'Line has been crossed' as Trump directly echoes Stalin: columnist

The Atlantic's Anne Applebaum on Friday warned American voters that former President Donald Trump has crossed a line that even racist demagogues such as George Wallace never did. In particular, Applebaum shines a spotlight on the purportedly dehumanizing rhetoric that Trump has been deploying on the campaign trail, such as referring to his political opponents as "the enemy within" and as "vermin," which is the exact kind of rhetoric used by some of the greatest mass murderers of the 20th Century, including Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Pol Pot. Even though Wallace infamously called to maintain permanent racial segregation in the southern United States during his ill-fated presidential campaigns, writes Applebaum, he did "not speak of his political opponents as 'vermin' or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood." If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them," she warns.