Far right rhetoric stoking victimhood narratives is the largest cause of reactionary violence and populism.

This everlasting road continues more than seven years after Trump’s candidacy, as he was still out on the campaign trail as a former President endorsing candidates for the 2022 midterm elections. Seven years of continuing down the previously described pipeline from moderate to fascist thought can be easily proven when looking at how Trump engages his base today compared to before his presidency. In this section, Trump’s RNC speech will be compared to his campaign rally in Pennsylvania on September 3rd, 2022, the first campaign rally after the FBI searched his Mar-a-Lago residence and confiscated classified documents.

The similarities between these two speeches cannot be denied: both start with Trump describing how he wants the audience to envision America as a political dumpster fire. Within the first two minutes of his Pennsylvania speech, he fit in a cavalcade of these qualities:

Our country is going to hell. This election is a referendum on skyrocketing inflation, rampant crime, soaring murders, crushing gas prices, millions and millions of illegal aliens pouring across our border, race and gender indoctrination perverting our schools and above all, this election is a referendum on the corruption and extremism of Joe Biden and the radical Democrat party. (Trump Speaks, 2022).

Although Trump did immediately follow this statement with an encouragement for his supporters to “get out and vote,” there are many instances in this speech where there is an implied endorsement of violence. He claims that the country is “being destroyed through people who got into office through cheating and through fraud” while repeating his 2020 election conspiracies that directly led to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th (Trump Speaks, 2022). He says that the Democrats are “against God” to rile up the Christian nationalists in the crowd before going further and saying they are against the Constitution (Trump Speaks, 2022). He finishes his speech by saying, “We will not yield… We will never give up… the tyrants we are fighting do not stand even a chance because we are Americans and Americans kneel to God and God alone” (Trump Speaks, 2022). When you have the de-facto leader of a political party claiming that his opposition is destroying the country, against the founding documents of said country, against the religious beliefs that the majority of his audience wants to impose as law; when he declares that they will not fall to this oppression, and declares that the peaceful means of acquiring power are being manipulated by the opposition to isolate his movement of liberation, it naturally leads the audience to believe that a violent revolution is necessary. It doesn’t matter that no explicit endorsement of violence was made; Trump is calling for violence but leaving plausible deniability in case he is arrested for inspiring the acts that will happen because of what he says.

Another critical difference in Trump’s rhetoric is his focus on the American educational system. One of the claims made in Trump’s introduction was that there was “race and gender indoctrination perverting our schools” (Trump Speaks, 2022). This starkly contrasts 2016’s rhetoric, where American public schools were instead described as “failing” due to measured educational outcomes (Full Text, 2016). The contrast only grows more prominent as Trump explains his full position:

Our children are captive to unhinged Marxist educators who are pushing inappropriate sexual, racial and political material on our children from the youngest possible age… no teacher should ever be allowed to teach transgender to our children without parental sayso… We will get critical race theory the hell out of our schools… We will restore patriotic education to our schools, and we will teach our children to love their country, honor our history, and to always respect the American flag. (Trump Speaks, 2022)

By outright lying and exaggerating what is being taught in American public schools, Trump bypasses any concerns his audience may have about their children being raised to think for themselves. Nothing that they believe can be questioned by their children, even though their generation was the one that questioned almost every choice their elders made during the Cold War. Teaching children that racism is bad becomes Critical Race Theory. Teaching them that some people don’t identify with how they were born is brainwashing them into being transgender. Teaching children how America has made bad choices is unpatriotic and disrespectful, and all of it gets slapped with the label of Marxism. Just as Trump has led his followers down a pipeline of radicalization, so will Trump-supporting parents lead their children.

Then there is Trump’s outright endorsement of Chinese authoritarian Xi Jinping over Pennsylvania’s Senator-Elect John Fetterman. That sentence alone sounds absurd, yet it actually happened when Trump described a supposed conversation he had with Xi over the punishment for drug dealing in China and the United States. Keep in mind that Trump is “calling for the death penalty for drug dealers” (Trump Speaks, 2022)

[Xi said] ‘We immediately catch the drug dealer. We give him quick trial’… ‘If the drug dealer is guilty, he is immediately executed. So we have no drug problem’… Fetterman supports taxpayer-funded drug dens and the complete decriminalization of illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and ultra-lethal fentanyl… Compare that to president Xi of China, a little different, would you say? (Trump Speaks, 2022)

While it is true that Trump spoke positively about many authoritarian leaders during his 2016 campaign and presidency, it goes one step further when said authoritarian leaders are compared to American politicians by normalizing authoritarian figures, actions, and policies within American institutions. In this sense, Trump is priming his audience to go even further down the rabbit hole with him; if he can get enough people to accept valuing authoritarians over those with whom they politically disagree, he can push a Republican-led legislature to give him the authoritarian power he desires.

When putting all the pieces together of Trump’s latest rhetoric, it is clear why Pentadic Analysis and the Guilt-Redemption cycle must be simultaneously used to measure Trump’s (and more broadly, the Republican party’s) rhetoric going forward. Over the course of seven years, Donald Trump’s rhetoric has helped the American right has taken off its mask of civility. Its leading political figure is pushing for the whitewashing of history and the indoctrination of children, is endorsing authoritarians over the opposing political party in the hopes that he will normalize the possibility of his autocracy and is willing to walk directly up to the line of outright endorsing political violence against anyone who doesn’t fall into line with him. One week after he announced his 2024 candidacy, he dined with two of the most prominent antisemites in modern politics, and while that did provoke almost every major leader in the Republican Party to condemn him, there is every reason to suggest that five to ten more years of this rhetoric would shift the Overton window to making this type of behavior as politically acceptable, perhaps even politically advantageous (Basu, 2022).

By empowering the feelings of ressentiment and fueling the victimhood complexes of his supporters for so long, Donald Trump has tipped the scales when it comes to the achievability of American fascism. Right now, the Republican party is in the beginning stages of committing a cultural genocide against transgender adults and children, as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention, and it is the exact outcome one would expect when using a demonized minority group for acts of victimage (Austin, 2022). This attempt cannot go farther, and the only way to prevent it is to stop everyone who spreads or believes this rhetoric from achieving power. The writing is on the wall: if they succeed, the Order that we currently know will be thrown out the window and replaced with the whims of those who want the harshest forms of structural inequality they can implement. This paper helps to explain the root of the problem and where the GOP’s rhetoric is likely headed; it is now up to the American public to do something about it.