Sunday, November 10, 2024

Dem Bones 2024: Autopsy of a Choice

Well, Donald Trump has been reelected and even for a committed anti-alarmist like myself, there's no way to sugarcoat the pill: It's a disastrous turn, for both the U.S. and the world, and the negative effects of it are likely to continue to impact everyone alive to read these words today for the rest of their lives.

As in the aftermath of any big loss, there are an infinity of assessments of What Happened, most refracted through the lens of the biases of those offering them, far too many long on wind but short on facts. Ritchie Torres, the dimwitted Clintonite congressclown that New York's 15th district has seen fit in inflict upon the rest of us, spoke for much of the online Clintonite-right faction in trying to somehow blame progressives:


Notably absent from the presidential ballot on Tuesday, of course, was anyone from "the far left," anyone running on "defund the police" or "from the river to the sea" or "Latinx" and anyone who either listens to anyone who pitches such things or who pitches any substantial genuine progressive reform. What American got was yet another lackluster Clintonite-right candidate, guided by all the same Clintonite-right advisers, bought off by all the same donors. Again. And this ticket lost to Trump. Again. By any reasonable assessment, it would seem as if Trump has a much greater friend than "the far left."

This writer's own analysis comes through the lens of his own biases as well, but as Torres' irrational raving indicates, not all such assessments are equal. Biases can be baggage. If they put some brand of blinders on the assessor or, as with Torres, some brand of hallucinogenic pharmaceutical in him, they aren't going to allow for a very good explanation for anything. But as with anything else, the soundness of competing analyses, however they're arrived at, is still always a question of whose argument is the most sound.

Many commentators think Trump's victory signals a hard shift, by Americans, to the far-right, toward Trump's ugly fascism, but that's arguably an even worse take than Torres'.

It's a fact that Trump is the ideal candidate of his hardest-core followers, the authoritarian strongman of which they've always dreamed. It's also a fact that they, alone, aren't even close to sufficiently numerous to elect him. A dynamic that is always at work in our elections but that few seem to recognize or acknowledge is that when, in a two-party system, it comes to expressing discontent with the party in power, the other party is the default. There's no other game in town. Trump benefited from simply having a failed incumbent of the other party in the White House, one with whom Americans have been exhausted for years.

Trump also sells his campaign via a firehose-of-falsehoods approach to propaganda, spewing many different, often blatantly contradictory, views on everything. I've often used this as an example:
"A 2016 Washington Post article offers an hilarious look at Trump’s many positions on the minimum wage in that campaign. In sequence, Trump opposed raising the federal minimum wage, said wages were already 'too high,' as if he supported reducing it, said he supports raising the min. wage to $15, said wages were 'too low,' supported raising the min. wage but not to $15, supported entirely abolishing the federal min. wage and supported raising the min. wage to $10/hour. In office, Trump made no effort to do any of these things. Take your pick."
The only through-line is Trump trying to get into power. Out of one side of his mouth, Trump is the "anti-war" candidate; out of the other, he persistently disdains diplomacy and international cooperation--the things that keep nations out of war--and advocates, as a solution to every international difficulty, belligerent authoritarian aggression. When it comes to expressing his absolute hatred of immigrants, no lie is black enough, no measure against them harsh enough, but then he'll say he's just opposed to illegal immigrants and that, in fact, the U.S. needs more immigrants--while, during his first term, radically restricting legal immigration, pledging more of the same in his next and promising to deport legal immigrants already in the U.S..

Trump even tries to appeal to progressive values broadly shared by most Americans while pushing darkest fascism that repudiates all of them. The Trump who, at his Madison Square Garden event on 27 Oct., was warm-and-fuzzily touting his Muslim support...
"[T]hese are people--by the way, they're great. They just want peace. They want to have peace, and it's great... [T]he Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion."
...is the same Trump who falsely claimed thousands of American Muslims celebrated in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11 when the World Trade Center fell, called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the U.S., actually enacted a version of that ban and has pledged, in the just-concluded campaign, to bring it back and strengthen it. He praised his Jewish support; he has repeatedly disparaged and condescended to Jews, suggesting, for example, in September that if he lost, Jews would be responsible, for voting for "the enemy." Trump has pledged to bar from the U.S. those who "don't like our religion." By"our religion," he wasn't talking Judaism or Islam.

Again, take your pick.

Trump has seamlessly integrated straightforwardly fascist themes with traditional conservative motifs and imagery, "Morning in America" fancies of tax cuts and a return of prosperity for those who stiffen in nostalgic appreciation for such corn porn, alongside a ruinous campaign of deportations against untermenschen, to heat the hemoglobin of the blood-and-soil brethren.

All of this contradictory and nonsensical messaging goes out there, being further distorted by the massive right-wing media apparatus that plagues the U.S.. People, who tend to have a lot more going on in their lives than following public affairs, get bits and pieces of it, form their notion of Trump--and, more broadly, their notion of what's happening in the U.S.--from what they pick up. Sometimes--ofttimes--they hear what they want to hear, remember what they want to remember. It's an exaggeration to say Trump doesn't even have policies, but it's dead-on accurate to say that, other than a few typically really bad and harmful ones, he's entirely unserious about policy. That's why he can use that firehose so effectively--he doesn't really care. What people who don't closely follow public affairs tend to get from him is a vibe, and the vibe he's projecting, when one strips away most of the specifics, is the one they're currently buying: discontent. People have been let down by the political Establishment--that's just a fact--and they feel it; Trump tells them they're right, and calls out The Elites of that Establishment, excoriates them, pokes fun at them. Even if, when it comes to that, his targets are the wrong ones, his attacks ludicrous, ill-informed, false, no other politician does that. And the political Establishment hates Trump, which allows him to pose as some sort of rebel and Wear Their Scorn As A Badge Of Honor. Trump's overawing lack of polish has always made him seem, on a public stage otherwise populated by blow-dried, scripted, rehearsed-down-to-the-micronometer politicians, Genuine--another quality appreciated by people perpetually bombarded by a never-ending parade of those kinds of political robots. All of this is a style, a brand, and though any reasonable, informed analyst would dismiss Trump as something like the least ethical used car salesman they'd ever encountered, it's received by many as an indication that Trump is a strong, straight-talking, hard-assed leader, something else people appreciate.[1]

On the other side, of course, are the Democrats, and the scorn that party's corrupt Clintonite-right leadership has earned by this disaster is very difficult indeed to adequately express. It isn't inaccurate to say that Trump has never won the presidency but, rather, that Democrats have lost it.

The public doesn't like rule by the donor-driven conservative "Democrats" of the Clintonite right but a dysfunctional system has ensured the faction has held hegemony over the party apparatus and its federal elected officials for decades, even as the public has moved further left. Joe Biden was a conservative "Democrat" of a bygone era and had been showing signs of significant cognitive impairment since he'd entered the 2020 presidential race but the party Establishment backed him because after all their other potential champions fell, they needed a name-brand Clintonite to defeat progressive Bernie Sanders. During that campaign, Biden told his wealthy donors that "nothing will fundamentally change" under his rule, and in office, that usually seemed to be his guiding principle. His presidency was a miserable failure (Trump was, in fact, only able to present himself as a viable presidential candidate after J6 because of Biden's refusal to act against he and his goons in an appropriate and timely manner).[2] His approval rating went permanently underwater--more disliked than liked--in Aug. 2021, only 7 months into his regime, and it hit permanent majority disapproval only 2 months later.


