Trump fascist rally guide and explainer

A portrait of George Washington alongside swastika banners and American flags at Madison Square Garden in 1939 during the German American Bund’s pro-American rally (Field of Vision)

More than 40 million Americans have already cast a vote for president. What is it that they have chosen? National suicide is on the ballot, and Donald Trump is our demented Jim Jones. He is addled, messianic, paranoid, corrupt and deadly. He is selling a venomous elixir that is neither new, nor medicinal. Donald Trump is the unlikely demagogue about whom the founders prophesied. Though he is easy to laugh at, he is on the verge of having the last laugh if enough Americans buy into his lie.

The whole country is bound together in a shared moment of waiting for our destiny to be revealed through our collective choice. What is it that is on the ballot? What precisely is the choice?

Tonight, Donald Trump will begin the last week of his campaign with a declaration of repudiation against the ideas of the American Revolution, the sacrifices made to preserve the Union, and the moral might of the civil rights movement. Standing in Madison Square Garden, Trump will seek to vanquish the memories of sporting triumphs, agonizing defeats, joyful concerts and great pageants of democracy to awaken the furies and ghosts of menace that once filled an American space with an alien, evil, poisonous cause. The cause was fascism, and it has been very hard for America’s corrupted political news media to see this clearly because speaking truth to power costs access.

Anyone wondering about the path to Jeff Bezos’ staggering moral capitulation to Donald Trump’s menace, egotism, threats and transactional corruption should begin the investigation with his hiring of a shady British Murdoch stooge to run The Washington Post. Will Lewis destroyed millions of emails to thwart criminal, parliamentary and civil investigations into a phone hacking scandal that remains one of the greatest scandals in journalism history. David Maraniss, an associate editor at The Washington Post, might be right about Ben Bradlee spinning in his grave, but the the truth is that Mr. Bradlee has likely been spinning for quite a while.

For the record, here are reactions from top (former) editors of the newspaper:

David Maraniss:

I find this contemptible. Marty Baron is right. This is an act not of benign neutrality but of cowardice in the face of the biggest challenge to democracy in our post-World War II lifetimes. Ben Bradlee, 10 years dead, is mightily p---ed in his grave.

Marty Baron:

This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

Marcus Brauchli:

There are perfectly good reasons a newspaper might give for not endorsing a presidential candidate. The Post didn’t offer any, and its timing was awful and looks, whatever the reasoning, gutless or craven. It also failed to explain whether it plans to continue endorsing in state and local races, where its viewpoint matters enormously to local readers.

I want you to understand what it is that will be occurring tonight in Madison Square Garden. This morning, in my “Warning #2: Indifference is a sin,” I cautioned you about the importance of using judgement, and your eyes and ears to orient towards what is happening all around you.

Fredrik Logevall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the 35th president begins with him observing and sorting through what he was witnessing below his Berlin balcony.
“JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917 - 1956” recounts a 22-year-old Harvard senior processing the relentless propaganda that warned of imminent Polish aggression against the Reich. Logevall paints a vivid picture of John Kennedy looking at a mosaic of Nazi uniforms. They were olive, green, black, brown, blue. The extremist political movement that had propelled the führer to power was a force for chaos that became so great, the Nazis became the only plausible solution to stop it. The calculus of German voters changed decisively towards the Nazi Party in a volatile era in which voters electorally obliterated it in 1928, before resurrecting it in 1930, following the economic crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. In the end, the political chaos was confronted by giving its alchemist and inspiration responsibility for ending it. When Adolf Hitler took lawful power as German chancellor in 1932 it took six short months to eradicate democracy from Germany. A man became the law, and the greatest crimes and catastrophe in all of the recorded history of human civilization resulted.

The United States became the preeminent world power in the war that destroyed fascism and the imperial ambitions of the Axis powers.

Today, the story of the Second World War stands at the edge of remembered history, as the participants of humanity’s greatest trial are at the end of long human life spans.

The cataclysm built for many years on a rising and toxic tide of venom, lies, hate, scapegoating, dehumanization and fear. Much of that fear was born out of political violence that yielded to state violence when the party became the state and the leader of the party became the nation.

The people were complicit with a mix of actions and accommodations that ranged from the eager to the transactional. People got in line because that was the easiest thing to do. A central lesson of history is that people who submit to tyranny incited by lassitude lack the grit to easily recover it. Most don’t. The submission leads to societal destruction at deep and profound levels.

The eradication of love, joy and the pursuit of happiness are the awful byproducts of oppressive extremists who seek control of others. They share a philosophy that is rooted in a self-declaration of superiority against lesser groups of people whose existence isn’t just unequal, but a burden on the superior group.

This always ends up in the same terrible ditch. The people who are blamed are always the same: visible minorities, non-conformists, free thinkers, artists, musicians, authors, activists, disabled, or gay.

This raises the fundamental political question of our time: who has the wherewithal to talk about freedom in a way that can galvanize a clear majority from an apathetic slumber against a growing cancer that is metastasizing in plain sight?

