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:

Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he is certainly authoritarian and admires people who are dictators – he has said that. So he certainly falls under 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 have dominated discussions on Fox News and prompted 20 Republican senators to call for Tr – haha, just kidding.

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

One exception was Matt Drudge, the arch-conservative left-monger who has cracked down on Trump, who showed a photo of the Führer himself. This proved the rule, argued Times (and former Slate) columnist Jamelle Bouie: “a truly wild world where Matt Drudge, at least as far as Trump is concerned, has better news judgment than most of the mainstream media.”

Debates about Trump and fascism have been going on for a decade, and it seems unlikely that applying this label will convince or motivate anyone. But the lack of alarm underscores a deeper question that doesn’t need a dictionary to address: 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 studiously avoided confronting Trump with some of the most controversial, devastating policy choices of his first term, or the most radical campaign promise of his second term. You simply cannot make the full case against Trump — or provide a compelling illustration of his fascist tendencies — without talking about immigration. Immigration was key to Trump’s rise and the source of two of his most infamous presidential debacles: the Muslim ban and child separation policies. Blaming immigrants for national decline is a classic trope of fascist rhetoric; Rounding up our neighbors with millions for deportation is a proposal with few historical precedents, and none of them are good.

It’s as if the Democrats are trying to play a national taboo game by helping people identify a zebra without saying “stripes.”

It’s fair to say that Democrats are wary of continuing to talk about an issue where Trump always scores better than Harris. The backlash against a Democratic president and a surge of migrants at the Mexican border have made Americans wary of immigration at levels not seen since 2001. As Atlantic staff writer Rogé Karma explained to Mary Harris in Wednesday’s What Next, the share of Americans who think immigration should decrease has risen from 28 percent in 2020 to 55 percent now. And some polls show that a majority of Americans support mass deportations.

But such results are an indictment, not a justification, for Democrats’ unwillingness to talk about immigration. Mass deportation would separate 4.4 million children of U.S. citizens from their parents. It would require the largest police response in American history, wipe out millions of jobs, cost hundreds of billions of dollars and destabilize the economy. Industries from milk to housing would be damaged for years. Los Angeles and Houston would see their populations shrink by 10 percent; Florida would lose 1 in 20 residents. A million mortgages could be at risk.

It’s a historically terrible idea on humanitarian and practical grounds, and Democrats should be able to explain that to voters. The prospect is also reminiscent of some of the most shameful and chaotic episodes of the Trump administration, such as the day of the Muslim ban, when Trump invalidated visa paperwork collected over many months and at great expense by arrivals from Syria, Sudan, Iran, and four other Muslim-majority countries – some of which are mid-flight. Or the day of the largest single-state Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in US history, when the parents of hundreds of American children were taken away. Or the days when the Trump administration separated 5,000 migrant children from their parents, with little plan to help them find each other again, and locked the children in chain-link 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 was the least popular federal policy in decades!

But Harris has treated the subject as if it were radioactive. She couldn’t bring herself to condemn the mass deportation at a Univision town hall, and has wavered on her support for granting citizenship to Dreamers, the two million undocumented Americans brought to the country as children. Instead of crying American children asking where Mom and Dad are, her ads glorify her background as a “border state prosecutor.”

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

The Atlantic article is a good example of this: Trump’s wish for a good Nazi general at his side did indeed attract some attention. Harris himself talked about it on Wednesday; Andrew Ross Sorkin spoke to Bill Ackman about it on CNBC.

But far more revealing and relevant to American politics was the story’s opening anecdote, in which Trump offered to pay for the funeral of a Mexican-American soldier killed at Fort Bragg. When the bill arrived at the White House for the city ceremony in her native Houston, Trump reportedly told his staff not to pay the bill: “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 topic of immigration – first or second generation, legal or otherwise – brings out the strange, nasty core of Trump. It underlines the superficiality of his distinction between legal and illegal arrivals, his flirtation with the Great Replacement Theory and his grotesque fixation on genetics. Immigration provides the most damning evidence of what he might do during his four-year revenge tour. And it is the most powerful proof of his ideological connection with fascism.

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