Let's talk about Trump's white nationalist authoritarianism

The president of the United States suggested last week that his political supporters might resort to violence if they didn’t get their way.

The statement didn’t even get that much attention. I’m guessing you heard a lot more about the college-admissions scandal than about the president’s threat of extralegal violence. So let me tell you a little more about the threat.

In an Oval Office interview with writers from the right-wing news site Breitbart, President Trump began complaining about Paul Ryan. As speaker of the House, Ryan blocked efforts by other House Republicans to subpoena and investigate people on the political left. Trump’s loyal allies in the House “wanted to go tougher,” Trump said, “but they weren’t allowed to by leadership.”

To Trump, the incident was part of a larger problem: “You know, the left plays a tougher game. It’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. O.K.? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump. I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

This wasn’t the first time Trump had mused about violence, of course. He has talked about “Second Amendment people” preventing the appointment of liberal judges. He’s encouraged police officers to bang suspects’ heads against car roofs. He has suggested his supporters “knock the hell” out of hecklers. At a rally shortly before 2018 Election Day, he went on a similar riff about Bikers for Trump and the military.

I’m well aware of the various see-no-evil attempts to excuse this behavior: That’s just how he talks. Don’t take him literally. Other Republicans are keeping him in check. His speeches and tweets don’t really matter.

But they do matter. The president’s continued encouragement of violence — and of white nationalism — is part of the reason that white-nationalist violence is increasing. Funny how that works.

After Trump’s latest threat, I reached out to several experts in democracy and authoritarianism to ask what they made of it. Their answers were consistent: No, the United States does not appear at risk of widespread political violence anytime soon. But Trump’s words are still corroding democracy and public safety.

His latest incitement fit a historical pattern, and one with “scary echoes,” as Daniel Ziblatt, who co-wrote the recent book “How Democracies Die,” told me. Trump combined lies about his political opponents — Democrats who need to be investigated (for made-up scandals) — with allusions to a patriotic, violent response by ordinary citizens. Latin American autocrats, including Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, have used this combination. So did European fascists in the 1930s.

The United States, thank goodness, does not have armed citizen militias carrying out regular attacks, as those other countries did. But our situation is still worrisome. “Violent talk can, at minimum, encourage lone-wolf violence,” Steven Levitsky, Ziblatt’s co-author and a Harvard political scientist, said. “It can also slowly normalize political violence, turning discourse and ideas that were once unsayable and even unthinkable into things that are sayable and thinkable.”
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It isn’t very complicated: The man with the world’s largest bully pulpit keeps encouraging violence and white nationalism. Lo and behold, white-nationalist violence is on the rise. You have to work pretty hard to persuade yourself that’s just a big coincidence.

Trump regularly engages in both veiled incitement of violence and anti-Muslim bigotry with a kind of casual regularity that almost seems designed to lull us into desensitization. That this is losing the power to shock is bad enough. But that’s producing another terrible result: This desensitization leads us to spend too little time focused on the actual consequences these verbal degradations could be having.

This is what the White House wants. That reality comes through clearly in an important appearance that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney made on “Fox News Sunday,” which opens a window on these matters in a particularly illuminating way.

Fox’s Chris Wallace pointed out that before allegedly massacring 50 people at two mosques, the New Zealand shooter declared that he supports Trump “as a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Wallace asked Mulvaney: “What does the president think of that?”

Mulvaney replied that it is not “fair” to cast the shooter as a “supporter of Donald Trump.” Wallace pressed Mulvaney on Trump’s history of anti-Muslim remarks — which is long and ugly — and noted that just after the shooting, Trump described immigrants as an “invasion,” just as the alleged shooter did. He asked why Trump won’t state clearly that “there is no place in America for this kind of hatred.”

Mulvaney repeatedly brushed off Wallace’s questions, bridled at the suggestion that the violence was Trump’s “fault,” and whined: “I’m not sure what more you want the president to do.”

What’s particularly reprehensible about this performance is what’s hiding in plain sight: There are no signs that Trump is troubled by the fact that the man who allegedly murdered dozens of people because of their Muslim faith sees him as a symbol of the devotion to protecting white identity that drove this act.

“What does the president think of that?” Wallace asked Mulvaney, who treated this question as not worthy of a response. Mulvaney cynically cast the core issue as: Is Trump directly responsible for this act? In fact, it’s this: Are Trump’s words helping produce conditions that are emboldening and encouraging the type of white-nationalist and white-supremacist group activity that is leading disturbed proponents into violence and murder?

There are no signs that either Trump or the administration sees this as a question that should preoccupy them. Why not? Why aren’t Trump and his advisers asking themselves this question?