Hate as a Political Weapon: How Trump & Vance are Reviving Dangerous Racist Myths

From ancient lies to modern slander, the GOP's toxic rhetoric is weaponizing fear and tearing America apart…

Image by Angela Yuriko Smith from Pixabay

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

With European antisemites from the Middle Ages right up through WWII, the blood libel was to claim that Jews were using the blood of Christian children to make their matzo bread for Passover. In 1890s America, east coast German and Dutch immigrants were slandered with claims they were making sausage from local pets; the assertion was even made into a then-well-known folk song. Chinese immigrants suffered the same sort of defamation with white Americans spreading rumors of pets being served in their restaurants from the 19th century through last year.

Now it’s Donald Trump and JD Vance turn telling the vicious, racist lie that legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are both here illegally (they’re not) and are eating the pets of local white people (also a lie). Most recently, Don Jr. has repeated his father’s frequent claim that Black people have lower IQs than white Americans:

“You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world.”

Their rhetoric has already inspired threats of violence, which is exactly what they want: anything to stay in the headlines as the champions of America’s white supremacist political party. This is how fascists and bullies behave.

Members of Trump‘s team have told reporters that this is a strategy. JD Vance admits they are “creating stories” to keep the hatred against Haitian immigrants alive and at the top of the news cycle:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually has to pay attention to the suffering of American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Yesterday, Trump repeatedly refused to condemn the bomb threats being inflicted on Springfield schools and government buildings, and then publicly posted that he has “hate” for Taylor Swift. Hate, hate, hate.

And as long as Trump and Vance keep making their outrageous claims, the media keeps talking about immigration — which Trump believes is his strong suit. And the media is not talking about what Biden and Harris have accomplished so far or what they plan to do for America in the future. Trump wins no matter what.

Will it work?

Following the January 6th insurrection and coup attempt, The New York Times documented hundreds of thousands of Republicans across America leaving their party by going to the effort of changing their party registration.

Most, like Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, say it’s because of the hate. Particularly since the rise of Trump in 2015, but certainly dating back to Trump’s 2008 Birther conspiracy theory — and with the seeds planted in Richard Nixon’s 1968 Southern Strategy — hate has filled what has become the putrid core of the GOP.

Hate of queer people; hate of college professors; hate of Black people; hate of immigrants; hate of public school teachers and books; hate of Hispanics; hate of “uppity” women; hate of drag queens; hate of liberals; hate of American history; hate of Asians; hate of “woke” and other terms to describe tolerance and compassion.

Hate is now the primary driving force within today’s Republican Party, so it shouldn’t surprise us that — as they slip in the polls — Trump and Vance would follow the examples of Nixon, Reagan, and GHW Bush’s “Willie Horton” strategy and fall back on naked appeals to the most destructive forms of racism.

The GOP’s embrace of hate as a political strategy has moved out of the fever swamps of conspiracy and the stereotypical “redneck racist” world into everyday interactions. A Hispanic worker at McDonald’s is berated in a viral video, Asians are randomly attacked, teachers flee the profession in fear, young women are terrorized in Red states, friendships and even families are torn asunder by this spreading Republican-endorsed hate.

There’s a reason we have specific criminal laws against acting out hate: it’s destructive but, more important, it’s highly contagious. Which is why these demagogues in the GOP are using hate itself — raw, fear-driven hate — as a weapon against their political opposition, the Democratic Party and the diverse people it embraces. It’s using bullying as a political tool.

It’s a deadly game they’re playing, and they know it. The last time a major world power’s largest conservative political party embraced hate as a political strategy was 1933 in Germany, as former Secretary of State Madeline Albright warned us in her prescient book Fascism: A Warning:

“Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was ‘bully.’”

It’s not like we weren’t told this was a possibility.

Hate has always been the main tool of demagogues and dictators because it’s powerful enough to cause people to act in ways they normally would consider offensive or even bizarre.

It has this power because it’s deeply rooted in mammalian survival instincts that predate our very humanity. Fear was necessary to help us survive.

The most powerful of all our various primal instincts is fear. It’s even more powerful than hunger or the drive for sex. Fear, when persistent, inspires hate in almost every instance.

And fear is even more contagious than hate: to make a person hate somebody, you must first make them fear that person or people. You must turn someone or a group of people into an “other,” something perceived both as a threat and as less than human.

And now — as we saw this weekend when Vance continued to try to push the Springfield Haitian immigrant lie — all the guardrails, the limits, even common decency, are gone.

When Donald Trump, in 2021, said that “hanging Mike Pence” was “just common sense,” Republican politicians went out of their way to avoid criticizing him: Wyoming Republican Senator John Barasso was repeatedly asked by George Stephanopoulos on ABC to comment and he repeatedly changed the subject until Stephanopoulos finally gave up.

Hate used as a political weapon, it turns out, can be such a powerful motivating and rallying force that it produces fear even in powerful people like Senator Barrasso and pretty much every other elected Republican. Once they submit, their fear is then used as a shield to protect the leader who first inspired that hate.

Republicans used to call themselves the “party of ideas.” They had policy papers on everything, and as little as 10 years ago used to love coming on my program and other media to debate policy.

Now they’re afraid to say anything that might offend these bullies — Donald Trump and JD Vance — and afraid to tell the truth about what has happened to their party. Today, groups of Republican House members are even going so far as to defend and visit in jail the people who tried to overthrow our government and put 140+ police officers in the hospital, killing three. Trump calls them “heroes” and “hostages.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that the number of serious threats against the lives of members of Congress — nearly all threats were directed at Democrats — had more than doubled between 2020 and 2021 and continues to explode.

Hate rarely remains purely rhetorical when used to gain political power. History tells us that it usually translates into violence until there is a whole-of-society consensus and effort to stop it and punish those who have exploited it.

That same Times story documents how a young Republican in Idaho attended a town hall meeting and asked a local politician when they could start killing Democrats:

“‘When do we get to use the guns?’ he said as the audience applauded. ‘How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?’ The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a ‘fair’ question.”

American Nazis, complete with guns, swastika flags, and Sieg Heil shouts, showed up for a drag show in Ohio, egged on by Republican legislators. They so threatened a Black reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal that he “left for his own safety.”

As Rachel Maddow noted on her program, Donald Trump's son Eric is traveling the country with an author and speaker who says “the Jews did 9/11” and that “Hitler was fighting ‘the same people that we are trying to take down today.’” Not to mention what’s up with Trump’s new best friend, white supremacist Laura Loomer.

As Benito Mussolini or Donald Trump would be the first to tell you, love is powerful but hate is overwhelming. With enough hate you can take over a nation and kill millions of its people. You can become fabulously rich and famous. You can rule most of the world, or at least make a good run at it.

Unfortunately, this is not a problem Democrats can solve alone.

If ever there was a time for patriotic Americans — particularly in the media — to be calling out hate as a political tool, this is it.

Now is the moment for Republicans who love America to display the courage of the hundreds of high profile GOP elected and former administration officials who have publicly condemned their party and endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

As German conservatives learned by the late 1930s, if they don’t act now it may well soon be too late.