On Tuesday, The New York Times published a lengthy interview with Donald Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, who googled an online definition of fascism before saying of his former boss:

The former president is certainly on the right-wing extremist spectrum, he is certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators – that’s what he said. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist.

Also on Tuesday, the Atlantic published a report in which Trump reportedly said, “I need the kind of generals Hitler had.”

The revelations dominated discussions on Fox News and prompted two dozen Republican senators to call for TR — haha, just kidding.

Instead, Democrats and their supporters are once again grappling with a muted response from the media, public and politicians who seem unmoved by Trump’s association with the F-word, no matter how many times Kamala Harris calls “6.” January” says.

An exception was Matt Drudge, the arch-conservative left-wing maker who took tough action against Trump and published a photo of the leader himself. This proves the rule, argued Times (and former Slate) columnist Jamelle Bouie, “a truly wild world in which Matt Drudge, at least on Trump’s side, has better news judgment than most of the mainstream media.”

Debates about Trump and fascism have been going on for a decade now, and it seems unlikely that using this label will persuade or motivate anyone. But the lack of concern underscores a deeper question that doesn’t need a dictionary to answer: Why do so few Americans, including many on the left, seem to take seriously the idea that Trump would use a second presidency to abuse the law? hurt his enemies?

Perhaps it’s because Democrats have carefully avoided confronting Trump with some of the most controversial and damning policy decisions of his first term or the most radical campaign promise of his second term. You simply can’t fully make a case for Trump — or convincingly illustrate his fascist tendencies — without talking about immigration. Immigration was key to Trump’s rise and the cause of two of his most infamous presidential debacles: the Muslim ban and the child separation policy. Blaming immigrants for national decline is a classic expression of fascist rhetoric; Rounding up our neighbors by the millions for expulsion is a proposal with few historical precedents, and none of them are good.

It’s like Democrats are trying to play a national taboo game and help people identify a zebra without saying “stripes.”

Of course, Democrats are afraid to talk about an issue on which Trump consistently does better than Harris in the polls. The backlash against a Democratic president and an influx of migrants at the Mexican border have contributed to Americans’ distrust of immigration at levels not seen since 2001. As Atlantic writer Rogé Karma explained to Mary Harris on Wednesday’s “What Next,” the share of Americans thinking about immigration has increased. The decline is expected to have increased from 28 percent in 2020 to 55 percent today. And some polls have shown that a majority of Americans support mass deportations.

But such results are an indictment, not a justification, for Democrats’ reluctance to talk about immigration. Mass deportation would separate 4.4 million U.S. citizen children from their parents. It would require the largest police operation in American history, eliminate millions of jobs, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and destabilize the economy. Industries from dairy farming to housing would be damaged for years. In Los Angeles and Houston, the population would decline by 10 percent; Florida would lose 1 in 20 residents. A million mortgages could be at risk.

It’s a world-historically terrible idea on humanitarian and practical grounds, and Democrats should be able to explain that to voters. The prospect also brings to mind some of the most shameful and chaotic episodes of the Trump administration, such as Muslim Ban Day, when Trump invalidated the visa paperwork required over many months and at great expense by arrivals from Syria, Sudan, Iran and others countries had been compiled. and four other Muslim-majority countries – some in the midst of displacement. Or the day of the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid on a single state in U.S. history, when hundreds of American children were deprived of their parents. Or the days when the Trump administration separated 5,000 migrant children from their parents with no plan to help them reunite and held the children in chain cages.

When those memories were still fresh, Biden saw an opportunity to rebuke Trump on immigration. “If I am elected president, we will immediately end Trump’s attack on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said at the (virtual) Democratic National Convention in 2020. Family separation has been the most unpopular federal policy in decades!

But Harris treated the issue as if it were radioactive. She couldn’t bring herself to condemn the mass deportations at a Univision town hall and has dabbled in her support for granting citizenship to Dreamers, the 2 million undocumented Americans brought to the country as children. Instead of asking crying American children where mom and dad are, she touts her background as a “border prosecutor” in her ads.

By focusing only on her plan to secure the border and her background in law enforcement, she has missed a chance to reframe the debate, sound the alarm about Trump’s plans and remind voters of the suffering he has caused caused the first time. This poll-driven politics is cowardly, but also counterproductive: you can’t win an argument you don’t have.

The Atlantic article is a case in point: Trump’s desire for a good Nazi general at his side actually got some attention. Harris himself spoke about it on Wednesday; Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Bill Ackman about it on CNBC.

Far more revealing and relevant to American politics, however, was the story’s opening anecdote, in which Trump offered to pay for the funeral of a Mexican-American soldier murdered at Fort Bragg. When the bill for the citywide ceremony in her native Houston arrived at the White House, Trump reportedly told his staff not to pay it: “It doesn’t cost $60,000 to bury a damn Mexican!”

As we saw in the presidential debate during the discussion in Springfield, Ohio, the issue of immigration – whether first or second generation, legal or not – brings out Trump’s strange, evil core. It highlights the superficiality of his distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, his flirtation with the Great Replacement Theory, and his grotesque fixation on genetics. Immigration provides the most damning evidence of what he could do on his four-year revenge spree. And it is the strongest proof of his ideological affiliation with fascism.

But not if no one wants to talk about it It.