Or Maybe The MAGAts Are Just As Fascist As Trump Is
Isaac Arnsdorf covered Trump’s MAGA rally in New Hampshire Saturday. Takeaways included Trump once again expressing admiration for fascist leaders in Russia and Hungary, fascist leaders with whom his ideas and goals align. He also “reprised dehumanizing language targeting immigrants that historians have likened to past authoritarians, including a reference that some civil rights advocates and experts in extremism have compared to Adolf Hitler’s fixation on blood purity. And he used the term ‘hostages’ to describe people charged with violent crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol. The comments came as experts, historians and political opponents have voiced growing alarm about Trump’s rhetoric, ideas and emerging plans for a second term, pointing to parallels to past and present authoritarian leaders.” Sunday morning, Trump summed up his themes on his social media platform:
Experts, historians and political opponents— and journalists and DWT readers— might be alarmed. Trump supporters— the very personification of the contrast between nationalists (which Trump supporters are) and patriots (which Trump supporters are not)— loved every second of it. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu can predict that Trump will lose his state decisively (“landslide” was the word he used) to Nikki Haley, but the latest polling from CBS News doesn’t show much indication of that.
At his rally, Trump said “I didn’t like your governor very much. He’s like a spoiled brat,” a followup to a slam on his social media site after Sununu endorsed Haley: “Chris Sununu could have run for the Senate in New Hampshire and WON, but no, he wanted to run for President and, without announcing, did. Sadly for him, he got ZERO traction, and went back to being Governor. Very selfish! Now he is unelectable in his own State, and can back Nikki, who has no chance of winning.”
Trump’s behavior— something you might expect from an old man approaching 80 under incredible stress, who eats poorly and doesn’t exercise— will remind many people of Robert Paxton’s definitive Anatomy of Fascism, which makes the point that fascism is not simply a dictatorial right-wing ideology but rather a distinct political movement with its own unique characteristics. He identified six core features of fascism, each of which describes Trump’s MAGA movement: mobilized populism, anti-liberalism, racism/nationalism, obsession with a national rebirth, fear of a internalized enemy, and voluntaristic cult of action. “Fascist regimes,” he wrote, “could not settle down into a comfortable enjoyment of power. The charismatic leader had made dramatic promises: to unify, purify, and energize his community; to save it from the flabbiness of bourgeois materialism, the confusion and corruption of democratic politics, and the contamination of alien people and cultures; to head off the threatened revolution of property with a revolution of values; to rescue the community from decadence and decline. He had offered sweeping solutions to these menaces: violence against enemies, both inside and out; the individual's total immersion in the community; the purification of blood and culture; the galvanizing enterprises of rearmament and expansionist war. He had assured his people a ‘privileged relation with history.’…In a way utterly unlike the classical ‘isms,’ the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is ‘true’ insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this.”
One thing you can't deny, though: Trump knows his base. They're as bigoted, xenophobic and stupid as he is himself. The states with the most immigrants are California (from Mexico, the Philippines China Vietnam and El Salvador), Texas (from Mexico, India, El Salvador Guatemala and the Phillipines), Florida (from Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela Haiti and Dominican Republic), New York (from Dominican Republic, China, Mexico, Guyana and Jamaica) and New Jersey (from Dominican Republic, India, Phillipines, China and Brazil)... and over half of them are eligible to vote. This from the CBS poll that was released yesterday:
Arnsdorf quoted Jennifer Mercieca, a professor at Texas A&M University who researches democracy and rhetoric: “Trump sees American democracy as a sham and he wants to convince his followers to see it that way too. Putin hates western values like democracy and the rule of law, so does Trump.” A typical Trump supporter isn’t intellectually capable of understanding any of this. They’re just in it for the razzle-dazzle… and the hate.
