Friend,

Trump’s deranged Veterans Day speech attacking his political opponents and any person who disagrees with him was par for the course. Yes, it was deranged. It was also carefully calculated.

Calling his enemies “vermin” is the true evolution of the man who descended the escalator in 2015. Everyone in the pro-democracy movement needs to be aware of it. 

It was intentional. And stolen straight from Hitler and Mussolini and other fascist dictators. We can’t let the media normalize or dismiss it. We must call it what it is.

It’s all a part of his attempt to dehumanize and delegitimize opposition in this country. It’s a step further than what we saw from him when he first took office in 2017. Any last moderate Republican, Democrats, the court system – his message in 2024 is to “other” us. It’s to splinter the fabric of our country in two and tear down our democracy with it. 

That’s why this descent into Nazi rhetoric is intentional. He knows that injecting our politics with that level of vitriol is the only way back to power. 

It doesn’t just stop at Trump. Look at the men he’s surrounding himself with. Bannon and the rest of the alt-right mob are planning for a wholesale demolition of our country’s civil service. Yes, the non-political public servants who keep our government running fall into the “vermin” category too. Anyone not on bended knee to Dear Leader is vermin.

The parallels between this latest stage of Trump and Hitler don’t stop there. 

As Republican primaries take place early next year, Trump will be sitting in courtrooms up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Much like Adolf Hitler during his trial following the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, Trump will use these trials to draw our collective attention back to him.

In doing so, he’ll demonize the prosecutors and the judges. And he’ll do it because he knows that the deeper he digs into the chaos matrix, the greater chance he has at taking back the White House. And the media is going to essentially shrug their shoulders and say “oh, look at that Trump again!” – treating him like a novelty toy instead of the most dangerous threat to democracy we’ve faced. Even worse, they’re probably going to try to both-sides and find something controversial or some measure of scandal from President Biden. Do not buy the “both candidates have the threat of impeachment” BS.

That’s the only way Trump wins, by letting his Hitlerian rhetoric go unanswered and to let the unfettered chaos machine that is MAGA steamroll everything.

But there’s good news. We know what the pro-democracy coalition needs to do beat him: Make the case for the future - for why Joe Biden is the president we need in this time, and remind voters the choice they’re making: A country calmed by a steady hand, or a world inflamed by a man only running for president to keep himself out of prison.

We like our odds. Are you with us?

-Reed