Donald Trump is a fascist who does not believe in elections, restraints on his power, or the morality of dissent in a democratic society. Mostly, the American news media is bewildered about how to cover him nine years into his rise. What he is remains elusive for many news organizations who can’t let go of an era and its norms, which are gone forever. They were shattered by a Queens hustler, who has cleaved American society into belligerent factions with a go-along political party trailing behind, gobbling down his toxic detritus.
Franklin Roosevelt once told Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau that if he died in his sleep, he wanted his friend to tell the whole world that he thought Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi.
Lindbergh was certainly a sympathizer. The America First movement was a veritable fifth column of fascist menace, and American Nazis were packing Madison Square Garden in 1938. After Pearl Harbor, the movement faded and was discredited, but its remnant always remained.
Fascism has risen in America again. It is on the ballot, and it must be better understood. We must call it by its name.
Donald Trump is the leader of an American fascist movement that has laid out a specific authoritarian playbook that will assert absolute power and the right to control what it pleases and take what it wants.
The evidence of this is everywhere.
The Proud Boys are recruiting and growing.
The right-wing propagandists are calling for political opponents to be locked up. Leading candidates to be Trump’s VP all must pledge to act exactly opposite Mike Pence at the moment of truth.
The threats are growing louder and sharper. The plans, once amorphous nonsense, are now carefully considered and the mechanisms to implement them are being precisely laid.
The nation’s high court has lost legitimacy. The extremism that has manifested there is arrogant, ascendant and corrupt.
The Congress is dysfunctional on its best days, non-functional on most, and dangerous on some. It exists in a state of perpetual decay and failure, profoundly corrupted by special interests run amok in a golden age of corruption that is staggering to behold. It is long overdue that Jared Kushner’s investment fund is finally being investigated by the Senate Finance Committee.
It is time to take a stand.
Perfection is not on the ballot, but fascism is.
Perfection will not be on the ballot this November, but fascism will
Americanism and patriotism are incompatible with fascism.
Good Americans rebuke and revile fascists.
Donald Trump is a fascist, which makes him a bad American and his movement un-American. I don’t say it lightly.
President Biden needs to look Trump in the eye, and say it directly. It must be said.
MAGA is a threat to our liberty.
It is a threat to America.
I hear what you’re saying, and agree, but I do wonder what is happening these days with people. Americans seem to be tossing aside good judgment in the name of supporting extremism.
Case in point: The MAGA Candidate for Governor of North Carolina just met with a group called Moms for Liberty. This group supports this man unequivocally.
Yet, this is the same man who said we were a better country when moms and daughters and sisters could not vote. I remain sadly flabbergasted that any group would support him, let alone a group of female voters.
I would vote for Joe Biden even if he was Bernie Lomax, which sadly is the way many voters perceive him. Contrast our current President with "the great communicator," Ronald Reagan, who effectively sold Americans on destructively crappy concepts like "greed is good", trickle-down economics and distrust of all-things government.
Fast forward 40 years and we now have a cavalcade of professional right-wing truth dissemblers in Congress, on television, radio and social media that have convinced half the country that the sky is falling, the end is near, but somehow a demented and disgusting orange blob can fix it. Our side? We have the quiet competence of Joe Biden, but we also have feckless Senators like Dick Durbin, and a host of scolding, self-absorbed, hectoring harrumphs on the fringy left that unwittingly supply ammunition to right wing extremists.
I didn't think the movie comedy Idiocracy was all that funny when I watched it a number of years ago, but it plays now like a documentary. More to the point, there is an assumption amongst the DNC brain trust that a majority of voters will ultimately see through the right-wing bombast, lies, and theatrics. That's wishful thinking, as the extremists continue to do a stellar job of "flooding the zone" with sewage.
The high-minded good works of the Biden administration aren't breaking through, which is a shame and isn't fair, but we never lived in an era of rat-a-tat-tat deception and curated darkness coming from every direction. Positive messaging is drowned out and falling on deaf ears.
We can't effectively convince undecided voters by condescendingly lecturing them about their gullibility, but we can show them how they're being played, and maybe enough will catch on without feeling shamed. Easier said than done, but we need a posse of firebrand surrogates that can deliver a very focused message about the anti-democratic heavy-handed madness a second term of Trump will rein upon America, and how it will impact everyday lives in a terrible way. Put a metaphorical "kick-me-hard" sign on Trumps backside and pound away every minute of every day. God knows, Trump provided enough campaign fodder for us just this week alone.
I like to imagine a world without MAGA, with the nefarious right wing billionaire influencers kicked to the curb. It's possible, but we have a tidal wave of dis and misinformation to battle.