Only three weeks have passed from the day Republicans chose Donald Trump as their nominee. Like a suicidal man who repudiates his choice one second before hitting the pavement, Repubs have been regretting nominating Trump ever since. Unfortunately, they can't pick up their brains from the sidewalk and put them back in. They will even more ashamed on November 8th, and long afterward.
Trump is a fascist. The real McCoy, not some Godwin analogy in an argument over Final Fantasy. If you don't believe me, see his
policy papers. Unlike Benito Mussolini, who had fascism defined and mapped out, Trump didn't become fascist by thought or design. (In Il Duce Mussolini's era, Fascism was cutting-edge evil.) No, Trump arrived at fascism due to beliefs his father passed on to him, beliefs that Trump has always been too narcissistic and stupid to re-examine. Those quaint World War II totalitarianisms (fascism, Nazism and Bolshevism) are especially attractive to sociopaths, including narcissist sociopaths like Trump.
So far, besides selling himself as a Messiah come to save our country from doom, Trump has made vindictiveness the theme of his campaign. He couldn't let it go with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, insulting them and the memory of their son. He had to sink himself and his party further and further with it. I can't wait to see how this guy will use nuclear weapons. No, actually, I can wait forever. And he has to tell Hilary Clinton that he'll get revenge if he loses. His followers might go 2A on her ass.
Then there was
the baby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEeY8ENxPDwIf you watch the video, Trump's tone when he said “get that baby outta here” was practically a snarl, and he makes fun of the woman for believing him momentarily.
Aren't politicians supposed to kiss babies? A cliche I know. Not that Trump could have done it (I mean even infants have their standards and would recoil from Trump's orange sleaze.) Yet, he should have, at least, taken his cues from that very old politicians trope: you don't have to kiss your supporters' babies, but dote over them. Make your constituents admire your forbearance toward their kids. (What? You think they'd believe you'd like a crying baby? No, they just want to know the candidate is willing suffer with them. It's a bonding experience.)
The GOP leaders didn't have much of a choice accepting Trump after their base fell in love with him. Still, it's impossible to feel sorry for the leadership. They did it to themselves from years of propaganda, much of it from Roger Ailes at Fox News, who fortunately has now been dismissed. They scared their base for years over terrorism, Islam, race, immigration, the Clintons, Obama, our foreign policy, our economy, our debt, taxes, and our military, and so on. How could they be so thunderstruck when their voters acted like scared rats and forced the nomination of Trump?
Frightened people want a want protection, a “strong” leader. A muscle-head. A bully, but on their side. We have a word for this: a strongman. A guy who makes grandiose plans to displace whole human populations never realizing nor caring about the suffering that would entail. A leader who can't be bothered with pesky details like how many people his deportation plan might kill. An iron-fisted blockhead who will build a wall, and by God, force Mexico to pay through warfare, dirty tricks . . . or nukes. A man who revels in the use of force: the more extreme the better. That's Trump:
a man who asks about nuking countries three times in a one hour national security briefing, like nukes are his new toy, and he can't wait to try it out.
(Of course,
Trump denies this now, because “deny and lie” is his “shock and awe.”
Politifact gives him a truth rating of about 15%. Fifteen percent of what he claims is true, or mostly true.)
People who are voting for Trump should just ask themselves how they would like working for Trump. How would they like working for a boss who only tells the truth less than fifteen percent of the time?
Ailes and the rest of the GOP lie machine were so good at scaring people, the GOP base is acting like scared Germans in the 1920s-30s. Germany's situation was far more dire than anything we're going through, and the threats it was facing were far worse than immigration and terrorism. Devastated by war, isolated by the world, having faced starvation and economic chaos three times. The Germans had good reason to be terrified that the Soviet Union was about to roll in from the East. Stalinist operatives, not liberals or progressives, were within their country wouldn't let the German people forget the threat.
What do we have stacked up against us? At least Islamic terrorists have no armies of real consequence, and couldn't move them here even if they had them. To the other side of their country, the Germans had the intransigent French, Belgians, and the worldwide British Empire. Post-war, the French (with Belgium) invaded Germany in 1923, creating the German hyperinflation that wrecked the economy and starved the people over two years. This is only a few after the starvation caused by the allied blockade. To sum up, their everyday situation was more dire than ours.
Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and company have made the US
people feel as desperate as the post-WWI Germans, an astounding
accomplishment. They way they've lost control of that frightened, angry
base might be an object lesson to why propaganda is no substitute for
news. This election has to represent the biggest long-term
political-strategy failure in US history. It's enough to make Patrick
Buchanan pull out his pubic hair, or Rush Limbaugh swallow one his
cigars.
A week ago came a rumor that Trump might drop out. That would be the best outcome for everyone involved. I'm certain he must have talked about it. He has a terribly thin skin. However, the story disappeared and has the hallmarks of being just a rumor. If so, it's hard to see how the GOP will ever recover from Trump. Whether they do or not, already the Republicans can write off the 2016 election. Anybody else they put up against Clinton now is bound to lose by twenty points. They can't get on the ballot this late in most states. I'm expecting most of the Trump supporters to stay home if their strongman quits.
By running for the presidency (which we're led to believe is an entry level position) Trump is taking a tremendous risk. He's not going to deal with a loss well. Moreover, Trump University looks like it ruin him financially, and even put him in prison. That's why he's using goon threats and saying if he loses the election must be rigged.
For as long as I've been alive, people have been hoping for third party. At the rate things are going, the GOP is going to be the third party in 2020. If not the fourth. And Trump will have his Trump Party then. If he's out on parole.
Last Note: As I was writing this blog, I saw that Wikileaks has released 23,000 more of Clinton's Secretary of State emails. They're marked with a “C” for classified. There's some dispute about whether she knew it meant classified. When I was in the military, we stamped things “Classified,” no acronyms or abbreviations about it. I know I would have seen the letter and presumed it probably meant “copyright.” I know if it were drawn to my attention, a few seconds of thought would have told me it didn't mean copyright, but the point is, I wouldn't have assumed it meant classified. Because it seems stupid to me that anything like that should be marked with single letter.
Today it came out that Judicial Watch, a conservative operation, found indications of Clinton cronyism in an email just released. But Clinton didn't send the email, and what's described there is someone seeking a job and being recommended by a few people at the Clinton Foundation. Somehow, this didn't compete well with Trumps threatening innuendos to Clinton.
About Wikileaks: does Julian Assange want Trump to win? I realize he has every reason to despise Hilary Clinton, (and probably more than I know about) but surely he wouldn't endanger the world by putting Trump in office, . My question is why isn't Wikileaks or Anonymous getting dirt on Trump? It would be damaging to Wikileaks integrity if it's now being used as Assange's instrument of revenge.
And we should also ask: has Trump made a deal with Assange? He certainly seems to have an understanding with Putin.
