Sept. 21, 2024

A hundred years ago there was an organization in Weimar Republic Germany called Verband nationaldeutscher Juden, the Association of German National Jews (VnJ). They were fascist German Jews who opposed immigration (including by Eastern European Jews). They also fought against German communism and believed they were part of the racially superior German race. Their newspaper, Der Nationaldeutsche Jude, The National German Jew, had a circulation of 6,000 in 1927 and supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

The VnJ saw Hitler’s platform as good for the German economy. His fierce nationalism would serve to make Germany great again, restoring their might that had been destroyed by humiliating defeat in the first world war. The group saw Hitler’s emphatic anti-Semitism as merely a rhetorical tool to “stir up the masses.” Mainstream Nazis initially saw them as the “good Jews,” praised by Reich leaders with the refrain, “If only all Jews were like you.” After Hitler’s appointment to the position of Reich Chancellor in January 1933, critics of the VnJ joked that their motto was, “Down with us!” In 1935, Hitler outlawed the organization and the vast majority of the members and their families died in the Holocaust.

I always think of the VnJ when I see that “Blacks for Trump” guy.

Trump’s Long History of Racism

It’s increasingly difficult for Trump supporters to defend his over-the-top racist appeals. White guys will say, “But he’s got a black friend! I heard he gave a donation to Jesse Jackson! He CAN’T be racist!” But we’ve got the receipts and they go way back. They include the 1973 federal lawsuit brought against Trump for racial discrimination at his New York housing developments, the full page ad he took out in 1989 calling for the execution of the Central Park 5, his campaign to prove that President Obama was not a U.S. citizen, and the 2015 launch of his presidential campaign, where he said, and I quote, “Mexicans are murderers and rapists.” And there is so much more.

In 2019, after President Trump’s incessant blathering about an immigrant “invasion” at the Southern border, one of his supporters drove to El Paso, Texas to turn Trump’s words into action. There, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius walked into a Walmart and opened fire. He killed 23 Hispanic shoppers and injured 22 others. Crusius pre-attack manifesto, posted on 8chan, was full of anti-immigrant diatribes, lifted from the rhetoric of Trump and conservative television personality Tucker Carlson. The slaughter of innocents didn’t quell Trump’s xenophobia and in 2024 it has only increased.

The scapegoating of immigrants has a long history in the U.S.. “Dirty” immigrants were blamed for the “Spanish Flu” in 1918. (It started in Kansas.) The second era of the Klan, beginning in 1915, was fueled by anti-immigrant hysteria with the anti-black racism. The waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants upset the dominance of Protestant culture. In 1924, the 6 million member-strong Klan successfully supported the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act, that severely limited immigration from non-WASP nations, including those that Donald Trump would later call “shit-hole countries.” Trump’s own reference to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan Flu” echoed the pandemic xenophobia a hundred years-prior. It’s not surprising that hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans exploded following Trump’s scapegoating.

The latest version of this has been Trump, and his Mini Me, JD Vance, and their retelling of the lie that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. It’s been proven that both Trump and Vance knew that the story, initially spread by a neo-Nazi group, was untrue. But it fed their anti-immigrant, anti-black mantra that (white) Americans are threatened by outsiders who have been “dropped in” (Vance’s term) to Small Town, USA by Democrats. The reality is that Springfield’s crime rate was higher when Trump was president and that the cat that was originally believed to be stolen by immigrants, Miss Sassy, was found safe it her owner’s basement. The impact of the lies of Trump and Vance have been devastating. There have been dozens of bomb threats, repeating Trump’s lie. Schools have been shut down and cultural festivals have been cancelled. The Proud Boys have marched in Springfield and the KKK have handed out flyers. Immigrants are being harassed and the city fears an El Paso-style mass shooting.

That Trump chose Springfield to trot out this old tired trope that immigrants are invading your town (and here they are legal immigrants, which is neither here nor there from Trump’s racist base). Springfield is Anytown, USA. There are 34 states with a Springfield (including here in Oregon, site of another mass shooting in 1998). Springfield was the fictional town on the TV sitcom Father Knows Best (1954 – 1960). There were no immigrants on Father Knows Best, Haitian or otherwise, to “infect the blood” (Trump’s words) of the country. There were no people color at all. No queer people. No disabled people. And women’s job was solely to support their men. It’s the “Great” Trump refers to on his red caps. Make America Springfield Again. And to do that, there needs to be “mass deportations” of anyone who doesn’t look like the mythical Anderson family.