Political violence is that cancer, and it is forming in real time, right now. This is the essential point of Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld, an expert on the extremist movement, in this July 2022 article, which should have been the foundation for relentless media coverage about the startling reality at hand.

Paramilitary militia groups have become heavily armed appendages of the Republican Party, which have been hijacked by political extremists at the local, county and state levels. Both their numbers and influence are rising.

Perhaps hijacking is an unfair descriptor since they took over the organized institutions of the Republican Party through a democratic process. Though their aim is to end American democracy, and according to them, by the barrel of a gun if necessary, the value of incrementalism and using the rules to their advantage seems intuitive and natural when compared to an opposition that exists in a perpetual state of wonderment about the existence of the malice, hate and incipient threat that is so clearly present.

There has always been an appetite for fascism in America. Charles Lindbergh was a fascist, and his America First movement was a fascist front. He gave aid and comfort to a hostile foreign enemy who he venerated enough to be officially decorated by the Nazi regime.

There were enough Nazis in New York City in 1939 to fill Madison Square Garden to the rafters. A giant banner of George Washington was flanked by the swastika. The American führer, Fritz Kuhn, spoke. There were many uniformed paramilitary in attendance.

Their heirs are marching today. They marched in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. They marched in Boston, and desecrated the Freedom Trail and the birthplace of American liberty. They attacked the US Capitol, and they don’t feel defeated. They feel emboldened. They are preparing to play their part in taking political power, and they don’t believe in a pluralistic society.

The simple questions at hand in 2024 are as follows:

1. Who wants to live in a country where we are all born equally, and where we have inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? 

2. Who wants to live in a nation of laws, where no person is above the law and no person is abused by the law on the basis of their skin color? 

3. Who wants to live in a society where tolerance, respect for differences, decency, humanity and basic fairness are bedrock values? 

4. Who wants to live in a country where we teach our children that respect, honesty, civility and kindness are better than contempt, lying, cruelty and meanness? 

5. Who wants to expand freedom and opportunity for everybody and wants to see all corners of America and all her many people prosper? 

6. Who wants to allow every individual to use their natural-born talent to create, rise and build in a country where the only impediment to pursuing a dream is grit, determination and ambition?

7. Who wants to give everybody a shot at happiness and fulfillment, allowing them to make the most out of that divine spark within each human being? 

8. Who wants justice for all of the people and not just some of the people? 

9. Who wants decent, honest, competent government that seeks to build and unite around the common good, not inflame every division for self-interest and financial gain? 

10. Who will stand up against the militias and the paramilitary groups? 

What is important to understand about the extremists is that they have found purpose and community in their movement. They have found a place that has immunized them from responsibility by making their grievances righteous and their victimhood holy. Each extremist is a type of martyr with an outsized sense of entitlement that breeds a culture and philosophy of taking.

They are the antithesis of the 22-year-old on the Berlin balcony, who would issue the American people a challenge worthy of the ages 21 years later: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

The taking of rights and the assertion of control is at the core of the American extremism that is swirling, forming and becoming more dangerous. The costs of confronting it will only rise from here. It is also important to see the fusion between the cynical religious fanaticism that abounded around Trump and his noxious cartel. They are married and often linked deeply to the armed wing of a movement that seeks confrontation, domination and submission.

They are not content to practice their faith or compromise with opponents. They want to impose their values, beliefs and politics. The gun looms in the immediate air – their weaponized Damocles sword that hangs over the head of the whole nation if they can manage to achieve it. 

If they fail, it won’t be for a lack of commitment, focus and determination. Say what you will about Steve Bannon, he is undeterred with regard to taking political power. As we speak, he is training the cadres that he openly brags about – those who will dismember the American government, what they call the “Deep State,” “in about six months’ time.” Sound familiar? By the way, none of this is exaggerated or secret. Bannon talks about it all the time. Bannon’s chief takeaway from the Trump presidency was not to be caught unprepared by an unexpected victory next time.

The age of political violence looms through the murk immediately ahead. We are caught in the momentum of an awful tide. We are living in the consequences stage of a terrible movement that is not new in our country. It has had many faces and been called many names.  It has never prevailed, and has always yielded to the forces of better in this country. That will be so until it isn’t anymore.

That is the danger of this moment. Are we strong enough to hold the people back with the guns with the power of an idea? Can we stop the extremists with a better idea? Can we unite a majority of Americans around the American idea and ideal against its domestic enemies?

There is terrible momentum-building behind a threat that could end the ability of the American people to author their future.

It is a threat that could imprison our children in a small, vicious world where their agency is non-existent – a world in which their lives can be upended on the whim of powerful people who don’t care about anything other than themselves.

It has happened before, and the lights are flashing red. No one in this country has an excuse born out of a lack of imagination for what is coming down the road.

What is it that we are all seeing together? Do we care to see it at all?

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