Thumpy
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Number 1 - SCAPEGOATING
Scapegoating was a Nazi maneuver to blame minority groups for policy failures and the weak economy. Trump has blamed foreigners and minorities for taking away jobs and killing Americans, but we need to see if this rhetoric from the campaign trail continues once he takes office.
Moreover, Nazi ideologues drew connections between their adversaries: to them, Marxists were essentially Jews, and Jews were connected to big money, so they alleged a global conspiracy against “racial” Germans — the “Jüdisch-Bolschewistische Weltverschwörung.” The equivalent today — an invented conspiracy of Trump’s domestic critics, minorities and international adversaries — would be a clear parallel and warning sign.
Trump has continued to blame foreign and domestic enemies for his policy failures. China has been blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic. Domestically, violent Anarchists, left-wing cancel culture, and the “deep state” have been blamed. Trump has never connected these dots into a Nazi-style world conspiracy, but his most ardent followers have. In the popular QAnon conspiracy theory, a child-abusing, state-run conspiracy, composed of global elites, is responsible for a wide array of social problems. Such conspiracy theories were not originally proposed by Trump, but he has embraced them, by drawing a “Q” in the air, referring to the state department as the “deep state department”, and by proposing that his reelection was stolen by a conspiracy. In summary, Trump has relied heavily on scapegoating.
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