depicted as innately savage and violent. Former president of North Carolina State University George T. Winston wrote in 1901, “When a knock is heard at the door [a white woman] shudders with nameless horror. The black brute is lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. His ferocity is almost demoniacal. A mad bull or tiger could scarcely be more brutal. A whole community is frenzied with horror, with the blind and furious rage for vengeance.”
What Trump says about migrants is no less vile.
The purported “justification” for the Kristallnacht was the assassination of Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish-German Jew whose parents had been deported from Germany back to Poland. Grynszpan had written on a postcard to his parents: “With God’s help. My dear parents, I could not do otherwise, may God forgive me, the heart bleeds when I hear of your tragedy and that of the 12,000 Jews. I must protest so that the whole world hears my protest, and that I will do. Forgive me.”
Republicans have falsely blamed Democrats for the assassination attempts against Trump, so once again, this all seems more relevant than the Ethan Hawke movie, which is fiction.
Trump continues to undermine U.S. elections. At his Pennsylvania rally last weekend, he said there was “out-of-control” cheating in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Atlanta — cities with a significant Black population. Neither his rhetoric nor his coup attempts are unprecedented.
Just two days after the 1898 election, white Southern conservatives in Wilmington, North Carolina organized and unleashed a mob of 2,000 white men who overthrew the duly elected biracial government.
Former Confederate general and sitting US House Rep. Alfred Moore Waddell led the assault, stating that he would “choke the current of the Cape Fear river with Black bodies.” The mob destroyed almost everything Black residents had built during Reconstruction. They demolished Black businesses and burned down the city’s sole Black newspaper. The complicit white press crafted a story that blamed Black residents for the riot. Before the bodies were even buried, Waddell was declared the town’s new mayor.
In Democracy Betrayed, historian Laura Edwards somberly notes, “What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole.”
Wilmington was the first successful coup in U.S. history, and Trump is aiming for the second. It’s foolish to imagine that history will “judge” Trump. In 1999, Wilmington named an elementary school after one of the ringleaders of the coup, Walter L. Parsley.
History is much scarier than The Purge. That’s why we should remember Kristallnacht and Wilmington. So that one day our own grandchildren won’t attend Marjorie Taylor Greene Elementary School or catch a flight from Donald Trump International Airport.
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For anyone saying "The Purge" is more easily understandable to voters, I'd note that the word "Kristalnacht" is pretty well known, and anyone hearing a sinister-sounding German word like that is likely to at least look further if they don't understand it. We are past the point of it being ok to compare Trump to a Nazi, it's simply what he is, openly and unabashedly.
Every Democrat and talking head should just come out and say it--Trump is proposing Nazi shit, he's not "stoking division" or any other watered down euphamism, it's simply Nazi proposals to ethnically cleanse this country. Tell everyone to wake the fuck up, and figure out where they stand, this is the same moment Germans faced in 1933 when they had to decide what direction they were going to take. You no longer have to wonder what you'd have done in their situation back then--you're facing it now.
There are a lot of other, positive reasons to vote for Harris--she'd make a good president, essentially, and continue good policies we need right now that would enrich all Americans' lives, rich and poor--but there's also one key reason that should cut through everything else--this is your chance to help decide what the soul of this country is. This is your chance to stop fascism, right now, and it's as easy as voting.
“He thinks we need a law-and-order holiday, just one day out of life, where cops can beat the crap out of criminal suspects”
There was that one day out of life when Donnie could have unleashed every law-enforcement entity available to beat the crap out of criminal suspects: Jan. 6, 2021. For some reason, he just didn’t feel like it that day. Instead, he purposely thwarted backup for the greatly outnumbered Capitol and MPD police officers, leaving them vulnerable to vicious attacks and horrific injuries.
What a difference a day makes, huh?