Yet still, the party poobahs stuck with him. An ABC News report on the 2023 Democratic National Committee's winter meeting in Philadelphia spotlighted how out-of-touch they'd become. It was headlined "Democrats Rally Without 'Any Reservations' Around Biden's Expected 2024 Campaign." The money-quote:
"'I have heard from no one within the DNC or other power brokers within the Democratic Party any reservation about Joe Biden,' one of the DNC members said."
...while that same week, the ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 58% of rank-and-file Dems "support the idea of nominating someone other than Biden... Just 31% said they would support Biden... Sixty-two percent of Americans say they would be 'dissatisfied' or 'angry' if Biden were reelected"; 62% of respondents thought Biden has accomplished little or nothing. While party officialdom was unanimously full-steam-ahead on a reelection effort by this doomed, brain-waxed incumbent, supermajorities of Democrats had, since at least July 2022 (when I first began tracking the phenomenon), been saying they didn't want Biden to run again and didn't want the party to renominate him. The rest of the public was even less warm to the idea; by the time Biden left the race in July, he'd been losing to Trump in the head-to-head polling averages for over 10 months, in an unbroken line, losing every swing state for 7 (and losing most of them since the previous Fall).

Biden's delusional insistence on running for reelection, backed by the party elite (many of whom were, for years, complicit in trying to conceal his cognitive impairment from the public), robbed Democrats of what would have been, in the absence of this, a vibrant primary that would have allowed Dem voters--whether they would have availed themselves of the opportunity or not--to pick a strong contender from a broad selection of candidates. Had Biden remained in the race, Trump would have defeated him on 5 Nov. in a major landslide that would have been accompanied by major Dem losses all over the U.S.. But as it was, Biden wasted over a year of everyone's time, then dramatically self-destructed in a prime-time debate with Trump.

Only then, when forced into it, did the party hierarchy begin to turn against him. When Biden was forced out of the race by their newfound no-confidence, he threw his weight behind Kamala Harris. Though someone not connected to the Biden administration would have had a better chance, Biden had already screwed that pooch on that; there was little time to introduce a whole new face. More importantly, no one else would have been able to access the illicit campaign money Biden had collected to date. So Harris, who wouldn't have won a competitive primary battle for the nomination, was thrown into the deep end of a campaign for President of the United States at, in effect, the very last minute. It would be an unenviable position for a gifted politician, and Harris would never be mistaken for one of that caliber.

Still, she started with some positive progressive populist messaging that put her numbers, which were rather awful, in ascent. She proposed removing medical debt from Americans' credit scores. She scorched corporate greed and pledged to back a federal ban on price-gouging on food (inflation and sustained, insanely elevated prices on everything was a huge issue, that could have--and should have--been been hit at every turn). She endorsed revoking tax incentives that rewarded private equity for buying up large numbers of homes (such investors exploiting the housing market is a major factor in making home ownership increasingly unattainable for Americans), and called for a legal crackdown on rent-setting software that allows for price-fixing by corporate landlords. She swiped Trump's proposal to end taxes on tips for service workers, putting a more sane face to a solid idea otherwise advanced by a candidate who was entirely unserious about it. It was a really small policy though, and all of these proposals are really just tinkering, not the big, structural reforms that are needed, but for a hastily-assembled campaign, they were a good start. In the one good major decision of her campaign, she picked plainspoken Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running-mate.[3]

This pulled her out of the hole in which she'd been as a consequence of her association with Biden and put her ahead in the presidential race.

Then, instead of building on it, came what many are calling The Pivot.

I'm not really fond of that characterization. It's describing, broadly, Harris' move to the right, and it's an accurate representation of how What Happened was widely received but the reality is that Harris was already a conservative opportunist. Calling it The Pivot puts her on the wrong starting-blocks and implies there was a dramatic, Suddenly It Happened sort of change, when that wasn't really the case. The mildly populist messaging that made her a contender was just that--"mildly"--and had, from the start, always been muddled with a certain degree of Clintonite muck.[4] But as big money from the donor class began to fill Harris' coffers, the populist talk quickly faded and all but disappeared, the muck consuming nearly everything. I'll stick with calling it The Pivot, but I'll leave it in caps like that and note it's a very problematic characterization.

Arguably, The Pivot can be said to have started with a series of stories in which the Harris campaign was quietly walking back support for progressive positions the candidate had made a show of taking in the past. She no longer supported a ban on fracking. She--again--no longer supported Medicare For All. She wouldn't support expanding the Supreme Court. She no longer supported a federal jobs guarantee. In her 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she had advocated making border-crossing a civil infraction, rather than a criminal offense, bringing it in line with the rest of current law (where being present in the U.S. without authorization is a civil infraction); she ditched that too. Would she support student debt relief? Well...
"Her platform briefly mentions it, saying that she will continue 'working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt' but without outlining a specific plan."
On the campaign trail, Harris never so much as mentioned the issue, much less any plan, not even at her debate with Trump, when Trump attacked Joe Biden on it.

This was Kamala the conservative opportunist. She'd frequently cosplayed as a progressive earlier in her political career because she thought it would benefit her, but she'd proven herself willing to jettison all of it on a dime and move right--to, for example, become Biden's running mate--whenever she thought doing so would benefit her. That sort of thing is demoralizing and, having seen the same con many times, exhausting to politically-engaged progressives, appalling to those who want and maybe desperately need progressive reforms and are being left behind by such shifts and breeds distrust, uncertainty and disapprobation across the entire political spectrum. No one--or, at least, no one who doesn't see politics as a sporting event and just mindlessly cheers on their team--likes a flip-flopper.

The Pivot continued.

Harris used her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Committee--one of her highest-profile moments of the campaign--to announce she would revive the atrocious "bipartisan" border bill that had mercifully died in congress back in February. When that bill was being hashed out, Democratic legislators had simply given up on trying to get anything positive into it, abandoning even the Dreamers, and, in the name of "bipartisanship," just gave Republicans everything they wanted--a bloated, punitive, miserable atrocity of a bill--only to see Donald Trump order it killed anyway so that he could run on the immigration "issue." Harris said she would pass it through congress and sign it into law. In a campaign in which Trump's hate-filled tirades involved insisting immigrants were a pet-eating, blood-poisoning, subhuman infestation carrying out a violent crime-wave against white Americans, Harris' representation of herself as a border-hawk, even a kinder, gentler one, only bolstered Trump's narrative.

Under Biden, the U.S. had become not just the largest producer of fossil fuels in the world but in the history of the world, with all the negative consequences that entails for the present and the future; Harris, who, in another lifetime, had been a supporter of the Green New Deal, announced she would be supporting even greater domestic fossil fuel production, bragged about Biden's "accomplishments" in this area.

