We all saw the Nazi salute perfectly done by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. It was executed with shocking panache, a masterful dexterity only a straight-from-the-heart neo-Nazi could have mustered.
So, there is no question about it. Adolf Hitler has just been exhumed and revived, if not substantially revitalised, in America. That awful reincarnation, Donald Trump, the fElon, is, unsurprisingly, now on a rejigged tidal wave of assaults on the global order as we know it. This is Trump 2.0, as it is being widely described.
The first time, Trump 1.0, he acted with a measure of caution and a semblance of restraint because, back then, he had a lot to play for, a lot to lose. This time, however, he is on a waltzing roll, impatient to demolish the pillars, beams and columns of the world order with a rumbling charge of far-right disorder.
His initial 100 Executive Orders, signed with the haste and self-satisfied impudence of a rambunctious potentate, signalled the start of a rabid raid on conscience, empathy and morality. He wants to reshape America and, by implication, the global political and economic environment, after his junkyard dog conceptualization of it. Although he projects the image of a reformer, his whole essence is one that aims to restore the despised era of racial division and acrimony. He is weaponizing racism and xenophobia as an instrument of state policy, as he threatens to deport, by fiat, millions of foreigners “back to where they came from.”
It is reminiscent of Hitler’s vile attempt to eliminate Jews in the gas chambers of his grim concentration camps.
Trump’s contempt for immigrants, with a similitude to Hitler’s revulsion for Jews, is encapsulated in his hateful rhetoric about them, featuring the undisguised invocation of contemptuous language, indiscriminately applied – “criminals,” “rapists,” and “drug dealers.” The irony is that Trump is himself a wholly contemptible piece of so and so.
His disdain for immigrants shows his crude, cold and capricious nature. He has, whimsically, withdrawn America from the Paris Agreement on climate change, as well as the World Health Organization, two organizations key to the fate and future of many sections of the world, from where immigrants, for various, mostly legitimate, reasons, flow into America.
So, the central thrust of Trump’s “Make America Great” mantra is his monomaniacal revulsion and contempt for immigrants, whether they are legal or not. This is all he is about – a deranged obsession with not just illegal immigrants but all foreigners of all non-white races, with a particular focus on, and a savage disdain for, blacks and Mexicans.
So, he wants all such immigrants thrown out of America. And he wants an end to, if not a total ban on, immigration altogether. Which is why he has unilaterally outlawed the asylum system in the United States. Ending birthright citizenship is his first major step toward that depraved sense of racial superiority and xenophobia. It’s a sign of the utterly despicable nature of the new Trump administration.
Surrounded by ultra-right racist neo-Nazi xenophobes like Elon Musk, whose tacit Nazi salute at a Trump post-inauguration function shocked the world with its brazen display, Trump is on the march to restoring and reinstating the Hitlerite idea that the only race intended by God to be in America is the Caucasian (white) race. It is what his utterly sickening and vile chants of “America First” mean. Now, with a frighteningly powerful, no-holds-barred mandate given to him mostly by white Americans to do as he pleases, Donald Trump is set to do the unthinkable, with absolutely no compunction, conscience or the natural encumbrances of moral and empathetic restraint. He has never had any of these noble ideals, by the way. It’s a dangerous trajectory the world just got on, on Donald Trump’s watch and leading.
