‘Death Wish’: Trump Menaces the Free Press in Dark Rallies

Donald Trump’s rally in Las Vegas took a menacing turn Thursday night when he shaded his eyes from the stage lights and peered out at the press corp covering the event. “Oh! That’s a lot of fake news!” he said. The mood turned dark, and menacing boos and jeers filled the basketball arena at UNLV. Trump stood in silence surveying the restive crowd before remarking of the press that covers him, “You know they sort of have a death wish.” He then claimed that the reporters are only willing to brave his rallies because their love of “ratings” is greater than their love of country.

The event was the second arena rally of the day for Trump. Earlier at a rally in Tempe, on the campus of Arizona State University, Trump also inveighed against a free press. “They’re just bad people,” Trump said to roars from the crowd. He then dusted off his favorite line from the genocidal Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. “They’re the enemy of the people. I’ve been asked not to say that. I don’t want to say it,” Trump continued, before returning to the fascist phrase: “They’re the enemy of the people.”

In this news cycle Trump has been accused, by top generals who served alongside him, of being “fascist to the core” (former joint chiefs of staff chair Gen. Mark Milley) and fitting the textbook definition of “fascist” (former Trump chief of staff Gen. John Kelly). Trump’s defenders have long downplayed the clear and present danger of putting Trump back in the White House, and they are now attempting to downplay these harrowing claims, even seeking to normalize Trump allegedly expressing admiration for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s generals.

Yet for his part Thursday, Trump appeared intent on showcasing his fascist menace, for the world to see. Many Americans take Trump’s attacks on the press as old hat, but the “enemy of the people” line is a chilling OG example of Trump’s admiration for strongmen. Stalin used “enemy of the people” as a de facto death-warrant for his critics during Soviet-era purges. Long laughed off as hyperbole, the threat sounded anything but funny in Las Vegas as Trump linked reporting on him to having a “death wish.”

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Some of the most prominent newspapers in America appear to be preemptively backing down in the face of Trump’s menacing rhetoric, which has also included calls to revoke the broadcasting licenses of CBS and other networks he feels haven’t covered him fairly. The billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have both reportedly killed their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris before they could see the light of day, leading to a spate of resignations. Marty Barron, the Post’s former executive editor, called out the paper’s brass for “disturbing spinelessness” with “democracy as its casualty.”

Attacking the fourth estate was hardly the only dark impulse Trump flashed Thursday. He continued his openly racist tirades against immigrants, using Hitlerian phrases about these new arrivals being less than human, even “garbage,” or part of a national infection.

“A lot of people coming out of the Congo,” Trump said in Tempe of Black immigrants from that war-torn country, as well as from “South America” and some 180 countries across the world. “We’re a dumping ground. We’re like a garbage can for the world,” Trump said of these new arrivals. “Every time I come up and talk about what they’ve done to our country, I get angrier and angrier,” Trump said, underscoring that he’d just hit on a new metaphor for him. “It’s the first time I’ve ever said ‘garbage can,’ but you know what it’s a very accurate description.”

Trump also claimed that the arrival of this human “garbage” has been part of an invasion, a conquest, or even a pestilence. “I will rescue every town across America that has been invaded and conquered…. They’ve been conquered,” Trump said, before shifting metaphors to disease. “We have a lot of towns that have not yet been infected, but they’re petrified that they will be. And they will be.”

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Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric is not hidden. It has been on display for months as he’s adopted Nazi language about immigrants being “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. He’s used this fascist fear campaign to gin up support for his proposed plan of ethnic cleansing, to round up and expel as many as 20 million immigrant residents here without papers. 

As Rep. Delia Ramirez, a Democratic House member from Illinois who is married to an undocumented immigrant, told Rolling Stone, “Trump has literally done everything in his power to dehumanize immigrants, to make them less than human, to accuse them of eating cats and dogs, accusing them of raping people, of being released from asylums.” She then insisted: “I’m doing everything in my power to make sure that someone as evil as Donald Trump never gets back to that White House.”