Of all Donald Trump’s rhetorical strengths, one that often goes unmentioned is his reliance on privilege. No one has ever seen anything like virtually everything he brings to the table. Why does he do this? And what does it reveal?
Much of the misinformation about Trump’s relentless perjury comes in the form of gross, almost comical exaggeration: he has the largest crowd anyone has ever seen (while his AI-generated opponent doesn’t exist); Democrats not only support abortion rights, but have legalized infanticide in six states; as well as everything he said today.
a quick look in Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention In July, he showed that his addiction to superlatives had overtaken all his other speaking habits. He used them to describe almost everything he discussed. The criminalization of political dissent is “at an all-time high.” The “inflationary crisis” is destroying our people like never before. They’ve never seen anything like it.” As for the “illegal immigration crisis,” well, “no one’s ever seen anything like it.”
During his presidential debate, Trump said, “We’ve had an economy like no one, no country has ever seen.” Also under Trump, “we had the most secure border and the best economy in the history of our country, in the history of the world.” This brings us to the middle of the speech.
Trump’s reliance on favoritism continued in last week’s presidential debate. Between letting us know that pets are on the menu in Springfield, Ohio, and that Kamala Harris wants to conduct transgender operations at a prison for illegal aliens, he told us he had “the most shocking demonstration in the history of politics” and “immigrant crime” is “happening at levels that nobody imagined.”
This kind of rhetoric is not new. Vesna Mikolić, a Slovenian linguist, analyzed the speech of four Italian Nazis in the 1920s. She found that the increased intensity of their language, including hyperbole and superlatives, was associated with their detachment from reality, as well as an incitement to violence and actual violence. Mikolic calls this kind of rhetoric because when Trump promises to “take America to new heights of greatness that the world has never seen before” – “fascist imagination“.
When a leader indulges in hyperbole, he remains committed. As Richard Evans reminds us in his book Hitler’s People: Faces of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler claimed that his invasion of France was “the most glorious victory of all time” and that he was the greatest military leader of all time, greater than Napoleon or Caesar.
Federico Finchelstein, an expert on Argentine fascism, says that such leaders “dream of creating new realities and ultimately adapt reality to their imagination.” For example, Hitler claimed that Jews were a sick people and then created the conditions that predisposed them to it. The Nazis’ goal, Finchelstein says, is “to eliminate every vestige of demonstrable truth.” and a philosopher Hannah Arendt says “The ideal subjects of a totalitarian government… are people for whom there is no difference between truth and fiction and there is no difference between truth and falsehood.”
Finchelstein also points out that fascism cannot arise without existing enemies. Every battle is urgent and every enemy is deadly. It’s as if all the battles between good and evil in our superhero movies feed Trump’s illusion that he doesn’t live by normal human rules. (New NFT trading card collection$99 each, which depicts him as a superhero, with an American flag as a cape).
“We didn’t have any wars,” the former president said in his convention speech. “I could stop wars with a phone call.” By this logic, if Trump is re-elected, all wars will cease because of the irrepressible charm of the one he has befriended.genius“Vladimir Putin”fantastic“Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who “does an amazing job“.
These foreign despots are his allies, while Trump’s existential enemies are domestic. Joe Biden is a destroyer of democracy; Harris is a communist, Marxist, radical leftist lunatic. And both, of course, are liars.
According to Finchelstein, predictability is another central characteristic of the would-be dictator. “Nazis always deny who they are and attribute their characteristics… to their enemies.” Trump’s prediction creates enemies among his fellow citizens, whom he blames for his growing legal peril. As the forces of justice unite against him, the odds are stacked against him. He has called this election a battle between good and evil, because for him it is really a bitter, bitter battle to evade responsibility.
Psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal, in their podcast “The Decline of Trump,” see the increasing simplicity of Trump’s vocabulary and outlook as a sign of cognitive decline, which may well be a good thing. But this is also a feature of fascism. Trump has always lied, but his delusions have reached a level no one has ever seen before.
Laurie Weiner is the founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of Music.
