I began to read what I could about the Nazi genocide, which really was very easy because there was actually rather little available in English. The most shockingly relevant anti-Semitic work I found was The Eternal Jew, a 1940 German “documentary” that portrayed Jews in a ghetto swarming in tight quarters, bearded caftaned creatures, and then a cut to Jews as mice—or rather rats—swarming in a sewer, with a title card that said “Jews are the rats” or the “vermin of mankind.” This made it clear to me that this dehumanization was at the very heart of the killing project. In fact, Zyklon B, the gas used in Auschwitz and elsewhere as the killing agent, was a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin—like fleas and roaches.
If you feel that you need additional backup, just go to Google Images and type in “Jewish vermin.” You’ll get the picture in a hurry. Here’s one cartoon from an Austrian newspaper in 1939 depicting Jewish refugees as scurrying rats. There are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of such images.
Trump, let us clarify, does not mean Jews. He means some Jews—the ones who aren’t for him, which come to think of it is most Jews. And by the way, to drop that rhetorical bomb at this time, when antisemitism is raging across the country because of what’s happening in the Middle East, is especially outrageous. But Trump’s vermin are not a racial category. No, Trump’s rats are a much broader category, and in that sense an even more dangerous one—he means whoever manages to offend him while exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to register dissent and to criticize him.
And no, he’s not going to be throwing anybody in a gas chamber. But that’s a pretty low bar for un-American behavior; that is, fascism was not so bad until it started exterminating people? The Nazis did a lot of things from 1933 to 1941 (when the Final Solution commenced) that would shock Americans today, and Trump and his followers are capable of every one of them: shutting down critical voices in the press; banning books, and even burning some, just to drive the point home; banning opposition organizations or even parties; making political arrests of opponents without telling them the charges; purging university faculties; doing the same with the civil service… If you doubt that President Trump and the Republican Party are capable of all these things and several more, you need to read some history pronto.