Biden had been bleeding support since last Fall for his unwavering, unconditional backing of the ongoing campaign of mass murder in Gaza by the Netanyahu regime in Israel, which was trying, for months, to draw the U.S. into a larger regional war while Netanyahu was all but openly backing Trump. When Harris became the nominee, it was hoped that she would go in a different direction but in August, her campaign flatly stated she wouldn't support an arm embargo, the only thing likely to put a stop to the killing. When, at a campaign event, Harris faced protesters chanting "we won't vote for genocide," she was condescending: "You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I'm speaking." At a CNN townhall event on 23 Oct., Harris was asked what she would say to those who are thinking about voting for a 3rd party candidate or sitting out the presidential election because of this issue, her answer was just ghastly: she suggested that those who care about this issue should vote for her anyway because they also care about "the price of groceries" and abortion rights.

At his debate with Harris, Trump made use of all of this, saying
"Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window. She's going to my philosophy now. In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat. She's gone to my philosophy."
...before, of course, turning on his firehose again to add that she was a "Marxist" and that, if she was elected, she'd change back.

Harris had to bear the baggage of a widely despised incumbent Clintonite-right administration of which she had been a part from the beginning and was stuck with trying to present herself as a change candidate--because absolutely no one was interested in continuing Biden's rule--while, at the same time, not being terribly critical of Biden, due to the mechanics of the Democratic party and her place in the administration. Politically, she needed to find a way to at least seem as if she was dramatically separating herself from Biden but she never did. The contradiction came to a head when, appearing on ABC's THE VIEW less than a month before the election, Harris was asked what, during the last four years, she would have done differently as president than Joe Biden. It was an obvious question, something for which any remotely skilled politician would have been prepared. Harris wasn't.
"There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of--and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact--the work that we have done."
...and that's probably how she really feels but if Harris had been actively trying to commit political suicide, the only more effective way to do it would have been to advocate something like legalized pedophilia. Trump and the Republicans seized on these profoundly brainless remarks and plastered them all over her right up until the election.

That same interview also showcased what was probably the most ruinous aspect of The Pivot, Harris deciding to spend much of the latter portion of her campaign (particularly the last month or so) alienating her own party's base to focus on chasing that cherished Clintonite chimera, the anti-Trump Republican, that mythical mass of conservative voters out there somewhere who, if they could be magically mobilized, would allow corrupt donor-driven "Democrats" to ignore/replace even more of their party's progressive base and be even more pro-plutocrat with impunity. It was one of Hillary Clinton's many blunders in 2016 and as if that election--and it's results--had never happened, Harris fell right into it:

The only thing Harris told THE VIEWers she would do that was "different" from Biden was "I plan on having a Republican in my cabinet." A few days later, she said that, if elected,
"Not only will I have a Republican in my Cabinet, but I'm also going to... [create] a bipartisan council of advisers who can then give feedback on policy as we go forward... We need a healthy two-party system, we have to have a healthy two-party system, we have to. It's in the best interest of all of us."
How something like that could help produce "a healthy two-party system" or even if it could, why producing "a healthy two-party system" is the job of a presidential candidate of one party who is supposed to be running against the other party, rather than helping empower it, is anyone's guess.

Not so much a mystery--though Harris was entirely oblivious to it--was the harm Harris was regularly doing to herself with this sort of nonsense. In the home stretch, the earlier positive pitches of progressive reform were mostly gone.[5] There were no bold proposals. Harris, charging to the right, was down to vaguely hinting at a pro-business vision of her presidency for which no one poorer than a millionaire was interested in dropping a tab, mouthing reductionist and inadequate "Orange Man Bad" messaging re:Trump, parading around celebrity supporters and, most especially, drawing, then, with no sense of self-awareness, waving around endorsements by highly partisan Republicans, whose backing only confirmed she was conservative enough not to alienate their support. Many of those same Republicans had, in fact, already endorsed Joe Biden before he withdrew. She was running on "defending democracy," which her own party had tried to undermine for years, while refusing to practice it--refusing to offer a positive vision for a better future around which voters could rally. Even if Harris hadn't directly said, on nationwide television, that she wouldn't do anything different from Biden, this just sounded--overwhelmingly and depressingly sounded--like more of the same.

On 18 Oct., the New York Times reported about how Harris
"has carefully courted business leaders, organizing a steady stream of meetings and calls in which corporate executives and donors offer their thoughts on tax policy, financial regulation and other issues."
That would be the representatives of the same business class that Harris, during her early moments of populist posturing, was publicly pummeling. Behind the scenes--while she was pounding Trump for being a puppet of such creatures--they were the ones shaping her policies. Soon, little pretense remained; Harris was openly touting endorsements of her candidacy by scores of "business leaders" and adopting billionaire Mark Cuban as one of her most visible campaign surrogates.

Democrats wouldn't allow a pro-Palestinian speaker to address the party convention about "the impact of Israel's military operation in Gaza," but they couldn't seem to award enough speaking slots to Republicans. Harris received and raved about endorsements by over 100 former Republican national security officials, then over 250 former staffers of the Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr. administrations and the campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. She drew endorsements from Alberto Gonzalez, the civil-liberties-slaying former Attorney General for George Bush Jr., and gore-spattered war-criminal Dick Cheney, Bush's Vice President. In North Carolina, Harris "used rallies in Charlotte and Greensboro to tout endorsements from Republicans who have crossed the aisle to back her." Harris repeatedly campaigned with Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, former congressclown and a vile reactionary demagogue despised by progressives but that the Clintonite right had bizarrely tried to turn into a hero for her opposition to Trump. They appeared together in, among other places, Ripon, Wisconsin, because it was the birthplace of the Republican party, and the crowd cheered at the mention of Dick Cheney and Trump VP Mike Pence! The New York Times reported that in Oct., Harris stumped with Cheney "more than any other ally." Harris sent Ritchie Torres and Bill Clinton's corpse to Michigan, home of the largest Arab and Muslim community in the U.S. and a state she was in danger of losing because of Israeli mass-murder in Gaza. Torres, our old pal from the beginning of this article who tried to blame "the far left" for Harris' loss, talked up Harris' support of Israel and, among other things,
"emphasized that Harris’s team had rejected calls by Michigan-based organizers of the “Uncommitted” protest movement to host a Palestinian-American speaker at the Democratic National Convention. Harris made the controversial move, Torres reportedly said, because she didn’t want to risk the chance of any speaker opposing Israel."[6]
Clintoncorpse, meanwhile, asserted that Hamas "forces" the IDF to kill civilians and dismissed, as misguided, criticism of the Israelis' grotesquely disproportionate violence.[7] Harris went on to lose Michigan. Three days before the election, Harris dispatched Hillary Clinton to stump for her campaign in Florida to, in the words of one local news outlet, "energize voters in hopes of turning Florida blue." Hillary Clinton has, for most of the last 7 years, been more disliked by Americans than Donald Trump and lost Florida in 2016, after Barack Obama had won it twice.[8] Harris went on to lose Florida--a swing state--by over 13 points.

