It’s Official: With “Vermin,” Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk He’s telling us what he will do to his political enemies if he’s president again. Is anyone listening?
I feel pretty safe in saying that we can now stop giving him the benefit of that particular doubt. His use—twice; once on social media, and then repeated in a speech—of the word “vermin” to describe his political enemies cannot be an accident. That’s an unusual word choice. It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only.
He’s been using Nazi talk since day one. “Fake news” is the most glaring example, which is just the most recent take on Lügenpresse.
And that was an actual term before he co-opted it. It would refer to the random blogs that claimed to be news sites that would post laughably false articles with doctored photos and completely made up quotes.
There was stuff with Hillary saying things that she literally never said, but it was “reporting” that she said it. The minor right wing sites would then cite these articles and the major right wing organizations would quote them. It would be proven false (easily) but by then they had moved onto the latest thing Hillary “did” (according to these sites).
Trump took this very useful term and twisted it into “anything I don’t like is fake.”
Thank you, it drives me batty that it’s become so hard to discuss the problems of actual fake news, much of which benefits Trump and needs to be called out, without people thinking we’re MAGA conspiracy loons.
But also, I kind of chuckled, because your use of past tense made it sound like those things don’t happen anymore, rather than being the cornerstone of right wing media today.
Thank you, it drives me batty that it’s become so hard to discuss the problems of actual fake news, much of which benefits Trump and needs to be called out, without people thinking we’re MAGA conspiracy loons.
But also, I kind of chuckled, because your use of past tense made it sound like those things don’t happen anymore, rather than being the cornerstone of right wing media today.
Thank you, it drives me batty that it’s become so hard to discuss the problems of actual fake news, much of which benefits Trump and needs to be called out, without people thinking we’re MAGA conspiracy loons.
But also, I kind of chuckled, because your use of past tense made it sound like those things don’t happen anymore, rather than being the cornerstone of right wing media today.