This is the second in a series of blogs looking at the Trump-MAGA movement—the new American fascism—within the context of a template laid out in 2003 by historian Lawrence Britt, who analyzed seven fascist regimes and the common threads linking them. You can read last week’s blog here.
Week 2: Disdain for Human Rights.
“Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, and long incarcerations of prisoners.”
Trump campaigned in 2016 on vitriolic and racist rhetoric. He knew then—as he knows now—that dehumanizing “others” is the first step to degrading their human rights. We know now that his most common targets (and by extension, those of his followers) are immigrants and Muslims.
After winning the presidency in 2016, Trump lost little time in using his executive powers to impose a “zero tolerance” policy of immigration enforcement. In the process, his administration perpetrated a deliberately cruel measure to attempt to deter future migrants: the separation of more than 5,000 children from their parents, with no tracking process that would allow them to eventually be reunited.
Detention under inhumane conditions for migrants and asylum seekers was not a byproduct of the zero tolerance policy—it was the point of it. The Atlantic’s Adam Sewer phrased it aptly: “The Trump administration’s commitment to deterring immigration through cruelty has made horrifying conditions in detention facilities inevitable.”
Case in point: The US government’s own inspectors documented detainees in ICE facilities being fed expired food, while being subject to “nooses in detainee cells,” “inadequate medical care,” “unsafe and unhealthy conditions” and “dangerous “overcrowding.”
Seven years later, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has only ramped up in the runup to the 2024 election, riding a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. He is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025—including rounding up and detaining vast numbers of undocumented people already in the United States, forcing them into camps while they wait for expulsion.
This is the stuff of authoritarian dictatorships. This is what follows when immigrants are deemed to be "poisoning the blood of our country." This is a horrifying echo of Adolf Hitler’s language about Jews and migrants.
This is just a small sample of the ways the Trump-MAGA movement degrades human rights in America—and we haven’t even touched on their attacks on the rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community (more on that later).
Next week: how the Trump-MAGA movement uses “the Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause.”
Here’s a foretaste of what’s to come:
