Ex-President Donald Trump told rally attendees on a frigid Friday night in Iowa that voting for him would "stop the invasion of millions of people—from parts unknown."
This follows his claims late last year that immigrants "were poisoning the blood of our country" an idea borrowed directly from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. The currency his remarks carry is clear. After all, he won the Iowa caucus with ease.
But the political winds are rapidly shifting, and Trump is no longer alone.
In recent months, Republicans have urged Congress to dub the border crisis an "invasion," and Republican 2024 hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy (who has now suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump), even referenced the once-fringe Great Replacement Theory on primetime television to applause.
Inciteful language is no longer isolated to dark corners of the Internet, but part of a broader, alarming trend in the American media and political landscape which is permanently shifting the parameters of Western public discourse.
With Donald Trump's Iowa victory making him the inevitable Republican nominee, his extraordinary authoritarian revenge plan if he wins the 2024 elections signals the grave turning point that has arrived: a literal choice between safeguarding or torpedoing America's fragile democracy.
But make no mistake: The battle is hardly contained to the United States. In Europe, America's cultural warfare is sparking a far-right chain reaction not witnessed since World War II. Just consider how the Netherlands recently doubled the votes for the far-right party run by Geert Wilders: a Muslim-hating populist who won with a slogan inspired by Trump's.
He won that victory on the back of pledges to ban mosques and the Qur'an – and it's only to secure a coalition that would make him prime minister that Wilders has signaled willingness not to follow through with his Islamophobic ambitions.
Wilders' shock rise to the top is the tip of the iceberg. From Sweden to Italy, Finland to Greece, far-right groups and populist leaders are winning elections in record numbers. Their playbook is to parrot tropes and conspiracies popularized across the Atlantic by Trump and extreme right-wing Republicans.
While the great replacement theory may have emerged in Europe, it is U.S. right-wing TV hosts, online personalities, and American politicians that mainstreamed it.
In the United Kingdom, issues like critical race theory or women's abortion rights were barely on the political cards until they dominated American debate stages and headlines. Sadly, my party, the current Conservative government is following the lead of the American right, focusing resources on culture war issues like the morally fraught Rwanda asylum plan, rather than finding serious solutions to our bleak economic outlook and failing National Health Service.
The Trump playbook of xenophobic "dog whistling," which blames minorities for Western society's ills, has become so mainstream that it has infected not just the right, but also the left in insidious ways.
For instance, the overwhelmingly negative tone of liberal Western coverage of last year's UN climate summit depicted COP28 president Sultan al-Jaber as nothing more than a one-dimensional oil man.
This simplistic anti-Arab trope unfairly overshadowed his unprecedented achievement of getting 198 countries—including Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iraq—to agree for the first time in 28 years to transition away from fossil fuels.
Such mainstreaming of casual racism speaks to what I've long warned about—the normalization of Islamophobia. In 2011, as chairman of the Conservative Party, I said that anti-Muslim hatred or Islamophobia had "passed the dinner-table test" in Britain, becoming socially acceptable.
Now, nearly 15 years on, what I saw in Britain has become a global phenomenon. The rise of Trumpism has weaponized Islamophobia into a potent political instrument of the far-right.
The social acceptability of casual xenophobia is now standard issue in the campaign toolbox used to divide voters, deflect criticisms, and win power. And outright political victories are not necessary to destabilize the fragile landscapes of our democratic institutions. Far-right parties in Spain, France, and Germany, for instance, are now power brokers whose strength determines the policies of centrist parties by dominating the political agenda.
That is an outsider tactic which the Trump team used to win and has carefully honed since 2020. And it means that with or without a 2024 victory, Trumpism will remain a dangerous political force of an increasingly international far-right movement.
Stopping Trump from winning the 2024 presidential election is just the beginning. And it will take more than simply Colorado or Maine excluding him from the ballot. We need an unprecedented effort by media, civil society leaders, and ordinary citizens to stand up against the hatred that has spread throughout our communities. If we fail to do so, it will not just be our neighbors from other communities who suffer—with democracy itself at stake, it will be all of us.
The Right Honorable Baroness Sayeeda Warsi was senior minister of state at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, minister for faith and communities at the Department for Communities and Local Government, and minister without portfolio. A former chair of the Conservative Party, she is the first Muslim to have served in a British cabinet.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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