The strongman as hero

“The Republican régime in Germany has betrayed you. Our day of retribution has come.” [Adolph Hitler]

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Trump’s pledge, with its nearly century-old echoes of the very worst movements that modern humankind has produced, was the low point of a weekend of red flags and flashing sirens for American democracy, just when you thought that it couldn’t get any worse.

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[In a] story that ran in 1990 in Vanity Fair that the future 45th president’s first wife Ivana told her lawyer “that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.”

  Philadelphia Inquirer

The only reason we question that is that we question whether Trump reads books.

But after listening to Trump’s New Order — Saturday’s grievance-filled, one-hour-and-forty-four minute fascism-on-barbiturates speech to the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC — I’m starting to think The Donald must have at least skimmed Der Fuhrer, or had his aides whip up a two-pager about him.

With pictures.

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Trump told the CPAC auditorium just outside D.C., in a room of largely Trump cultists, albeit not enough to fill the back rows. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

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There are historical precedents for all of these [recent GOP] actions and the overheated rhetoric — among history’s worst despots, genocidal maniacs, and totalitarian movements (like DeSantis’ blogger bill, which is almost identical to one that Russia strongman Vladimir Putin enacted in 2014). It’s been already way past time for the American media to start using the f-word — fascism — to describe this ideology that continues to transfix the core voting bloc in one of America’s two major political parties.

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[A]nd Trump’s dark prayer for justice and retribution might prove even more potent from a jail cell. [Some might] think the Big Money establishment like the surviving Koch Brother will stop him this time — but why, when all the money in the world can’t change minds that have been fried by QAnon and the Big Lie of election fraud.

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[Trump has] led his only serious rival DeSantis — who, again, it must be noted, is also an autocrat). And against President Joe Biden in a general election? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The Real Clear Politics average has Trump barely winning, 44.6%-44.4%. A fascist America by the mid-2020s is a coin toss.In

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addition to his inhumane “tent cities” for the unhoused, Trump — now engaged in a race to the moral bottom with DeSantis — told CPAC he would also send the National Guard into cities with high crime rates “until law and order is restored,” and suggested he would impose federal control over Washington, D.C., ignoring that city’s elected Black mayor. It all tied into his claim that there are “sinister forces” who want to “turn this nation into a socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals and dangerous refugees that no other country wants.”

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Trump. The horrific CPAC call by the extremist pundit Michael Knowles to “eradicate” transgenderism in America should remind us that Nazi brownshirts and their allies attacked Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Research and burned its 20,000 books just two months after that Hitler “retribution” rally that Jones witnessed in 1933. That same year brought political purges of university faculty across Germany — not unlike what DeSantis envisions for Florida.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.