Scapegoating Builds The Fever Dictators Depend Upon
Donald Directs Campaign At Trans Community; He Thinks It's A Useful Tool To Denigrate Liberal Democrats
Because mental images of invading immigrants dining on dogs and feasting on cats has dissipated into the pre-election era, Donald moved on to his new fan group of scapegoats in his incoherent Address to Congress this week: the transgender community. This time he relied on Mickey & Minnie to degrade and dehumanize the target he’s deploying in his desperate efforts to build a dictatorship in a democracy that, for now at least, is still testing his mettle.
He told a half-suffering and half-ecstatic audience that his liege, Elon Musk, has found spending excesses like: “$8 million for making mice transgender. This is real,” Donald said, with the familiar head tilt – the tell that he’s lying, really lying, as compared with the flow of flotsam that dribbles from his pursed lips on a steady basis. The little nugget came amid a vomitous spew of Musk’s imaginary cost-cutting aimed at diminishing everything from illegal immigrants, DEI, Arab Sesame Street, lavish fish monitoring, male circumcision in Mozambique. Ouch, that must have hurt the castrated Republican supplicants flapping their flippers like it was feeding time at the zoo. Not to mention the closeted White men who mask their preferences by hating on “others” rather than themselves. Mike Johnson? JD?
Another crowd favorite was “$8 million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of,” Donald said. If the nation had rare minerals or a canal or a seaside strip of land in ruins, Donald would know where Lesotho is.
But let’s return to the soundbite heard around the world: “$8 million for making mice transgender.”
Little is real, factual, or meaningful on its face in the world of the oleaginous Orange Agent – but that’s not the point of his poison. Donald, and his fixers who crave unbounded power, understand the dictator’s playbook. Pick a class of people who can be used to symbolically deliver a global message that angers, agitates, and alienates the masses from one party and sends them to another. Give that target a distorted face, a sordid storyline, and define them as an existential threat. Thump that Bible, if it helps. Round them up, or in Donald’s case, eject them from the military. Relocate a handful of incarcerated transwomen to male prisons. Tell the prostrate nation transgender folk are a threat to middle school volleyball players. Use the word “mutilate” to describe trans youth medicine. Trot out a so-called aggrieved Florida mother, whose built a high-profile career on opposing the trans movement, but who has lost in the courts.
So class, let’s turn to page “1930s Germany” in our textbook to examine the dictator’s playbook.
Adolf Hitler tells us in his own words in Mein Kampf:
“The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split that attention into sections. The more the militant energies of the people are directed towards one objective the more will new recruits join the movement, attracted by the magnetism of the unified action and thus the striking power will be all the more enhanced…Such unity intensifies their belief in the justice of their own cause and strengthens their feeling of hostility toward the opponent.”
Hitler, in the 1920s and 1930s, used Jews as his scapegoat, as Germany’s scapegoat. At the time, Jews made up less than 1 percent of Germany’s population, but they served as a symbol of avarice, out-sized power in finances, culture, intellectual prowess, and otherness. Fast-forward to 2025, and we understand the workings of Donald’s mind and the gambit he’s betting on with his feeble-minded, feverish followers who are angry, disenfranchised, also hungering for a scapegoat.
The transgender population, like German Jews in the early 20th century, comprises less than 1 percent of the population but are believed to embody what the rabid Right hates about the liberal Left.
The rising wannabe dictator must unify his subjects around a destructive notion. In his memoir, Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments, said: “Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler and Goebbels’ baton; yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme. This was no ardent nationalism. Rather, for a few short hours, the personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims. And Hitler and Goebbels threw them the victims. By lashing out at their opponents and vilifying the Jews they gave expression and direction at fierce, primal passions.”
Cue to transgender people, who would seem to be low-hanging fruit. Alas, they are a perfect scapegoat because their movement represents what the Right likes to call “institutional capture.” This is not about the “other” 1 percent – it’s about the institutions that sustain them. Long before Donald ever heard the phrase “gender affirming medicine,” the Republicans calculated that opposing the transgender community was a jolly good way to gin up the Righteous base. Adding trans issues to the culture war menu, Red States fell into lockstep and passed anti-trans laws. Sadly, what was really needed was a national conversation to evaluate the efficacy of trans medicine, which is what slowed down the process throughout Europe. But here it was never really about the medical issue – Republicans wanted ammo against the corporate media (which made the mistake of presenting the issue as a one-sided story), Hollywood (which felt obliged to incorporate a trans character in every script), consumer goods companies (ooh, Budweiser paid for that one), and the Biden administration, which appointed the first trans U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, but never made the effort to examine the complex subject with nuance.
Enter Donald – a mouse in search of a big chunk of cheese. He (well, his advisors) recognized that trans land has reliably irritated the Right but also sowed doubt and discomfort among the centrist Left. When his presidential campaign was sinking, he went to the mattresses and pulled out the sleazy “Kamala is endorsing transwomen prisoner surgeries,” television ads, which Blitzkrieged screens.
Mwah! It was perfect. People have been left behind in the global information revolution. Wages are stagnant. Factory towns are ghostly. White men can’t grab women by the, by the anything, anymore. Here comes Donald trying to Humpty Dumpty the broken dream of American nostalgia. As Manuel Hines, author of In Defense of Liberal Democracy, wrote: “People are mistaken when they think that mad rulers imposed their madness on otherwise sensible societies. Destructiveness becomes legitimate because people asked for it – not against themselves but against the people they perceived as their enemies.”
No one can underestimate the damage Hitler imposed on Europe and the world. But he was ultimately caught in his own mousetrap – and Donald will be too. You can bring great harm to a segment of humanity, but you cannot erase them.
As an aside, “between the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, the National Institutes of Health awarded a total of $477,121 to three projects that involved administering feminizing hormone therapy to monkeys to understand how it may affect their immune system and make them more susceptible to HIV,” CNN reports. Mice were not involved.