Trump is an Enemy of the State

Is Trump Building an Army of Modern Blackshirts?

The proliferation of pro-Trump militia groups across the country eerily
echoes the rise of Hitler�s SA and Mussolini�s squadristi.

n March 23, 2023, former president Donald Trump launched his third
presidential bid in front of a raucous, rollicking crowd in Waco, Texas.
Waco, a city of about 145,000 people in west Texas, situated halfway
between Dallas and Austin, was the scene 30 years earlier of a bloody
showdown between federal and state law enforcement officers and the heavily
armed Branch Davidian cult, a siege that left scores of Branch Davidians
dead in a suicidal conflagration. Since those events, which began on
February 28 and ended on April 19, 1993, Waco has become iconic in the
memory of far-right, violence-prone militia groups, and it inspired a
militia-affiliated extremist, Timothy McVeigh, to explode a truck bomb in
Oklahoma City exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995, that killed 168
people and injured 680.

By selecting Waco as his campaign kickoff event, Trump sent an unmistakable
signal to violence-prone extremists nationwide. The Houston Chronicle, in
an editorial about Trump�s rally, wrote that the choice of Waco went far
beyond a �dog whistle� and compared it to �the blaring of air horn of a
Mack 18-wheeler barreling down I-10,� adding that Trump was �stoking the
fires of Waco.�

In his speech, Trump fed his audience the red meat that many of them were
looking for. He opened the rally by playing a song, �Justice for All� by
the �J6 Choir,� recorded by men imprisoned for the insurrection at the US
Capitol on January 6, 2021, accompanied by footage of the mob attack.
Claiming that the United States has been taken over by �Marxists and
communists,� Trump said ominously, �2024 is the final battle. That�s going
to be the big one.�

And he added: �I am your warrior.� I am your retribution.�

Trump, of course, has a long history of supporting and encouraging
potentially violent supporters. In 2016, during his first campaign, he
suggested that �the Second Amendment people��i.e., his gun-owning
backers�might be able to stop the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court
choices. In 2019, he said, �I can tell you I have the support of the
police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump�I
have the tough people, but they don�t play it tough�until they go to a
certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.� And in 2020 Trump
famously told the Proud Boys militia to �stand down and stand by.�
Ultimately, the Proud Boys would help lead the January 6 insurrection.

Such rhetoric has led many people to warn that Trump, an authoritarian
favored by white supremacists, is a fascist, or proto-fascist, and that
stopping him in this year�s election is essential to prevent the erosion of
democracy, end runs around the US Constitution, and the beginning of a
slide toward fascism in America. But one thing that Trump doesn�t have, so
far at least, is something that both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler
could count on in their parallel ascents to power in the early 1920s: a
reliable force of street thugs and paramilitary units that he and his
allies can deploy against Trump�s �enemies,� from the Democrats (�Marxists
and communists�) to immigrants, racial minorities, LGBTQ organizations, and
that �enemy of the people,� the media.
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Certainly, Trump has summoned US militias and other extremists to his
cause. In 2020, for instance, at the height of nationwide protests against
lockdowns, mask requirements, and school closures at the start of the
coronavirus crisis, Trump issued a series of viral tweets urging his
followers to �liberate� Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, where armed
adherents were mobilizing in street demonstrations. For instance, on April
17, 2020, Trump tweeted�characteristically, in all caps��LIBERATE
MICHIGAN!� Soon afterwards, gun-toting Trump supporters invaded the state
capitol in Lansing. Most egregiously, he called on supporters to gather in
Washington on January 5-6, 2021��Be there, will be wild��for a rally that
ended in the occupation of the Capitol and led to Trump�s impeachment.

