Totentanz

If you want to get a flavour of the kind of world Donald Trump would like to usher in, think 1970s Chile, when friend of Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, in 1973, ousted the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and ruled as dictator of the country for the next seventeen years, before being given refuge by Thatcher in the UK, after his downfall. In the interim years he 'disappeared' countless Chileans whose views and politics ran counter to his own. It's both a matter of record and a matter of history, there to be viewed by all.

Trump's America is careening towards a similar place with his deportation programme, and he's glorifying the results on his 'Truth' Social platform. Almost none of the mainstream media mentions the detail, however, preferring to confine itself to the blandest of number crunching. According to The New European's Matthew D'Ancona in the current issue, the processing of the - so far  261 - Venezuelan and Salvadoran deportees from the US has been filmed by the Salvadoran government in cinematic detail and posted on X, where the grisly footage has been viewed 23 million times; thence to be reposted on 'Truth' Social by Trump as a kind of billet-doux to President Nayib Bukele of Salvador, in thanks and admiration.

Never mind that many [most?] of the deportees are innocent people being swept up in Trump's programme of pogroms and Kristallnächte. As D'Ancona says, this theatre of terror is the point, to instil an Old Testament-like fear into people: never mind the drift-net collateral damage of the innocent; that just reinforces the fear, the tribalism and the compliance with the regime. It worked long enough for the Nazis in Europe to cause complete chaos and almost led to their successful completion of the genocide of the Jews, the Roma, and many others the Führer and the Party machine had decided had no place in their infamous 'Tausend-Jahre Reich'.

If you think Trump's different in any way, shape or form from Hitler in the 1930s, consider again: the playbook's been taken from the shelves, dusted off and digitised for his New Jerusalem in the twenty-first century. If I was an American and not an adherent of this lunatic's twisted fantasies, or was a member of one of his increasing number of proscribed groups, I would be looking to seek asylum in a another, more welcoming country sharpish; as the next three and half years are going to get immeasurably more unpleasant for an awful lot of folks Stateside, unless something extraordinary is done to derail his ambitions. And we won't be immune from the fallout here in the UK and Europe, either...