Trump's Attack on Haitians Borrows From Neo-Nazis
Trump's Attack on Haitians Borrows From Neo-Nazis
His apologists want to deny that an obsession with creating a white ethnostate guides his rhetoric and conduct
For as long as he’s been in the public eye, Donald Trump has changed his mind innumerable times. He has said so many different and contradictory things and has backtracked from so many of his positions that it is easy to conclude that he stands for nothing except his own power.
Yet Trump has a consistent obsession, a theme that runs through his entire time in politics, even before he was a candidate for president, and that is whipping up a hysterical fear of the other—which includes an implicit conception of America as a white-majority ethnostate.
In 2011, Trump began promoting the “birther” conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was secretly a Muslim. In 2015, when he announced he was running for president, Trump’s central rationale was to demonize immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” In 2017, after neo-Nazis staged a violent and deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, then-President Trump said that there were “very fine people” on both sides—including the Nazi side. And at his first and possibly only debate with Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this month, Trump’s signature line was to accuse Haitians of stealing and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Taken one at a time, Trump’s apologists try to wriggle their way out of accepting the dark implications of each example. After all, they’ll note, didn’t he eventually backpedal from the birther theories? Yet, by now—and particularly in Trump’s ongoing attack on Haitians in America—the pattern has become too clear to deny.
Using Springfield to Mount a Campaign of Hate and Fear
Trump’s line about eating pets was not a random campaign gaffe. His supporters have been targeting Springfield with a protracted hate campaign that is now culminating in actual, physical threats to the Haitian community.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has been forced to deploy the Ohio State Highway Patrol to monitor schools in Springfield after receiving 33 bomb threats since late last week; two elementary schools were evacuated Monday. The threats turned out to be fake, but the fear they generated was real. Two colleges shut down and moved to virtual learning.
The threat to Springfield’s Haitian immigrants isn’t just from a few of Trump’s more fanatical supporters or from overseas (probably Russian) internet trolls. It is from Trump himself, who vowed on Friday that if reelected, “We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio, large deportations. We’re going to get these people out.”
The Haitians in Springfield are in this country legally. They are valued employees at local factories; Gov. DeWine credits them with a “great resurgence” in the economy and describes them as “positive influences on our community.” Yet our former and possibly future president is essentially threatening them with a nativist program of ethnic cleansing.
This should be no surprise. A politician who started out campaigning on fear and hatred of immigrants is still campaigning on fear and hatred of immigrants. But there was a key turning point at which we were warned just how deeply xenophobic Trump is, and just how far he would be willing to go: the day in August, 2017 when Donald Trump referred to the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as “very fine people.” Trump’s supporters have claimed he didn’t really say it, that this was a “hoax” and has been “debunked.” They have tried to make it taboo to even mention Trump’s “very fine people” comment.
But by now, we can see clearly that he meant it. Trump has been increasingly surrounding himself with just that kind of “very fine people,” and this is what led him to put a Midwestern town under a terrorist threat from racists.
Who Were the “Very Fine People” in Charlottesville?
A few years back, I wrote a widely disseminated article examining that case in detail, but since then, the revisionist history from Trump’s supporters has become so entrenched that it’s necessary to boil down the case in a shorter and simpler form.
Trump’s supporters claim that the “very fine people” statement clearly related to those on both sides of the Confederate monument debate. But they are replacing what Trump actually said with something that is easier to defend.
Here is what Trump actually said: “You have some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” This wasn’t a general statement about people who have opinions about Confederate monuments. He was referring to specific people—to “that group.” Which group? Trump is also specific about that. “You take a look, the night before, they were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.” And he repeats a little later, “the night before.”
“The night before” refers to a surprise march on Aug. 11, the night before the violent neo-Nazi rally that ended in brawling and a Nazi driving his car into a crowd and killing a young woman. Was “the night before” something tamer, more restrained? No, it was the torchlit march in which neo-Nazis chanted slogans like “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” This was “that group.” This was the specific event at which then-President Trump told us there were “very fine people.”
You could argue that Trump was contradicting himself. He said that Nazis “should be condemned totally” right before he called one group of indisputable Nazis “very fine people.” Or you could argue that he didn’t know what he was talking about and thought there was someone other than Nazis at a Nazi march. But that raises some important questions. If he condemned Nazis at the same time he praised them, which did he really mean? If he thought that a group of Nazis really weren’t Nazis—why did he think that? Who was giving him a false view of these events?