Yet so far Trump�s interaction with militia groups and what the US
Department of Justice calls �domestic violent extremists� has been mostly
at arms-length, and the national militia movement is leaderless and
inchoate. But America is heading into an election as a bitterly divided
nation in which a substantial portion of the populace believes that
violence may be necessary. According to a survey by the University of
Chicago�s Project on Security & Threats, as many as 14 percent of Americans
say that violence is justified to �achieve political goals that I support,�
and 4.4 percent�that�s more than 11 million US adults�agree that �the use
of force is justified to return Donald Trump to the presidency.�

�We are in such an extremely polarized country, where more and more issues
are seen as zero-sum, that we are in a tinderbox state where anything can
set people off,� says Mark Pitcavage, who�s spent decades studying far-
right extremists for the Anti-Defamation League, and who says that Trump�s
entry in politics has politicized the militia movement. �It�s like we�re
standing outside a building filled with explosives and hoping nobody�s
smoking inside.�
Blackshirts and Brownshirts

Mussolini�s Blackshirts and Hitler�s Brownshirts both started small.
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In the 1920s, in a Europe devastated in the aftermath of World War I,
seething with resentment over the losses suffered and, especially in
Germany, its humiliating defeat, ultranationalists and right-wing zealots
emerged out of battles with socialists and communists. The far right was
bolstered by the support of businessman, landowners, and a ruling elite
that saw the growing violence of its streetfighters as a battering ram
against the left.

The street force that would catapult Benito Mussolini into power started
with only a few thousand men. But the would-be Italian dictator was
charismatic and had an angry, alienated populace to rally to his side, many
of whom were already predisposed toward violence. During Italy�s Black
Years (1920�21), self-organized gangs of street thugs began taking shape in
a few urban centers, under the rubric of the Fasci Italiani di
Combattimento, a decentralized militia-like organization established by
Mussolini. Calling themselves squadristi, many of them donned ragtag
uniforms, carried rifles and revolvers, and began a pattern of systematic
small-scale attacks against their political opponents on the left.

Squadrism had its first major success in the city of Ferrara, northeast of
Bologna, where they crushed Ferrara�s socialists and trade unionists,
smashing printing presses, invading union halls, intimidating local
officials, and beating and torturing prominent leftists, and then in
Bologna. As historian John Foot writes in his book, Blood and Power: The
Rise and Fall of Italian Fascism, �The disintegration of local democracy in
Bologna would be a model which was exported across Italy from that moment
on.� Membership in the Blackshirts grew exponentially after that. Hundreds
of squads formed across Italy, in units of 30 to 50 men. In 1922, 16,000
Blackshirts led the March on Rome, and Mussolini was named prime minister.
�This is the violence of which I approve,� announced Mussolini. �This is
the violence of Fascism.� By the end of 1922, the number of Blackshirts
would rise to 200,000. Mussolini inflated those numbers a bit in his first
speech to parliament, claiming the support �of 300,000 young people, armed
to the teeth, ready in an almost mystical way to follow my orders.�

Meanwhile, while conditions in Germany in the early 1920s differed
significantly from those in Italy, Adolf Hitler modeled his Brownshirts on
Mussolini�s Blackshirts, and they served in a similar function: to unleash
violence against the left. In 1923, Hitler boasted: �If a German Mussolini
is given to Germany, people would fall down on their knees and worship him
more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.�

As with the Blackshirts, the Nazi Brownshirts, called the Sturmabteilung
(SA), or Storm Division, was tiny at first, established by Hitler as a kind
of bodyguard formation to protect Hitler�s speeches in beer halls. It drew
its recruits from a pool of German rightists called the Freikorps (Free
Corps), a 400,000-strong, ultra-violent paramilitary militia that engaged
in mass killing of socialists and communists in the immediate aftermath of
World War I. Some of its members, mostly in Munich, were recruited by
Hitler into his �hall protection� squad, first called the �Gymnastic and
Sports Section� and finally the SA. Initially, the beer-hall brawlers who
gravitated to Hitler at his Hofbrauhaus events numbered at most a few
dozen, and they engaged in brutal fights with clubs and truncheons against
dissenters and protesters. By 1922, the SA had grown steadily, and its
first major success came in November 1922 during �German Day� in Coburg, a
town on the Itz River in Bavaria, when 800 SA storm troopers marched
through the streets of Coburg carrying swastika banners and, using
violence, seized effective control of the city. By March 1923, when Hitler
named Hermann G�ring to head the SA, it was a well-disciplined militia of
just 3,000 men.
An American SA?