The presidential election is next month. Donald Trump is feeling the pressure. He planned on running against President Biden and not Kamala Harris. Since becoming the party’s nominee, Harris has closed the gap with Trump and is now leading in the national polls. Harris is tied with Trump in the key battleground states. The election is still one of the closest in modern American history; however, it is not the cakewalk it likely appeared to be when the summer kicked off.
For Donald Trump, the results of the 2024 presidential election are deeply personal. Although the Supreme Court has made Trump a de facto king who, despite his felony convictions, will be above the law if he takes back the White House, for now, he must navigate the reality that he could be sentenced to prison for the rest of his natural life if convicted in even one of the three remaining criminal trials that await him after the election.
There is also the narcissistic injury that he is experiencing at the very thought of being defeated in the election by a Black woman. Trump was symbolically castrated before an audience of tens of millions of people by Harris when she defeated him during their first debate in September. To lose the presidential election would be devastating for Trump’s ego. He has already announced that he will leave the country if he loses on Election Day.
Instead of the so-called “issues,” Trump and his surrogates have decided to embrace what CNN’s Stephen Collinson describes as a “feral political offensive”: In essence, nothing is off limits in Trump’s campaign to take back the White House.
As I chronicle these last weeks until the election, I keep returning to the visual of Trump as Robert Mitchum in his iconic role as Rev. Harry Powell in Charles Laughton’s 1955 film “The Night of the Hunter," his knuckles tattooed with the words “love” and “hate." With the election a month away, Trump is now more angry and more rageful, flexing his muscles, spittle coming out of his mouth as he becomes even more feral in his attacks on Harris and his other “enemies.”
On the other hand, Trump, the political cult leader and master manipulator, is continuing to love-bomb his followers. His campaign's fundraising emails call supporters friends, beg for their counsel and claim Trump will make any sacrifice for them — even his life. This is transactional, of course: Trump wants more money from his MAGA people.
Trump also plays the complementary role of being a dark, twisted and cruel therapist who knows how to trigger and pressure his MAGA people’s and other followers’ pain points. But, unlike a kind and responsible therapist, Trump offers no catharsis or healing. Instead, Trump, like other demagogues and fascists, is a sadist. This is the “hate” in Trump’s love/hate strategy. The result is that Trump’s MAGA people and other followers are left perpetually unbalanced, wound up for action and waiting for their Dear Leader to unleash them upon “the enemy.”
In an especially sinister move — even by Trump’s vile standards — the corrupt ex-president is using his propaganda emails to target and incite violence and hatred against nonwhite “illegal immigrants,” refugees and other non-citizens. In an email sent last week, Trump told his followers: “Don’t let anyone view your screen." The fundraising email is styled as some type of secret message, an “eyes-only” communication akin to the ones sent to intelligence operatives — or perhaps something lurid that could get them in trouble if others were to see it.
Trump’s “secret” email begins:
OFFICIAL VERIFIED 2024 CITIZENS SURVEY
Friend,
Our official Trump Records indicate that you have not completed your Official 2024 Citizens Only Survey!
Survey ID:
Response: MISSING
COMPLETE SURVEY
In order to ensure victory in 2024, we need our polling to be 100% up-to-date, so your response is VERY IMPORTANT to President Trump.
Friend, our country needs you in this fight!
Trump, whose campaign and authoritarian political project is based upon racism and nativism (and crushing any opposition to him and the MAGA movement), is emphasizing the distinctions between friend and foe, the “verified citizens” and those who are not. This message cannot be properly understood outside of Trump’s Hitlerian threat and promise to “purify” the nation’s “blood” of human “vermin.”
In a recent conversation, historian Rickard Frankel warns how Trump and his agents’ ethnic cleansing campaign will likely expand beyond “illegal aliens” and “unverified citizens” to include all other “enemies” of Trump’s regime:
[T]he idea that Trump is focused solely on deporting undocumented immigrants is absurd. His stormtroopers will round up anyone they decide does not belong in this country, whether they’re citizens or not. This is also something the Nazis did even before the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship. Only months after coming to power, the Interior Ministry stopped naturalizing Jews arriving from Eastern Europe and soon after that, they began removing the citizenship of Eastern European Jews who were granted citizenship between 1918 and 1933. Whatever their status, Trump means to remove anyone who does not fit within his particular vision of the American national/racial community.
