Mussolini Political Rhetoric

In 2015, The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that approximately 52% of religiously motivated hate crimes targeted Jewish people or organizations (“2015 Hate Crime Statistics" 1). These hate crimes are the remnants of ideas that reaches their peak during the Holocaust and linger to this day. Leaders during the Second World War used a few tools to enforce anti-Semitic policies in their countries, not just in Nazi Germany, but in many of the countries that held a similar sense of superiority and hunger for power, such as its close neighbor Italy. Benito Mussolini spread a message of fear, far-right nationalism, and racism in order to gain power amidst political chaos. However, becoming a dictator takes more than just political rhetoric;
A perfect example of this is his ongoing war on media, which ranges from him accusing news organizations of being fake to explicitly threatening the press. He infamously attacked CNN writer Michael Cohen during his first presidential press conference and began a shouting war with a CNN reporter who was begging to ask him a question. Trump’s justification was calling CNN “fake news.". During the same event, he asserted that Buzzfeed is a “failing pile of garbage” that would “suffer the consequences” for publishing an unverified dossier about his potential ties to the Kremlin in Russia (“Full” 18-19). Politico reports that, even before his election, Trump threatened to sue the press for publishing stories he believes to be false (Gold 2). These instances highlight Trump’s desperate attempt at quieting the media that reports against him by threatening to take a medium away form opponents. Further, Trump intentionally creates distractions from disagreement among the populous. Amidst nationwide protests and women’s marches concurrent with and following his inauguration, the new president, in a speech that was meant for the Central Intelligence Agency repeated false claims that over a million people attended his inauguration, even though expert photographic analysis of the event not only refutes his numbers, but shows that even more people attended women’s marches on that day
First, like many of these types of leaders, Trump is suspending truth by replacing facts with propaganda. Professional fact-checkers at Politifact.com found that just 16% of public statements made by Trump could be labelled as “half-true” or better, while journalists who have made attempts to go against his so-called “alternative facts” have been painted by Trump as “slime,” “disgusting,” “dishonest,” and, in the case of a reporter who dared to refute his claim of owning the Empire State Building, “third-class” (D’Antonio 2-3). It is clear that Trump’s open attacks on honesty of the press are more than just a way to silence opponents, but the beginning of an attempt at inflating his own ego and public image. Next, Trump disregards ethics by breaking the laws he promised to uphold as president and getting away with it. The law that Trump may have broken is outlined in the constitution, which states that government officials may not receive gifts from other governments, and by refusing to give up his various businesses to a blind trust, Trump is open to making profit from foreign state-owned companies. Instead, he gave up control of his businesses to his children, one of whom, as the Washington Post reports, has already been included in a presidential meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (Harwell and