Donald Trump fires up his MAGA legions by telling them Democrats hate America. Like his stolen election lie, it’s a textbook example of projection — charging his opponents with what he’s guilty of.
If you don’t think Trump detests the nation he aspires to lead, you haven’t been listening. Speaking recently before a rapt gathering of far-right activists, he sketched a nightmarish portrait of a dystopic America overrun by “bloodshed, chaos and violent crime.”
The nation’s 45th president risibly miscast himself as a “political dissident” bravely standing against “thugs and tyrants and fascists, scoundrels and rogues” who are leading the United States into “servitude and ruin.”
Reacting earlier to the judicial murder of a true political dissident, Trump twisted Alexei Navalny’s death in an icy Siberian prison camp into a grotesque analogy to his own supposed persecution by the “deep state.”
“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country… Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” he wrote.
Navalny is dead for having courageously borne witness to Vladimir Putin’s thuggish police state. Trump is cruising to the GOP presidential nomination despite facing criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election and getting hit recently with a $354 million penalty for financial fraud.
The injustice of it all!
For Trump, being held legally accountable for his inveterate lying and grifting is proof that tyranny is stalking America. “We’re turning into a communist country in many ways,” he opined at a recent Fox event.
For Americans not mesmerized by Trump’s megalomania, his legal problems are reassuring evidence that no one is above the law and that our democracy’s defense mechanisms are still working.
Sane Republicans, embarrassed by Trump’s bloviating but afraid to call him out, dismiss it all as political theater. It’s just his way of triggering dopamine rushes among his adoring fans.
But running for president by running down America is no joke. Our country is far from perfect, but Trump’s depiction of the United States as a corrupt and failing nation is slanderous and unpatriotic.
And because it reverberates around the world, it’s also a gift to America’s enemies. Since 2020, Trump has been shouting from the rooftops that U.S. elections are a sham for no other reason than that he lost one.
Thanks, Donald, for demoting the United States to banana republic status.
It’s hard to distinguish Trump’s dark narrative from anti-American disinformation spread by our chief adversaries, Putin and Chinese ruler Xi Jinping. Their state propaganda likewise portrays America as a nation on the skids, awash in crime, violence and illegal immigrants and afflicted by woke ideology and deep class and racial divides.
Not content with impugning the integrity of U.S. elections and trying to strongarm Congress, Trump has turned his political wrecking ball on our government’s third branch — the judiciary.
Facing four criminal indictments and a slew of civil charges, Trump is trying to gaslight Americans into believing that prosecutors, courts and judges in Atlanta, New York, Miami and Washington D.C. have joined in a conspiracy to keep him off the campaign trail.
This of course is more Trumpian projection. He’s the one relentlessly politicizing what he absurdly calls “Stalinist show trials carried out at Joe Biden’s orders.” Criminal defendants everywhere take note: Even when caught red-handed, you can always pull a Trump and play the victim.
Trump’s contempt for law and order also comes through loud and clear in his courtroom antics. In an overbearing performance worthy of a pro wrestling villain, Trump has insulted prosecutors, intimidated witnesses and accused judges and court officials of being personally biased against him.
In addition to subverting Americans’ confidence in their governing institutions, Trump’s slash-and-burn style of “leadership” tears up the unwritten rules that make our government of checks and balances work.
Temperamentally unable to engage in reasoned and respectful debate with people who don’t agree with him, Trump treats politics as war, civility as weakness and compromise as betrayal.
Rather than seeing Democrats as worthy if sadly misguided competitors, he describes them as mortal enemies trying to “destroy America.” Borrowing from the loathsome and dehumanizing vocabulary of last century’s fascist dictators, he’s even called his opponents “vermin.”
Normally U.S. presidential candidates invoke the nation’s shared values and vow to bring Americans together. They try to offer an inspiring and optimistic vision of how our future can be better than our past.
Trump, however, is anything but normal. He doesn’t uplift. He’s promising to tear us further apart, deepen the divide between red and blue America and misuse presidential powers to punish his political foes.
In response, President Biden and the Democrats should put the lie to Trump’s imaginary American hellscape.
This doesn’t mean reeling off lists of Biden’s legislative achievements. It means celebrating America’s enduring economic might and social diversity, unmatched powers of innovation, ability to adapt rapidly to change, capacity for civic inclusion and equality, the unselfish tradition of international leadership and strong alliances and our historic role as a beacon to the world for individual liberty and democratic self-government.
Like Lenin on the eve of the Russian revolution, Trump evidently believes the worse conditions in the country are, the better for him. Give him credit for being a radical political innovator: No one ever ran for president before by bemoaning how rotten America has become.
Trump’s disdain opens the door for Democrats to be unabashed patriots and speak of America with pride, optimism and affection. They should be as relentless in talking our country up as Trump is in talking it down.
Will Marshall is the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
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