The Nazis succeeded in demonizing Jews. Trump is doing the same thing with Hispanic immigrants. While the typical immigrant looks like a normal person who happens to have brown skin, conveniently for him gang members with the same color skin have tattoos all over their faces and bodies.
While all, or perhaps most, members of Hispanic gangs aren’t violent, Trump wants to portray them as rapists and killers.
In many ways Trump has more going for him than Hitler did in turning Jews into the enemy of other Germans.
Some Jews may have had large noses making them look different but what made them easy to cast as enemies was the existing anti-Semisticism based on their religion and animosity towards them because many were successful members of the merchant class.
Even though other Germans had contact with Jews until they were segregated into ghettos and knew they weren’’t violent criminals” Nazi propaganda was successful in characterizing them this way. For example:
The following is from an article in this U.S. Holocaust Museum website:
Demonizing the enemy is an effective technique for wartime propaganda. Hitler recognized this technique during World War I. Although most wartime propaganda demonized the political and military leaders of enemy countries, the Nazis went further. They considered all Jews—men, women, and even children—to be a deadly threat to the German people.
On posters and in speeches, newsreels, and radio programs, Nazis demonized and dehumanized European Jews. They depicted European Jews as carriers of deadly diseases such as typhus to justify segregating them in ghettos. They identified European Jews as a violent threat, calling them bandits and terrorists. Nazi propaganda held the Jews responsible for causing World War II, for which they would have to pay. All Jews, Hitler’s propagandists proclaimed, were accomplices in an international plot to enslave the non-Jewish world. Using such false claims, Nazi propaganda presented its war against Jews as a struggle between good and evil.
There were no Jewish criminal gangs in Germany in the 1930s, at least not in the way we describe a criminal gang. The Nazis wanted to cast them as criminals. This is from The Construction of “Jewish Criminality” in Nazi Germany:
This chapter shows that the right wing's essentialized construct of the Jew as criminal in the Weimar period was translated into policy and action in Germany after 1933. Until 1938, when the Nazis unequivocally embraced the guiding principle that “The Jew is outside the law,” they often took pains to charge individual Jews with specific crimes, usually focusing on technical aspects of tax laws and currency-exchange regulations. On the one hand, they sought to exploit the racist agenda and traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes. On the other, they wanted to give the impression that the Nazi State was simply zealous in applying the letter of the law.
Trump has lucked out. There are criminal American Hispanic gangs that can easily be depicted as the kind of people who would break into your house and do unpseakable things to you and your family.
Trump went from making the ludicrous claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pet dogs and cats to lucking out because the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is really composed of some real bad guys. Consider:
The following fact doesn’t matter:
There's little evidence to support the administration's contention that large numbers of the deportees are members of the violent Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua. Reporting by USA TODAY last fall found ICE, the FBI and law enforcement agencies in states with reports of the gang's activity had tallied fewer than 135 members of the gang, while the Trump administration says it deported more than 200 members to El Salvador last week alone. USA Today
The logical next step for Trump and his minions is to begin to plant the idea in public perception that anyone who has crossed, or is trying to cross, the southern border trying to make a better life for themselves will become a member of a violent criminal gang.
Trump and minions like Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi have the perfect foil in Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They are trying to convince the public that although he may look like a normal nice family man he’s really a secret gang member. This does not bode well for him or any other person deported without due process ever returning home. If they can pull this off with him they will keep doing it with others.
Plans to build a huge detention facility (aka prison) in Texas have been paused (see article), but I expect Trump will stop sending anyone to El Salvador due to public pressure and will eventually build facilities in the United States. We will end up with an American Gulag. They will provide lots of jobs for those who couldn’t meet the standards for thuggery to be members of ICE or other Trump Gestapos.
Read previous Substacks.