Throughout these final weeks, the song remained the same.

It didn't help matters when, only 6 days before the election, Biden, in his typically addle-brained fashion, seemed to call Trump supporters "garbage." Biden was reacting to MAGA "comedian" Tony Hinchcliffe, who, at a Trump rally a few days earlier, referred to Puerto Rico as "literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean." Biden retorted, "the only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters." In context, Biden was clearly referring to Hinchcliffe's words (think "supporter's"), but Trump and the Republicans pounced on it, and even if they were being somewhat dishonest, they were right to do so. Biden can't communicate; he needed to shut the fuck up and stay out of the race. His mind-melter turned what should have been a scandal that hurt Trump--one of Trump's multiple racist speakers--into one that hurt Harris--the sitting president of her party pulling a "basket of deplorables."

In the election aftermath, Rolling Stone has reported that many Democratic operatives and insiders made the case that "palling around" with the Cheneys "and making the campaign's closing argument about how many Republicans were supporting Harris" were bad ideas, that they would alienate and dissuade Dem voters "and that the data over the past year screamed that Democrats instead needed to reassure and energize the liberal base and Dem-leaning working class in battleground states." They were told to go piss up a rope. So add that to the pile.

A fat lot of things went into Trump's win and that kind of "leadership" in the Democratic party may be the porkiest of the passel. One could just look at Joe Biden's spectacular unpopularity, say Harris just wasn't able to separate herself from him and overcome it and leave it at that--people voted for what they saw as the only alternative--but the bad decisions by the Democratic leadership that cursed us with this outcome (and as much as I've written here, I've barely scratched the surface on this) are just too many, too egregious, too self-evidently stupid and went on too long to sweep under the rug. Votes are still being counted--this was reportedly the 2nd-largest turnout in a century, topped only by 2020--but so far, it looks like it's primarily just a matter of the Democrats failing to turn out a lot of their voters. This was a winnable election, and Trump didn't win it; Democrats lost it. Again.

As for Trump himself, he draws votes for reasons that tend to be a lot more complicated than some allow (or perhaps want to allow). It's laughable to suggest that, because they voted for him, Americans are moving sharply right or support the sort of end to liberal democracy he pushes or have embraced the fascism he represents. The issues polling to which Americans are subjected laugh that out of the room. If that isn't good enough, then consider that all across the U.S., the very same bodies of voters who backed Trump, often overwhelmingly, also supported progressive ballot initiatives (or opposed MAGA-backed ones) by lopsided margins. If, once Trump launches his 2nd presidency, he undertakes the many odious proposals he promised, he'll find precious little public support for any of it, and overwhelming opposition to most.

After screwing over all of us again, the Clintonites who run the Democratic party have, in their election post-mortems, largely retreated into their usual deflectionary bullshit. The loss, they say, is down to sexism. Or racism. Or--most especially--progressives. Somehow. They'll insist Americans have moved hard-right, so Dems should do the same (which is what they always want the Dems to do, no matter what happens). The most contemptibly elitist of them have attacked the voters. It's the fault of absolutely everything and anything, except for them--the people who actually ran the campaign, made all the decisions and failed. Again. The people who, on behalf of a parasitic donor class, feed the rise of fascism by choking off all systemic avenues for the progressive reform that would choke it off. The facts: For the 3rd time, Democrats struggled against a candidate who is still nothing more than a reality-show clown hated by most of the public and that any real opponent would have ground up for bait. For the 2nd time, they lost to him. They barely defeated him in 2020 and would have almost certainly lost to him then as well, if not for covid. But any relatively solid contender would roll right over Trump. Going with bad Clintonite-right leaders who consistently make stupid decisions and pull these razor-thin margins, instead of good ones who would send the Trumps of the world into permanent retirement, is a choice. Dems can make a different one. If there are any more elections.

--j.

---

[1] In a pretty good post-election article, Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs writes that Trump "is one of the most skilled bullshitters of our age. He has an amazing capacity to convince voters that things that objectively harm them (such as letting climate change spin out of control, or not raising their wages) are actually measures to stick it to The Elites."

[2] Biden--and his conservatism--was only part of a much larger systemic failure with regard to Trump. Both of Trump's impeachments should have resulted in his being removed from office. Trump violated both emoluments clauses of the constitution every day he was in office, to no consequence (except his own corrupt enrichment). The manycrimes he committed and that would have sent anyone else to prison are legion and he's never been properly held accountable for any of them. And so on. Bu it was Biden who was charged with the federal response to all of this, and it was he who dropped the ball.

[3] There's no question Walz was a major asset to the ticket, when the campaign would let him be, but he may have been a mixed blessing, as, hearing him speak, especially after he first joined the race, one couldn't help but wonder why he wasn't the presidential candidate.

[4] At a North Carolina rally (16 Aug.), when she wast still pitching the more populist policies, she also said things like this:
"Together, we will build what I call an opportunity economy, an opportunity economy, an economy where everyone can compete and have a real chance to succeed. Everyone, regardless of who they are or where they start, has an opportunity to build wealth for themselves and their children. And where we remove the barriers to opportunity, so anyone who wants to start a business or advance their career can access the tools and the resources that are necessary to do so. I will focus on cutting needless bureaucracy and unnecessary regulatory red tape and encouraging innovative technologies while protecting consumers and creating a stable business environment with consistent and transparent rules of the road. As President, I will bring together labor with small businesses and major companies to invest in America, to create good jobs, achieve broad-based growth, and ensure that America continues to define the future and lead the world."
...sentiment aimed firmly at the business class Harris hoped--correctly--would fund her campaign and that, like so much Clintonite-right messaging, could have been offered by any conservative Republican without changing a word.

[5] In one bizarre exception that may have been an effort at a Hail Mary pass, Harris randomly decided, with less than 2 weeks before the election, to endorse increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour, a signature progressive issue (thanks to Bernie Sanders). Why wasn't this wildly popular proposal a part of her pitch from the beginning? Chalk it up to another stupid decision.

[6] Facing pushback, Torres tried to justify this (and just made it worse):
"'All people of all backgrounds should be welcome at the DNC but not all messages should be given a microphone on the Democratic Party's most important stage,' Torres told JTA. 'A pro-Israel party like the Democratic Party has every right to filter out anti-Israel messaging, just like a pro-choice party has every right to filter out anti-choice messaging.' He added that he believes Harris 'falls squarely within the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus that has historically governed American politics.'"
It's "the far left," Ritchie!

[7] Harris had earlier given Bill Clintoncorpse a primo speaking slot at this year's Democratic convention.

