Tim Scott drops out, and Trump voices his worst desires | Opinion
Tim Scott, the junior U.S. Senator from South Carolina, is like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest. If he suspends his campaign for president and no one notices, did he really have one? He called it quits Nov. 12 on a Fox News show (of course), surprising his own staff. In other non-news, there will be more cold days in December than there have been in November.
While Scott was making official his disappearance from a campaign season that he never seemed an actual-serious participant in, the man he helped make president in 2016 was making real news by mimicking a pre-Holocaust Adolf Hitler.
“In honor of our great veterans today, we pledge to you that we will root out the communist, Marxist, fascist, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Donald Trump told a New Hampshire crowd on Veteran’s Day.
Those who dare oppose or disagree with Trump are bigger threats to the U.S. than the authoritarians in Russia, North Korea and China, the former president boldly told a crowd of Republican voters he was courting, hoping they’d help him get another crack at the White House.
Vermin, he called them.
Vermin.
Use of such labels to describe fellow human beings has echoes of how some of history’s worst actors paved the way for historic destruction and evil that would follow. The first step is to dehumanize your opposition, declare their lives don’t matter so neither would their deaths or suffering.
It came before the Holocaust and Hitler’s declaration that he should have the right to “eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin” before he carried out that evil plan. Before the Rwandan genocide in 1994, during which roughly one million people were murdered during a 100-day-long onslaught, radio broadcasters with huge audiences repeatedly referred to the Tutsi minority as “cockroaches” and “snakes.”
That these words are being proudly spoken by the leading candidate for the presidential nomination of one of our two major parties makes it that much more disturbing, especially given that Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said the former president praised Hitler for doing “a lot of good things.” It’s disturbing that Trump’s target audience — most of whom consider themselves good Christians, or just good people — is receptive to that kind of blatant hatred.
But the real problem isn’t Trump, though a problem he is. It’s that tens of millions of Americans are backing him and will no matter what he does, no matter what he says, no matter how ugly he gets.
It doesn’t matter that he plans to implement what would amount to concentration camps and a rerun of Operation Wetback if re-elected. All they want is to feel re-empowered — to stop the march of progress and make the country sound and look like it did when their granddaddies were young. And they believe Trump is the best vessel to make that a reality.
Trump, for his part, is busy readying an army of people who would serve in another Trump administration with more loyalty to him than the U.S.
His staunchest supporters don’t care that when their granddaddies were young, thousands of Americans, mostly but not only Black, were lynched in the public square in horrific ways as large crowds of self-declared God-fearing people cheered and took home body parts of the victims as souvenirs. As they seem unbothered by such lessons of history, there are plenty of other Americans complacent, convinced such things can’t be repeated because we are a great country filled with good people.
But they can. Even if our system of checks and balances makes it difficult for Trump to make real his worst desires, a man like that can still do enormous damage to a country he doesn’t love nearly as much as he loves himself. That becomes clearer as Republicans such as Scott, whose calling card had been their love of country over self before they began kneeling before a madman, bow out or refuse to even challenge Trump and his dictatorial goals.
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.
