Why Trump’s anti-Fox News rant exposes campaign’s 'classic fascist ideas': analysis

30 September 2024

Former President Donald Trump continued to generate controversy with his inflammatory campaign speeches in late September, from attacking his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, as "mentally impaired" and "mentally disabled" to calling for "one really violent day" of policing.

On X, formerly Twitter, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat slammed his "violent day" comments as dangerously authoritarian, posting, "I study dictators and this chills me." And MSNBC's Joe Scarborough found it laughable that Trump would attack Harris as "mentally impaired" when she "destroyed" and "humiliated" him during their contentious presidential debate in Philadelphia on September 10.

But one comment that hasn't been drawing as much attention is Trump's attack on right-wing Fox News during one of his speeches.

Trump lambasted the right-wing cable news channel for carrying a Harris speech on immigration, saying that they "shouldn't be allowed" to broadcast such a speech.

The New Republic's Greg Sargent discussed Trump's anti-Fox News comment during a late September conversation with Salon's Amanda Marcotte, who appeared as a guest on the publication's podcast. Sargent and Marcotte agreed that the comment shows how much Trump is doubling down on his authoritarianism during the final weeks of the United States' 2024 presidential race.

Sargent told Marcotte, "Amanda, this is really unhinged. Trump just said Fox News shouldn't be allowed to air the opposition's criticism of him." And he asked her if this type of rhetoric "creates a permission structure for persecution of the media for criticizing him."

Marcotte replied, "Absolutely. Trump has long held the opinion that one of the most important benefits of power is silencing people who criticize you. And he's getting louder and louder about it and more and more obnoxious about the double standard that he holds, which is if you say things I like, then that's free speech — and if you say things I don't like, then that should be criminal, right? Trying to hold him to any legal or morally consistent standard is ridiculous because his only standard is if I like it, it's good and legal; if I don't like it, it should be criminal."

Marcotte added, "The scary thing here is that that narcissism is spreading out across the supporters."

The Salon journalist went on to say that Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has joined him in pushing dangerously authoritarian ideas.

"It's very explicitly this end-of-liberal-democratic ideals, right? — and replacing them with fairly classic fascist ideals, 'blood and soil' notions," Marcotte told Sargent. "JD Vance's speech at the (Republican National Convention) was very clear on this — that what makes you an American is that you're born here and your ethnicity and your history here. And he played a little around the edges to imply that there was some allowance for racial diversity in there, but we all heard what he was saying, which is Americans are an ethnic group, and that ethnic group is obviously a white one and a conservative one and a Christian one and all these other things."

Marcotte continued, "Once you've redefined American-ness in those lines, you can redefine the law and who is in and who is out. And the consistency here is not that we have free speech for all citizens or all people actually. It's that the in-group are real Americans, and they have all the rights and privileges and the out-group are not real Americans, and they deserve nothing."

Listen to Greg Sargent's full interview with Amanda Marcotte at this link and find a transcript here.

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