And Trump has been very vocal that his mass deportation plan will be molded on President Eisenhower’s 1954 program,  “Operation Wetback.” Those sweeps rounded up nearly two million Mexican immigrants, many of them U.S. citizens and legal residents, and dumped many in the desert, across the border, leading to scores of death from heat. In July 1955, 88 deportees died in 112 degree heat, left without food or water. This is Trump’s immigration policy model.

Trump’s racism is also evident to his complete unwillingness to acknowledge that the casualties of his abortion bans have mostly been women of color. White women with resources can travel to safe states, but lower income women are stuck in Gilead. If Ivanka Trump wants to terminate a pregnancy, for whatever reason, she can hop a plane to California, but not so for less fortunate women, like 28-year-old Georgian Amber Thurman, who is dead and won’t be voting this fall. Maybe that was Trump’s intent. We’ve watched Kamala Harris, who is a human being, shed tears over these preventible deaths. Trump refuses to acknowledge them, even when Harris forced him to hear the details at the Presidential debate. They’re just black women.

Blame the Jews

Of course behind all this, just like with another sociopath who came to power 91 years ago, is anti-Semitism. Speaking to Jewish groups in Washington DC on Thursday, Trump said that if he didn’t win in November, the Jews would be to blame. And if blaming Jews wasn’t enough (Where have we seen that before?), he told his audience that if Harris was elected, “Israel would cease to exist in less than two years,” which a) is completely insane, and b) uses the same old anti-Semitic trope that Jews only care about Israel and no other issue. Jews are not a monolith. It should also be pointed out that Trump’s evangelical base loves Israel, but not because they love Jewish people. The see Jews as keeping the “promise land” warm for the return of their messiah, and then they will be dispensable. Trump did get a warm round of applause in DC, and some likely chanted, “Down with us!” (At these events, Trump also stated he would re-instate his Muslim ban to prevent people from coming to America from “infected” countries. An anti-Semitic/Islamophobic two-fer!)

Trump’s flirtation with neo-Nazism is also not new. He used anti-Semitic imagery to claim that secret sources of money was behind rival Hillary Clinton in 2016. He referred to the murderous Nazis who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people.” Trump hosted Nick Fuentes, a notorious neo-Nazi, at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and could not seem to get enough of famous Hitler fan Kanye West. “But he can’t be an anti-Semite! He has a Jewish son-in-law!” If you like Trump, he likes you. And neo-Nazis REALLY like him.

Trump’s Black Nazi

This brings us to North Carolina and the black man Trump described as “twice as good as Martin Luther King.” North Carolina Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, an ideological basket case, has cast doubt on the occurrence of the Holocaust, praised slavery, and said he would prefer if women did not have the right to vote. Trump, endorsing Robinson for governor of the state, called him “MLK on steroids.” (Apparently, all Trump knows about King is that he was a black man who gave speeches.) This week it was revealed that Robinson, who has an established history of eating pizza in porn shops, had been claiming to be a “Black Nazi” on an adult website called Nude Africa, where he posted that he preferred Hitler to Obama. Robinson fits the profile of fellow black Republican Byron Donalds of Florida, who Trump said, “is one of the smart ones.” As long as Black Nazi praises Trump, he has the orange seal of approval.

Let’s be 100 percent honest. The core of Trump’s base are old white men who see their Father Knows Best America fading from view. They desperately want to make America 1954 again. They are thrilled that Trump is weaponizing a segment of the population’s fears about the rapid pace of demographic change. The good news is that the old white man vote is shrinking fast. Like Trump himself, that demographic is increasingly incoherent, shaking their fists at clouds. But those mean old white men can do a lot of harm to others on their way out the door, including training a new generation of white men, like JD Vance, to continue their politics of hate and exclusion. A massive rejection of Trump’s racist views of America is the only way we can move forward.