It has been seven years since then, and we don’t need to ask these questions any longer. We have a pretty good idea of the answers. All we need is to look at how Trump worked up his followers into a frenzy against innocent, black immigrants in Ohio.
The Neo-Nazi Transmission Belt
Trump set off the current wave of threats in Springfield by repeating at the presidential debate an internet rumor that Haitian immigrants were abducting household pets to cook and eat them. It was literally a rumor. The fact-checking outfit NewsGuard tracked down the original source: a single Facebook post referring to something that happened to an acquaintance of a friend of a neighbor. The woman who posted it—now contrite—marvels, “I didn't think that any of this would explode to the presidency.” So how did it get there?
It got there through a well-established conveyer belt from the wilds of the internet to Donald Trump’s brain: white nationalist social media.
An investigation by Talking Points Media describes how the online right’s focus on Springfield has been inflamed by a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe. They came to the city in August to stage “one of their trademark events, which involve masked marches where participants wave swastika flags.” It is no coincidence that there was an online rumor mill ready to amplify any social media posts about Springfield because Blood Tribe has been targeting the town in an effort to stoke racial resentment against “subhuman” Haitians for a year now. When Vance and Trump took up the cry, Blood Tribe boasted to each other in online discussions that they had “pushed Springfield into the public consciousness.”
There is no need to speculate how this talking point got from white nationalists to President Trump, because we know at least one direct link: Laura Loomer, an infamous internet troll who spent the week before the debate traveling around with Trump on his private jet and heavily promoting the slander against Haitian immigrants. Loomer has been notoriously friendly with white nationalists and neo-Nazis, describing herself as a “white advocate” at the white nationalist American Renaissance conference in 2022.
The Death of Godwin’s Law
It may seem ironic that Loomer, who is Jewish, has been hanging around with neo-Nazis. Then again, this is the same election year in which Vivek Ramaswamy, the son of immigrants, ran on a virulently anti-immigrant platform. And it’s the same presidential ticket with a man who is both a spreader of anti-Haitian smears and the father of mixed-race children. The Trumpist right attracts ambitious and unscrupulous people. What matters is that they all have to embrace a similar message to get ahead in a conservative movement increasingly interconnected with the white-supremacist right.
The examples are legion. As early as his 2016 campaign, Trump was sharing antisemitic memes created by online racists. His close advisor Stephen Miller, who has just promised to denaturalize citizens and deport them if Trump regains office, has a long history of promoting articles from the same white nationalist organization Loomer spoke to. Fresh from a headline spot at this year’s Republican National Convention, Tucker Carlson, who dabbled in racist theories back when he was still on cable news, endorsed a pseudo-historian who thinks Hitler got a bad rap, Winston Churchill was the real villain in World War II, and the Allied victory represented the worst of all possible outcomes. This brought near-universal condemnation—but not from the Trump campaign, which still plans to hold events with Carlson. And of course, Trump himself has already had another neo-Nazi, Nick Fuentes, over for dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
Donald Trump has surrounded himself with “very fine people” of exactly the sort we feared he was praising in 2017—and he is now openly embracing one of their key demands: to round up and forcibly deport non-white immigrants. And he is only embedding himself deeper in this bubble.
One of the signatures of the Trump era is the death of Godwin’s Law, an old internet adage meant to discourage lazy attempts to win an argument by comparing your opponent to Hitler. It is an artifact of an era when neo-Nazis were a small and highly marginalized group. That is no longer the case, and Trump is one of the people who let them out of that box.
We can no longer shrink from drawing the awful conclusion that Donald Trump is pro-Nazi when he keeps actually hanging out with, listening to, and taking advice from Nazis. “Very fine people”? Yes, he really meant it.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
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Excellent article. At a certain point, if it walks like a Nazi, quacks like a Nazi, and gets its talking points from Nazis, it's a Nazi.
I have really tried not to let those two vile creatures get to me but this deliberate demonizing of people who were invited to come to this town in a state that vance is supposed to be a representative of as a senator is lit my last nerve on fire. trump and vance are toxic waste stirring up even more toxic waste. We need a Superfund Election to clean all of it up and remediate the damage.