Noam Chomsky Quotes

Demagogues like [Donald] Trump come along. He says I know what the cause is. Remember, later, the cause was that Mexicans who are coming to this country, well, they were criminals or rapists. Now it is Muslims.

…a low and dangerous demagogue.

… becoming a very dangerous proposition…. an out and out demagogue

Unfortunately in this country we now have a demagogue ... one that is reckless with the truth.

I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America

Political demagogues will seek popularity by public speeches full of insult to foreign countries, and yellow journals will seek to increase their circulation by appeals to prejudice against foreigners.

We've had characters like Trump in American politics forever, characters who trade on xenophobia.

With his mendacity and increasingly virulent attacks on immigrants, Muslims, women, the press, the judiciary, the intelligence services, the F.B.I. - any group or institution that he finds threatening or useful as a scapegoat - Mr. Trump is attempting the Orwellian trick of redefining American reality on his own terms.

In many respects, David Duke was the playbook. He established the playbook by which Donald Trump ran and ultimately became - I won't even use the term - let's just say he became the occupant of the White House.

The conservatives nearly always tolerate the demagogue while he is destroying liberals.

The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.

Steve Bannon is the biggest threat to democracy that we've faced since the Civil War, but in the Civil War the champion of democracy was in the White House. So, even then, we were probably in less danger as a country than we are right now.

Trump, like that canary in the coalmine, makes clear what elements of fascism are really like. Let's be honest. The racism, the ignorance, the stupidity, the baiting, the great-man affect, this notion that he exists in a circle of certainty that can't be doubted, this kind of perverse hatred of the other. We've seen this before. This legacy is not new. What we have to recognize is the different form that it takes at a different moment in history.

There's no liberal equivalent of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump creates scapegoats in Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.

Trump's "Make America Great Again" program trumpets a national identity built on scapegoating, self-pity and grandiosity, and the promise of a strongman.

If Trump is elected president... I just don't know what America looks like four years after his election, in terms of the kind of bigotry that will be erupting, in terms of the kind of divisiveness that we will see, the kind of demagoguery that we will see.

[Donald] Trump is what happens in America every time it feels economically and politically threatened, and it encounters the limitations of its own white supremacists practices.

Donald Trump removed all doubt. He is running for president as a fascist demagogue.

The Democrats have twice now enabled a World-Historic Demagogue to be elected President of the United States. One wonders if Trump’s reelection will stand with Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The Gaza-like rubble of the Biden Administration is just beginning to come into focus. It probably dates to the days before Biden became President, when he made a deal with the socialist minions of Bernie Sanders to create his new Administration. This was Project 2021, the precursor of Project 2025. It resulted in left-nuttiness below the radar throughout the government. Every so often, the nuttiness would surface—as with the chaos at the Southern border—and Biden would do nothing about it. But usually it was a subdural hematoma, bleeding beneath the surface, like the death-grip the teachers unions held over the Department of Education. And the utter lapse in keeping the Pentagon up to date and funded appropriately. And the espousal, in too many Democratic cities, of releasing shoplifters without bail. (It wasn’t Defund the Police; it was Empower The Thieves.)

A lot of people felt defeated and hopeless by Trump's election. But I feel his election should energize people to resist apathy, ignorance, sexism, xenophobia, and racism.

You could say that Trump is the 21st century version of Pat Buchanan. Protectionist, anti-immigrant.

Extreme nationalism objectifies and dehumanizes those from other countries.

It's hard to imagine that there are people in the country that have types of hateful, inexcusable, racist, white supremacist views.

Trump is, to some extent, redefining what we think of as polarization in this country. Where polarization has been seen as ideological, it is now being seen almost as behavioral.