[8] No wise campaign would touch the politically radioactive Hillary Clinton with a 10-foot pole; before sending her to Florida, Harris gave her a top speaking slot at this year's Democratic convention.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Trump & Fascism: The Beast That Be & the Mock Shock Crock

Follow this:

On 9 Sept., a campaign account for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted (or "X'd"), "President Trump will deport migrants who eat pets." The same day on the same platform, Trump's running mate J.D. Vance was ranting about "illegal Haitian immigrants" in Springfield, Ohio, and posted that, "reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country." Two days later, Trump himself was repeating this in his debate with Kamala Harris:

"...what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War 3... What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States... In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating--they're eating the pets of the people that live there! And this is what's happening in our country."
It was a typical Trump campaign narrative: false in every particular (there has been no known pet-killing or eating; the Haitians being attacked were legal, not illegal, immigrants), aimed at demonizing and utterly dehumanizing a powerless "out group," and to spark and create a justification for ugly retribution against that group. It didn't just sound exactly like what neo-Nazis say about immigrants every day, Trump's "source" was, in fact, a neo-Nazi group (called Blood Tribe). In the days that followed, Vance continued to repeat this and to escalate the rhetoric, continuing to pretend the legal Haitian immigrants were "illegal" and that they were responsible for "a massive rise in communicable diseases" and "crime" in Springfield (also false).[1] Presenting Jews as an alien infestation of unclean creatures who commit crimes, live like (and are) animals and spread disease were central themes of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, the groundwork for the Holocaust. Vance made the rounds of the Sunday network news shows repeating all of this.

And then on Monday--literally the very next day--Vance was on X whining that "the rhetoric was out of control." Not Trump's rhetoric or his own but the rhetoric of Democrats, for reacting to this sort of "campaign." Their condemnations of Trump's words and behavior, not Trump's words and behavior themselves, were, Vance bleated, encouraging "violence" and assassination attempts against Trump.

In a sign of things to come from far-right media, Fox's deplorable Sean Hannity had this written up and further circulated it.

Hold that thought.


At the beginning of the Trump regime, I wrote a pair of articles about "Trump & Fascism," the first outlining the substance of fascism--so often treated, these days, as an empty political curse--and delineating Trumpism from it, the second a series of appendices outlining Trump's use of fascist language and the fact that this had drawn to him a massive following among the overtly white nationalist/Nazi/fascist subculture in the U.S.. A third article, written in 2020, was intended as, among other things, an update, one that covered events since the first two and expanded their scope, showing how Trumpian protofascism was a manifestation of what far-right media had been preaching to its followers for years. It grew to book length then was, unfortunately, lost in one of those awful mechanical accidents to which this overly computerized age is subject. Months later, some of the surviving notes on that one went into another piece, written in the immediate aftermath of Trump's efforts to overthrow the 2020 election. Our dysfunctional institutions failed to properly respond to that, just as they'd failed to curtail what had led to it.

Trump has only gotten worse since then, the accusations of fascism by his opponents--when his opponents bother to make them--only more justifiable. As, in fact, the examples already noted indicate, Trump has, of late, been delving into straight-up Nazism.

That's what he was channeling in December when, paraphrasing "Mein Kampf," he repeatedly said immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our nation," directly contextualizing his virulent anti-immigrant campaign as racist blood-and-soil Nazism. As that and the false pet-eating charge demonstrate, that campaign[2] has radically escalated in the current race, where he's made one of his central themes the false insistence that immigrants are carrying out a violent crime-wave. In Grand Rapids, Michigan in April, he was describing them as "animals":
"The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals.' Nancy Pelosi told me that. She said 'please don't use the word "animals," sir, when you're talking about these people.' I said 'I'll use the word "animal," because that's what they are.'"
In that same appearance, he outlined his fantasy that other countries are
"sending [to the U.S.] prisoners, murderers, drug-dealers, mental patients and terrorists, the worst they have in every country all over the world... They're coming from all over the world."
Sentiment he's often repeated. Last week at a rally in Tempe, Arizona, he hit on the idea of calling the U.S. "a dumping ground. We're like a -- we're like a garbage can for the world," immigrants being the "garbage." In Colorado earlier this month, he said immigrants to the U.S.
"are the worst criminals in the world... Our criminals are like babies compared to these people. These people are the most violent people on earth."
A few days before that, Trump had been dabbling in Nazi pseudoscience, suggesting that immigrants commit murder because they're genetically predisposed to do so: "it's in their genes." Reuters describes Trump's rhetoric:
"Migrants who had come across the U.S. border were slaughtering people across the country, [Trump] falsely claimed.

"'These are people at the highest level of killing that cut your throat and won’t even think about it the next morning,' Trump told the crowd. 'They grab young girls and slice them up right in front of their parents'... [They are] 'savages' and 'predators' who 'sexually assault' young girls... At a rally in the small Wisconsin town of Prairie du Chien last weekend, Trump suggested migrants want to 'rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill' the nation’s citizens and that they would 'walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.'"
Trump has literally described immigrants as an infestation--a pestilence one kills--and, even more often, as an invasion--something one violently resists. Earlier this month, he told a crowd in Reading, Pennsylvania
"I will liberate Pennsylvania and our entire nation from this mass migrant invasion of murderers and child predators and gang members, terrorists, drug dealers, and thugs."
...later described as a "nation-wrecking border invasion."

One can point out that none of this is true, that all available data indicates that immigrants commit crimes at notably lower rates than the native-born, that even if one accepts "migrant crime" as a real presidential issue--and it isn't one--it's a microscopic one, that Trump's "sources," on the rare occasions when he even has any, don't at all support his assertions, but fact-checking such talk completely misses the point, which is to demonize and dehumanize brown untermenschen as a means of politically organizing Aryan voters around hating them.[3] It is, on point after point, a direct appropriation of the propaganda of the Third Reich.

It's the fascism, stupid.

