The White House website engages in a zenophobic tirade which might match the that of fascist governments and political movements of the past 100 years. Swept up in this phobia are, beyond the ostensible focus on persons with criminal profiles, produce pickers, kitchen workers, primary care physicians, AI experts.

Anne Applebaum on Trump’s recent language (June 5)

“…. A very specific language that comes from the 1930s. Trump’s been doing it for a while, but it somehow became more prominent and noticeable recently. And this is the language where he talks about the enemies within, the enemies of the people. And specifically he talks about his political opponents and migrants also as vermin, he talks about migrants poisoning the blood of Americans. And this is language that not only comes from Hitler, it also comes from Stalin. I wrote several books about Stalin and Stalinism. I have a whole file of notes that I once took in the East German Stasi archives. I typed the word vermin into the search line and discovered dozens of examples of the Stazi using it too. And it’s not been part of American politics before. American politics have been racist before and we’ve called one another traitors and unpatriotic and so on. We haven’t talked about one another as being insects or vermin or parasites. And this comes from the language of regimes who saw their enemies as not citizens, as not necessarily human, as people who could be treated or destroyed anyway that they liked. “