Trump quoted Putin, the dictatorial Russia president who invaded neighboring Ukraine, criticizing the criminal charges against Trump, who is accused in four separate cases of falsifying business records in a hush money scheme, mishandling classified documents, and trying to overturn the 2020 election results. In the quotation, Putin agreed with Trump’s own attempts to portray the prosecutions as politically motivated.
“It shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Trump quoted Putin saying in the speech. Trump added: “They’re all laughing at us.”
He went on to align himself with Orban, the Hungarian prime minister who has amassed functionally autocratic power through controlling the media and changing the country’s constitution. Orban has presented his leadership as a model of an “illiberal” state and has opposed immigration for leading to “mixed race” Europeans. Democratic world leaders have sought to isolate Orban for eroding civil liberties and bolstering ties with Putin.
But Trump called him “highly respected” and welcomed his praise as “the man who can save the Western world.”
In the speech, Trump also repeated his own inflammatory language against undocumented immigrants, by accusing them of “poisoning the blood of our country”— a phrase that immigrant groups and civil rights advocates have condemned as reminiscent as Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, in which he told Germans to “care for the purity of their own blood” by eliminating Jews.
The crowd of thousands in a college arena cheered Trump’s recitation of an anti-immigrant poem called “The Snake” that he has repeated on the campaign trail and popularized since the 2016 campaign.
And approaching the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, Trump came to the defense of alleged violent offenders who have been detained awaiting trial on the order of judges.
“I don’t call them prisoners, I call them hostages,” he said. “They’re hostages.”
The speech drew renewed criticism from Democrats. “Donald Trump is campaigning on an extreme MAGA agenda that would rip away hard-won freedoms from Americans— it’s as simple as that,” Democratic National Committee press secretary Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “If he takes power, Trump will waste no time implementing his dangerous vision for America.”
Trump’s speech began with an economic focus, with a new tagline of “Better off with Trump” and a recitation of statistics comparing affordability under his presidency to now. But Trump became more animated as he returned to his material on immigration and the charges against him.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said that Trump “gave a great speech and knocked it out of the park” in front of a large crowd.
In a move that experts said could have the effect of confusing voters about the true dangers to democracy, Trump has begun deflecting from reports that he would seek revenge on his critics in a second term, accusing Biden of acting like a dictator because of the prosecutions against Trump. Two of the cases were brought by local prosecutors, and the two federal cases are being handled by a special counsel acting independently of the White House in accordance with Justice Department rules.
Without evidence, Trump has portrayed all four cases as a coordinated persecution against him because of his lead in primary and general-election polls. As he pushed that theme on Saturday, the slogan “BIDEN ATTACKS DEMOCRACY” flashed across the screen above him.
The speech ended with an instrumental track that Trump has continued using at rallies despite becoming associated with the QAnon online extremist movement.
Whatever you may think of Chris Christie— yes he was a garbage governor and a major Trump enabler— today he’s one of the few prominent Republicans speaking truth about Trump. After the rally in Durham, he was on State of the Union reminding the viewers that Trump is “becoming crazier. And now he’s citing Vladimir Putin as a character witness, a guy who is a murderous thug all around the world… He’s disgusting... And what he’s doing is dog-whistling to Americans who feel absolutely under stress and strain from the economy and from the conflicts around the world. He’s dog-whistling to blame it on people from area that don’t look like us. The other problem with this is the Republicans who are saying this is OK, almost 100 members of Congress who have endorsed him… These members of Congress who just sit there and compliantly nod their head like a dog in the back of a car, just nodding away when he says all these things because all they acre about is their own political future and their own primary in their own district. This is why American leadership is falling down.”
No "maybe" about it. They absolutely yearn for a reich with their pumpkinfuhrer as god/king.
The stupid ones are those who keep trying to elect hapless worthless feckless lying corrupt neoliberal fascist pussy democraps as a bulwark against a nazi reich. They certainly are too stupid to know that the nazis want it. But they're also too stupid to realize, after 55 years of their party refusing to stand up for the constitution and against nazis, that it can't/won't ever work.