Trump's "politics" remain the same palingenetic ultranationalism at the core of the fascist project, and he pitches it the same way, obsessing over imagined national decline that he and his movement will fix, cast in a stew of populist and faux-populist bromides, raw hatred of those in designated out-groups and relentless authoritarianism.
"Together, they built America into the single greatest country anywhere in the world. But now we're a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has quite simply lost its way, but we are not going to allow this horror to continue. Three years ago, we were a great nation and we will soon be a great nation again. It was hardworking patriots like you who built this country and it's hardworking patriots like you who are going to save our country. We will fight for America like no one has ever fought before. 2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the war mongers. We will expel them. We're going to drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communist, Marxist and fascist, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will route the fake news media and we will evict crooked Joe Biden from the White House on election day 2024. The great silent majority is rising like never before. And under our leadership, the forgotten man and woman will be forgotten no longer. We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God. And together we will make America powerful again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again and we will make America great again."
As that suggests, Trump allows for no legitimate political disputes. Those who disagree with him or who otherwise fall afoul of his "politics" are, in his presentations, evil, ill-intentioned, filled with and motivated by hatred, looking to do no less than destroy the country, they're scum, dangerous, Marxists, communists, fascists--any word with a negative connotation, it doesn't have to be consistent or even make any sense--and Trump, again echoing classical fascism, has explicitly said they, his fellow Americans who disagree with him, aren't part of the "nation" he's pitching, are enemies of that "nation" and are the greatest threat in the world to that "nation":
"[T]ogether, we are taking on some of the most menacing forces and vicious opponents of our people I've ever seen. We've never seen anything like what’s happening in our country. The danger from within is far greater, in my opinion, than the danger on the outside of our country. That’s danger. But this is serious, the fascists, the communists, the serious socialists... It's horrible what's happening. But no matter how hateful and corrupt the communist and criminals we are fighting against may be, you must never forget this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. This is your home. This is your heritage."[4]
Offering a vision that is fundamentally incompatible with a liberal democratic society, Trump's authoritarian program is aimed at ending such a society. Defining everyone outside his narrow notion of "the nation" as enemies of the people--a phraseology most prominently associated with no less than Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin--he advocates that the state be weaponized against them. In May, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) went through Trump's Truth Social posts and reported that "threatening political opponents"--and promising to weaponize the government against them--"has been a consistent fixation for Trump." In Sept., NBC News noted that Trump "has become increasingly explicit in describing plans to use the Department of Justice to prosecute scores of people he has declared corrupt, if he wins in November"--something that, because of the recent lawless presidential immunity ruling by a far-right Supreme Court majority, he could do with virtual impunity. Reuters notes that Trump "has vowed to investigate or prosecute political rivals, election workers and left-wing Americans if he becomes president again," and goes through some of the examples. In a Fox interview earlier this month, Trump said
"We have two enemies; we have the outside enemy and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries."
...and suggested using the National Guard or the U.S. military against "the enemy from within," which he defined as "radical left lunatics" and whom, he assessed, are a bigger problem than even immigrants (which, in case anyone forgot how much he despised immigrants, he then said are "totally destroying our country").[5] This "enemy from within," Trump has said, is a worse enemy than murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He told a 7 Oct. rally in Wisconsin
"[T]he enemy from within, the crazy lunatics that we have, the fascists, the Marxists, the communists... Those people are more dangerous, the enemy from within than Russia and China and other people."
At an 11 Oct. rally in Colorado, he said, "It's the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country, that's a bigger enemy than China and Russia." Doling out more straightforward Nazism, he told a November rally in New Hampshire,
"[W]e pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country."[6]
And so on.

Trump has, over time, liberally bestowed these labels on, well, everyone. The "radical left lunatic" and "enemy from within" labels have been directly applied to even some of the most conservative Democrats in politics--everyone from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi, Jon Tester and Adam Schiff. Earlier this year, Trump dubbed a "left lunatic" Robert Kennedy Jr., who was so "radical left" that, a few months later, he endorsed Trump for president. Many times, Trump has called the press "the enemy of the people", "the true enemy of the people", "scum." He's called Harris a "Marxist," a "communist," a "fascist." "Comrade Kamala," he says, "she's a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist." The 2024 election
"is not a choice between Democrats and Republicans. It's a choice between communism and freedom. That's what it's about."
Joe Biden is a socialist too, one "surrounded by fascists around the Oval Office," one who is "running a Gestapo administration." Conservative members of Trump's own party who aren't, in his view, sufficiently deferential to him are "Never Trumpers" who
"are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!"
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsome is "Governor New Scum." Trump expressed his opinion of the 1st Amendment rights of the filmmakers behind THE APPRENTICE by writing
"So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!"
The "people that surround" Nancy Pelosi are
"scum, they're scum, and they want to take down our country. They are absolute garbage."
And on into infinity. Everyone who isn't MAGA gets tagged with the same language with which he's described "the enemy from within."[7]

This fascist contempt for liberal democracy is all over Trumpism. In my lost fascism article, I went into a lot of detail about how baseless "voter fraud" conspiracism by Trump and the far-right media that birthed and back him is fundamentally anti-democratic--a campaign in reaction to their diminishing electoral prospects that undermines and destroys liberal democracy, sold as "protecting" it. The subsequent 2020 election denialism by these same elements and extensive efforts by Republican-controlled state and local governments and election officials, premised on Trump's lies of 2020 fraud, to hinder and restrict the franchise reinforce this conclusion. Trump continues to make the same fraudulent fraud claims and to insist he actually defeated Joe Biden. In Dec. 2022, Trump came along on Truth Social and helpfully made my original point for me, arguing that his fraud fantasies allow for the termination of all rules, including the constitution itself:


Trump, of course, launched a criminal scheme to defraud the government with fake presidential electors and generated a terrorist assault on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overthrow the results of that election. The Sept. 11th Commission documented, in excruciating detail, the fact that Trump was fully aware, right from the beginning, that the claims of widespread fraud he was making in the aftermath of losing that contest were baseless and false, but while that kind of granular debunking is important for the historical record, it--again--misses the point. Trump uses this kind of talk as an organizing force to gain and hold power and neither he nor his hardest-core followers care a whit about the actual election results. For them, the only "legitimate" election would, by definition, have been one in which Trump wins. Any other result was, by definition, an illegitimate theft, with the supporting details manufactured around that predetermined conclusion.

That's what happened in 2020. A fact given far too little attention is that Trump's efforts to overturn that election didn't begin in its aftermath. While president, Trump spent most of that year telling his followers that Democrats were not a legitimate political entity operating within the parameters of liberal democracy, that they were, rather, depraved, malevolent, a "radical left movement that seeks to obliterate and destroy everything that you hold dear," that if Democrats won, they would literally be killed in the streets, that America would be violently and entirely ended. As I wrote in 2021, "hyperbolic demagoguery so far outside any reasonable or legitimate political discourse that it would require scientific notation to graph the distance"--essentially not only a declaration of open season on Dems but an argument that it would be suicidal, both personally and nationally, not to open a season on them. This was his story, day after day, a boilerplate fascist aggrievement fantasy that represented a complete abandonment of the social contract necessary for the functioning of a liberal democracy. As part of this, Trump was telling his followers that Dems, being such depraved creatures, were working to steal the upcoming election. "[T]he only way they're going to win," he said, "is by a rigged election." After the election, Trump and his goons set out to find something--anything--from which he could manufacture a case for the conclusion he'd been openly pitching many months before a single vote had been cast, that the election was rigged and stolen from him. He came up with nothing, then tried to hold on to power by resorting to a criminal scheme then, at the end, to terror.

I covered all of this in some detail here.


Trump was, by every report, absolutely delighted by the attack on the Capitol, not only refusing to call off his supporters or do anything to assist its victims as it went on for hour after hour but tweeting an angry attack on his own vice-president, who was in the Capitol being pursued by a mob out to kill him for not assuming dictatorial powers he didn't have by refusing to certify the election results. Later that day, Trump addressed the mob in a brief video in which--fully aware that he'd lost--he said
"I know your pain. I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side... It's a very tough period of time. There's never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from out country. This was a fraudulent election. But we can't play into the hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You're very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel."
No contrition and the people injured and dead, the rule of law and democracy be damned. While continuing to repeat and vehemently insist on his "stolen election" lie in the years since, Trump has has called J6 "a day of love" and tried to present the J6 rioters, who, among other things, violently assaulted 140 law enforcement officers, as heroes. He's referred to them as "hostages" and "unbelievable patriots", "political prisoners":
"The moment we win, we will rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner unjustly victimized by the Harris regime and I will sign their pardons on Day 1."
He recorded a "patriotic" song with some of those charged with crimes for J6 and has played it at his rallies, saying the proceeds from its sales will go the families of the rioters. He's tried to make Ashli Babbit, a Trump supporter who was shot and killed in the Capitol while trying to smash through a barricade and get at members of congress, into a full-blown martyr, recording a video honoring her and denouncing the law-enforcement officer who shot her as a "lunatic" and a murderer who shot her "for no reason." When he raised the matter at his debate with Harris,[8] Trump seemed to suggest that it was an outrage that the Capitol's defenders didn't just let his goons attack and/or kill the elected officials they were protecting:
"Ashli Babbit was shot by an out-of-control police officer that should have never, ever shot her! It's a disgrace!"
Babbit has become Trump's Horst Wessel.

