The Fascist and the Furious
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing news. In the two days I was away from my keyboard, we learned that Trump has fantasized about having “the kind of generals Hitler had,” was directly described as a fascist by his longest serving Chief of Staff John Kelly (a description that has already been confirmed by 13 former Trump administration officials), and that, according to the WSJ (Gift Article) Elon Musk, Trump’s biggest current supporter (both financially and on social media), has been having secret conversations with Vladamir Putin. “The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.” (Personal topics? “How’s the constant lying on your platform going?” … “Great, thanks. What’s new with your mass murder campaign?”). In a normal American era, any of these stories would qualify as an October surprise. In 2024, the surprise will be if a majority of Americans see fascist tendencies and Hitlerian fantasies as disqualifying features for a president. Before coming to a conclusion on that matter, consider that half of Americans saw Donald Trump as a fascist in a poll taken before the John Kelly story. (That said, in the same poll, 22% see Harris as a fascist.) The Harris campaign clearly thinks the threat to democracy is a worthy topic for their closing argument. And it may move some Trump supporters to reconsider their allegiance (or at least stay home on Nov 5th). But don’t underestimate the ability of people to normalize even extremely dangerous behaviors and beliefs. As I mentioned last week in Zero Tux Given, “You thought it couldn’t happen here? This is exactly what it look likes.” (And just wait until we get to story number 2…)
+ Maybe hearing a universally respected patriot like John Kelly issue a warning like this will be the thing to finally get Trump’s top enablers to consider the risks we face and put country over party. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Wait, sorry. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Susan Glasser in The New Yorker: Donald Trump and the F-Word. “Now that the fascist label is out there, a significant part of the G.O.P. has predictably gone ahead and normalized it, as they have with all Trump’s previous outrages. Watch the clip of New Hampshire’s formerly moderate Republican governor, Chris Sununu, smirking on CNN as he rationalized Trump’s admiration for Hitler and Nazi generals as something ‘baked in’ with the voters. If Trump wins, we will surely see many repetitions of that scene: when he starts carrying out the policies that led to Kelly and others to call him a ‘fascist,’ his defenders will shrug and say, Well, it’s old news.”
+ Wait, it gets worse. Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell are out with a joint statement. It doesn’t argue that Trump’s fascist tendencies are the threat to America. No, in a gaslighting move that would make Joseph Goebbels blush, they warn that the real threat is that someone is saying he’s a fascist. (Because, you know, Donald Trump is against name-calling.) Johnson, McConnell ask Harris to ‘stop escalating the threat environment’ after Trump fascist remarks. (These guys can go fascist themselves.)
