For the past several days, the White House has been trying to dig itself out of a "shithole" of its own making. Donald Trump's racist remarks about Caribbean and African nations — which he made repeatedly at a congressional meeting last Wednesday to discuss immigration issues — have inevitably dominated the national conversation.

Given the shelf life of his past outrages, Mr. Trump's shocking description of Haiti, El Salvador and all of Africa will not outlive the current news cycle. By the time you read these lines, we will no doubt be steeping in a new scandal. All the more reason, then, to consider the country that Trump compared favorably to those he imagined mired in muck — namely, Norway.

Why Norway? We can probably scratch Mr. Trump's admiration for, say, the playwright Henrik Ibsen as the reason to recruit Norwegians to our country. Other possibilities, though, have been floated. For example, shortly before the immigration session, Mr. Trump had met with Norway's Prime Minister Erna Solberg. Perhaps grateful for her straight face when he boasted of our sale to Norway of F-52 fighter planes — a plane that exists only in video games — he naturally thought of her country later that day.

Another possibility is that Norway is not just the world's happiest country — something of a miracle, given its progressive tax system that funds its socialized health care system — but also its whitest. According to Index Mundi, two percent of Norwegians are something other than Caucasian.

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Observers have not, however, mentioned a third possibility. Along with fjords and Ragnorak, another Norwegian word that has entered our language is "quisling." Like fascist, the term "quisling" is both descriptive— namely a traitor who collaborates with a foreign and hostile regime— and pejorative. Unlike fascist, though, quisling first denoted not to an ideal, but an individual: Vidkun Quisling.

A rightwing politician inspired both by Adolf Hitler and Norse mythology, Quisling founded the Nasjonal Samling, or National Front, in 1933. Though the party failed to elect a single member to the Norwegian parliament, its true importance lies elsewhere: It carved a public space for the dissemination of racist and reactionary ideas. After 1940, when his country was defeated and occupied by Nazi Germany, Quisling had helped make the unspeakable all too unexceptional in Norway.

As the Nazi-appointed leader of the civilian government, Quisling played a critical role in applying the Final Solution in Norway. Determined to align Norway's interests with Nazi Germany, Quisling's anti-Semitism was as practical as ideological. In 1942, his security force began rounding up the country's 1,800 or so Jews. About 1,500 were Norwegian citizens, and the remaining 300 were refugees from countries that had already become fatal "shitholes" for Jews. Quisling's government captured and deported about half the Jewish population to Auschwitz, while resistance groups hid and spirited the other half to the safety of Sweden. Two dozen of the deported Jews survived the war. Quisling, who had holed up in the official villa he named Gimle —the home of the Norse gods — survived just long enough to be arrested, tried and executed by Norwegian authorities.

Just as the Nasjonal Samling sought to normalize racism in interwar Norway, our own "alt-right," which has thrown its support behind Donald Trump, is doing the same in our country. Tellingly, the neo-fascist Daily Stormer has published glowing pieces on both Quisling as well as Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian novelist who was both a Nobel Prize laureate and fanatical anti-Semite.

No less tellingly, along with the movement's leader, Richard Spencer, the editor of the Daily Stormer cheered Mr. Trump's description of Haiti and Africa. The remark, declared Andrew Anglin, "indicates that Trump is more or less on the same page as us."

Of course, no self-respecting Republican would be seen reading from this particular page. And, of course, several self-respecting Republicans took issue with Trump's words, just as they did last year when Trump insisted that some "very fine people" were part of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

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But here's another "of course": The very fact that these Republicans are, once again, scrambling to distance themselves from Trump's racist remarks reveals two uncomfortable truths.

First, the president's remarks are not accidental, but instead essential; they are not sparks from a wire, but the wire itself; they reflect not peripheral concerns, but core values.

Second, Republicans believe they can quarantine Trump's racist worldview while together they pursue a common economic agenda.

But Quisling's career carries a warning. Though he was a racialist, the Norwegian did not imagine, when he aligned himself with the destiny of Nazi Germany, that it would also made him complicit with its genocidal worldview.

That not a single Republican senator or representative has broken with their president over his remarks betrays a quisling-like odor.

As that other Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, declared: "A thousand words will not leave as deep an impression as one deed."

Robert Zaretsky teaches at the University of Houston and is the author, most recently, of Boswell's Enlightenment. He's currently writing The Empress and the Philosophe: Catherine the Great, Denis Diderot and the Eclipse of the Enlightenment.

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