Instead of being condemned as a criminal and going to prison for his coup attempt, as would have happened in any functional liberal democracy, Trump has held on to his cult, escaped accountability and is now running another presidential campaign, with a credible chance of winning--a consequence of our system's usual vile deference to elites, the incredibly bad decision to elect Joe Biden (who, predictably, proved to have no stomach for pursuing justice, until shamed into it), and the more general breakdown of public support for the liberal democracy.[9] Trump went into office in 2016 despite losing the popular vote and was able to appoint 3 Supreme Court justices who joined a court majority in granting Trump immunity from prosecution for crimes he committed while in office, which didn't just free Trump from some of the late prosecutions aimed at him but, if not soon reversed, effectively ended the American experiment.[10]

A few years ago, I drew some objections for insisting on some subtle nuances in the discussion of Trump and fascism. At the time, Trump was, in my estimation, more properly characterized as protofascist, albeit one who did preach fascism. If one takes seriously what he says, that's what it is. It's a lot harder to justify those distinctions in the face of what Trump has said and done over time. The sort of things I've described in this article stretch back to Trump's very first campaign appearance in 2015, when his description of Mexicans as rapists and criminals (and his insistence that the government of Mexico was engaged in a conspiracy to ship such elements into the U.S.) instantly made him the Republican front-runner, but it has gotten much worse in recent years, and it's the thing to which commentators--both responsible, informed ones speaking in good faith and others--are responding when they call Trump a "fascist" or a "threat to democracy."

That order is significant. Intelligent, informed people didn't start calling Trump a "fascist" as some empty epithet, as so often happens in our degraded political discourse. It was because he preached and, increasingly, practiced fascism. If liberal democrats--of both the conservative and liberal Democratic, Republican and everything else varieties--argue fascism isn't a legitimate political exercise, fascism, by its very nature, rejects their form of government and disqualifies them. Regarding fascism, history charges us with one mission: Never Again. We often do a pretty poor job at seeing to that but it would be a complete abrogation of our obligation to our history if, when faced with fascism, people of good conscience chose to ignore it, rather than to speak out and to resist its progress. It would also be insane.

That brings us to, well...

When Sean Hannity approvingly reposted J.D. Vance's best impression of self-righteous outrage over allegedly harsh Democratic rhetoric aimed at Trump--rhetoric offered in reaction to Trump's own words and deeds--it was exemplary of how this matter is being treated by far-right media. For weeks, Fox News has been an endless stream of this kind of fake outrage. Anyone who dares suggest that if Trump looks like a fascist, talks like a fascist and goosesteps like a fascist, he may just be a fascist is denounced as "reprehensible," as engaging in "violent rhetoric," and "encouraging violence" and encouraging Trump's assassination (one of Vance's complaints). In one rant on the topic, Emily Compagno found it "reprehensible" that a "dignified, wonderful gentleman" like "grab 'em by the pussy" Trump was being called a fascist. On the same show, Kayleigh McEnany raved that headlines in liberal publications noting that Trump was talking like a Nazi were "totally irresponsible." Playing clips of various figures noting that Trump's talk was that of dictators, she chirped
"Really responsible, after two assassination attempts, right? Nice. Vice President Harris, meanwhile, campaigning on the 'Trump is a threat to democracy' message."
Harris Faulkner said of calling Trump a fascist, "this is hate speech now." And so on. When retired Gen. John Kelly, Trump's own former chief of staff, told the New York Times that Trump "falls into the general definition of fascist," right-wing media suggested that Kamala Harris was inspiring assassination attempts against Trump by repeating it.[11]

The Republican congressional leadership--always choosing complicity with every Trump political atrocity--got in on this circus as well, issuing a joint statement condemning Harris for calling Trump a fascist.
"[T]he Democratic nominee for President of the United States has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus. Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over... Labeling a political opponent as a 'fascist' risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day."
This was too much for CNN's Jake Tapper, who, in reaction, offered a segment showing, among other things, clips of Donald Trump repeatedly calling Kamala Harris a fascist and many other bad things, which is, of course, what Trump has done with his every political opponent since he entered politics. Tapper could have pointed out, to those offering the same objections to calling Trump a "threat to democracy" that Trump himself has repeatedly described the upcoming election as a "final battle" and told a right-wing gathering in July that if he's elected,
"in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not going to have to vote."
..and, conversely,
"If this election isn't won, I’m not sure that you'll ever have another election in this country... I don't think you’re going to have another election in this country if we don't win this election. I don't think you’re going to have another election or certainly not an election that's meaningful..."

But one won't find that sort of thing in the appalling 24/7 mockery of moral outrage staged on far-right media. If one were to have the thought that, if anything, Trump's fascism, rather than those who have only just pointed it out, is what may inspire assassination attempts, one wouldn't get it from these outlets, because Trump's own rhetoric and behavior, as covered here, is entirely absent from those segments and only turns up in others, wherein, with no sense of decency, the same hosts angrily roasting Democrats for calling out Trump's fascism actively promote that same fascism.

It would, however, be a grave error to focus solely on the hypocrisy of these MAGA howls about Democratic rhetoric. Hypocrisy is an easy charge to make, easy to understand, easy to politically use but here, it's mostly just another case of missing the point. These attacks on those who call out Trump's fascism aren't meant as a serious critique, certainly not as a call for civility (not even "civility for thee but not for me"). They're part of the same Depraved Democrats narrative that Trump has been spewing for years. They're encouraging violence in the guise of condemning same. They're part of the fascism.

It should all perhaps be a Sobering Reminder that while he undeniably accelerated some bad trends, Trump is a symptom, not the problem, and even if he's defeated, his followers and the broader right conditioned by this toxic media machine and the politicians empowered by it will still be with us. Trump has been priming as many of them as he can to reject any Trump loss this year as a fraud, just as he did in 2020.[12] Anyone wanting to save the American liberal democracy will have a lot of hard work ahead of them.

--j.

---

 [1] Trump himself had been presenting immigrants as disease-carriers since at least 2021.

 [2] When Trump entered his first presidential campaign in 2015, he used his speech announcing his candidacy to say Mexicans who came to the U.S. were rapists and criminals and to suggest the government of Mexico was conspiring to ship such elements into the U.S.