To that point, Trump’s fundraising email continues:
“I’ve registered my campaign’s Official Citizens Only Survey in YOUR NAME.
I promise that your responses will be kept completely confidential from the WOKE MOB, so this is your chance to be completely honest with me.”
Trump asks for demographic information and political beliefs of his followers to weed out the “verified citizens” from the enemy Other.
Are you an AMERICAN CITIZEN or an ILLEGAL ALIEN?
If you are an “illegal alien” you are told to “end survey immediately.”
The screening process now complete, Trump then asks his followers if he should “conduct the largest deportation plan in history.”
Trump continues his process of determining friend and foe, “MAGA American” and the dangerous enemy Other, by targeting the LGBTQ community, and specifically transgender people:
Are you male or female?
MALE
FEMALE
INSANE
Inevitably, Trump turns his attention to Kamala Harris, accusing her of being some type of “commie” or “socialist." In reality, Harris is a member of the elite capitalist class, a former prosecutor and the vice president of the United States. Trump’s fundraising email then warns that the country will become a living hell (“doomsday”) if Harris becomes president. Trump presents himself as the alternative, a protector and martyr who took a bullet in an assassination attempt to protect his MAGA people and the country. Trump then asks his followers for more money.
An image then appears on the screen of Trump with his fist in the air and a fascistic proclamation from the Great and All-Powerful Leader:
I am Donald J. Trump. FEAR NOT!
I will always love you for supporting me.
Unity. Peace. Make America Great Again.
At a rally in Pennsylvania over the weekend, Trump escalated his apocalyptic rhetoric and attacks on Harris. Trump is now claiming that Harris is “mentally disabled,” that she should be impeached for non-existent crimes, and is essentially guilty of murder because she is somehow responsible for the killings and other crimes being committed by non-white migrants, refugees and “illegal aliens.”
In total, Trump and his surrogates are continuing with their years-long project of emotionally training and conditioning the MAGA people and other members of the “conservative” movement and right-wing into political extremism and violence. The language used in Trump’s speeches in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, his fundraising emails and his communications more broadly are almost textbook stochastic terrorism.
Research by political scientists and other experts has repeatedly shown that this process of radicalization has been remarkably effective, with a significant percentage (millions of people) of Trump’s MAGA followers and other members of the right-wing now supporting and being willing to participate in armed violence against Democrats and “liberals” to put Trump back in power and to “protect” “American values” and “the American way of life.”
In a powerful new essay, Robert Reich reflects on the role of hate in the Age of Trump and the country’s democracy crisis:
The word “hate” has become Trump’s signature utterance.
During the presidential debate, he claimed that President Biden “hates” Harris, that Harris “hates” Israel and also hates Arabs. After Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, he posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” in capital letters.
Hate is the single most powerful emotion Trump elicits from his followers. Hate fuels his candidacy. Hate gives Trump’s entire MAGA movement its purpose and meaning.
Trump’s closest allies are magnifying Trump’s hate….
Those who wield hate for personal ambition are among the vilest of human beings.
How to deal with the hate that Trump and his enablers are fueling?
We must call them out for what they’re doing. We must vote against the haters now running for office, from Trump on down, and urge others to join us.
The American mainstream news media (and especially the elite, agenda-setting news media) have mostly continued to normalize and “sane-wash” Trump’s escalating threats of violence and his feral political strategy. For example, Trump’s emails where he incites violence and radicalizes his MAGA people are rarely if ever discussed. The mainstream media also appears to have lost interest in Trump and Vance’s racist conspiracy theory hate campaign against the Black Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio. These terrorist threats against the Haitian community, and Black and brown people more broadly in Springfield, are no longer novel, the “new” in the “news,” even as the danger to lives and safety continues.
Trump is honest, transparent and direct in his plans to cause harm and suffering through a campaign of revenge and retribution against both his personal “enemies” and those deemed to be the enemy of the MAGA movement and his New America. If Donald Trump defeats Harris in the election and then takes power next January, becoming the country’s first dictator as promised, the American people, their news media and other leaders cannot say they were not warned. Once again, as it has been true throughout the Age of Trump, they live, and you sleep. Please wake up. You are almost out of time.
