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   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.   
   Current Issue   
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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   
      
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