 [3] Trump has done a version of the same thing with transgender people, a politically powerless minority hated by the far-right. Among other things, Trump has been telling his followers on the campaign trail that not only are schools performing gender reassignment surgeries on children but are doing so without parental consent or knowledge, a black lie with no basis whatsoever in reality. Transgender people make up only 1.14% of the population but CBS News reported on 16 Oct. that Trump's campaign spent $19 million airing anti-trans ads 55,000 times in the first two weeks of the month. Trump has promised that, if reelected, he'd use the federal government to roll back trans rights and both impose discrimination against trans people and force localities to do the same.

 [4] To virtually no apparent notice by our dysfunctional institutions, Trump has been offering variations on that same sentiment in his stock stump-speeches since at least the Summer of 2021. He was offering a version of it at his Madison Square Garden rally this weekend, where, among other things, Stephen Miller--a white nationalist and longtime Trump hand--gave a speech on the theme, "America for Americans only," a slogan and longtme theme of the Ku Klux Klan, and "comedian" Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as "literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean."

 [5] Trump is, of course, as casually authoritarian as any fascist. A July CREW analysis of his Truth Social posts gives a small slice of this, reporting that

"from January 1, 2023 to April 1, 2024, Trump has vowed at least 19 times to weaponize law enforcement against civilians. This includes deploying state and local police, multiple branches of the military and federal law enforcement agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, FBI and Homeland Security agencies against people crossing the southern border, homeless people and protestors."
Disruptors of "the nation." In 2023, he told the annual CPAC Klavern meeting that

"'he would use a second term in the White House to implement an authoritarian vision for policing crime that would include deploying the National Guard into US cities with high crime rates.

"'I will send in the National Guard until law and order is restored. You know we’re not supposed to do that,' Trump said in his address closing out the annual Conservative Political Action Conference conference in Oxon Hill, Md., where he easily won a presidential straw poll of attendees."
 [6] When some called out Trump for this Nazi language, a Trump campaign spokesman sought to dispel the concerns by telling the Washington Post that those who were complaining were "snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House."

 [7] If the rest of this article doesn't make it clear enough, Trump's authoritarianism would be difficult to overstate. Cumulatively, he advocates centralizing law enforcement power that now rests with states, cities, towns and localities in his own hands, forcing police to essentially create a police state. He has said he wants to force local law-enforcement agencies to implement a stop-and-frisk policy--police just randomly stopping and searching people--which the courts have already ruled is unconstitutional (as if one needed a court ruling to understand that). He's said he will "increase vital [legal] liability protections" for police that shield them from being sued for abusive behavior, "direct the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical leftist prosecutor's officers" around that U.S.--that is, duly elected prosecutors--if he doesn't like how they're doing their jobs, "[deploy] federal assets, including the National Guard, to restore law and order when local law enforcement refuses to act." While president, Trump rescinded President Obama's executive order barring the transfer of military-grade weapons and equipment to civilian law enforcement and resumed those transfers; Biden reimplemented it and now, Trump promises to do away with the ban again. Trump has promised to implement the death penalty for drug dealers. He's advocated revoking the citizenship of anyone burning an American flag in protest and sending them to prison for a year. He's pledged to deport demonstrators protesting Israeli mass murder in Gaza ("[I]f you get me reelected, we're going to set that movement back 25 or 30 years," he said). In 2016, Trump pushed for a complete ban on Muslims entering the U.S., which, once he was in office, was whittled down to a ban on travelers from predominately Muslim countries. He's pledged to bring back and strengthen this ban.
"I will ban refugee resettlement from terror infested areas like the Gaza Strip, and we will seal our border and bring back the travel ban... Remember the famous travel ban? We didn't take people from certain areas of the world. We’re not taking them from infested countries."
Some of the new restrictions on entry into the U.S. he's advocated:
"I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants. If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion--which a lot of them don't--if you sympathize with the jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in. Right? We don't want you! Get out of here!"
And:
"I will order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists. Those who come to and join our country must love our country. We want them to love our country. We don't want 'em when they want to destroy our country... So we're going to keep foreign Christian hating Communists, Marxists and Socialists out of America."
And "what do we do with the ones who are already here?" he asked. "I think we have to pass a new law for them."

In foreign affairs, the story is the same. Using his long-running firehose-of-falsehoods approach, Trump posed as an anti-war candidate at times while, at the same time, advocating a persistently belligerent foreign policy. During his first administration, Trump
"[escalated] conflict in every theatre of war he inherited, repeatedly brought the country to the brink of new wars, and recklessly threw around U.S. power with no regard for the many lives it would cost... Trump’s foreign policy was characterized above all by an aversion to diplomacy and a knee-jerk reliance on hostility. Attacking diplomatic relations and torpedoing successful multilateral agreements like the Iran nuclear deal, Trump instead tried to strongarm other countries into doing his bidding through threatening rhetoric, military brinkmanship, and suffocating sanctions. The result? Not a single one of Trump’s targets for hybrid warfare is any closer to doing his bidding now than when he started (often for the best). In the meantime, countless thousands have suffered the consequences."
And so on.

 [8] In that same clip, Trump suggested that he told the J6 crowd to protest "peacefully and patriotically," but while, in real time, he said they would protest in that way--in a single throwaway line that seemed to have been included solely with an eye toward dodging legal liability later--he never, in fact, suggested to them that course of action, in a speech devoted to telling an angry mob the election had been stolen from them and they needed to fight against this. Continuing, Trump entirely washed his hands of any responsibility for anything bad that happened.

 [9] That breakdown is apparent across the political spectrum, where MAGA Republicans are boldly anti-democratic but in the name of protecting democracy while Clintonite-right "Democrats" pose as defenders of the liberal democracy while trying to kick third-party candidates off ballots.

[10] Faced with conviction and prison, Trump ran to the courts with the notion that presidents enjoyed "absolute" legal immunity for crimes committed while in office, his "lawyer" agreeing, during argument, that a president could order SEAL Team 6 to execute his political rivals and that immunity would still apply, unless he was first impeached and removed from office--a thing the same president could avoid by simply having the same SEALs also kill enough members of congress to prevent a quorum. While it reflected Trump's authoritarian view of his own power (and why he never should have been president in the first place), it was an entirely frivolous claim, directly at odds with the entire American experiment and made solely as one of Trump's many delaying tactics, but shockingly, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case eventually landed, ruled in Trump's favor, holding that the constitution was unconstitutional and the president above the law.

[11] Kelly is one of many former Trump officials who have offered this characterization of their former boss. When asked about why so many of his own former officials refuse to support him in the present campaign, Trump claimed that "the people who don't support are a very small portion. We have a tremendous-- about 97% of the people in the administration support me." In reality, half of Trump's own cabinet officials have refused to endorse him for reelection, as has his Vice President, after Trump essentially tried to have him killed on J6.

[12] MAGA has been working on 2024 for years now, putting in place all manner of new voting restrictions, absurd, illegal and unconstitutional rules, crackpot election officials who spread outlandish misinformation and vow to challenge the results without regard for whether they have any authority to do so, and filing scores of lawsuits to try to restrict the franchise, manipulate the outcome of the vote and cast doubt on its ultimate results, should Trump lose.