Trump Is Just Part Of An American Racist Legacy

By Nina Turner, Newsweek

Former President Donald Trump and his campaign threw an event at Madison Square Garden over the weekend with tens of thousands of attendees. What we heard from the speakers about Black people, Latinos, Puerto Ricans, and Palestinians was utterly racist and bigoted. I would say I’m stunned, but I’m not. Unfortunately, it’s to be expected from those at the front of the MAGA movement. It was so vile it seemed to elicit groans from the crowd; even the MAGA faithful weren’t feeling the overt nature of the racism.

Even before the rally, there were some calling this rally a fascist, even “Nazi rally.” Yet as a Black liberationist and a former professor of African American History, the accusation troubled me. Bigotry, white supremacy, and white Christian nationalism are as American as apple pie. It is this aspect of America’s formation we cannot escape.

Trump supporters and protesters gather outside a campaign rally (and accompanying anti-Trump protest) for President Trump and US Senate candidate Martha McSally.

Fascism is a populist political movement which advocates putting the nation first through a centralized, autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader who controls the economy and suppresses opposition. I do believe former President Trump is a fascist. He fits the description. Yet that does not make Donald Trump and his movement “Nazis” as a whole.

America’s history is dark enough that we do not have to export our comparisons to Nazi Germany. At the MAGA rally in New York, the bigotry and white supremacy spewed was American through and through.

My concern is that calling him a Nazi erases the American nature of his movement and makes it a foreign concept. It’s not foreign. The bigotry is not foreign, the white supremacy is not foreign, this movement is not foreign, it’s American and we must address it head-on to defeat it.

Moreover, the Nazi label diminishes the fact that millions of Jewish people and other ethnic groups, including people with disabilities, were mass murdered. And it completely erases the vile impact of the American slave system on Africans and their American descendants. Crimes against humanity happened on this soil.