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Hate Being Branded a Fascist?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 24, 2024

Don’t vote with them

https://x.com/chipfranklin/status/1848929243318632452

“The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary,” wrote Robert Paxton, 92, in Jan. 11, 2021 Newsweek article. Previously reluctant to use a loaded term like fascism to describe the Trump presidency, Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election,” was the breaking point for the retired Columbia University historian of fascism.

Elisabeth Zerofsky writes in The New York Times (gift article):

Calling someone or something “fascist” is the supreme expression of moral revulsion, an emotional impulse that is difficult to resist. “The temptation to draw parallels between Trump and the fascist leaders of the 20th century is understandable,” the British historian Richard J. Evans wrote in 2021. “How better to express the fear, loathing, and contempt that Trump arouses in liberals than by comparing him to the ultimate political evil?” The word gets lobbed at the left too, including by Trump at Democrats. But fascism does have a specific meaning, and in the last few years the debate has turned on two questions: Is it an accurate description of Trump? And is it useful?

Most commentators fall into one of two categories: a yes to the first and second, or a no to both. Paxton is somewhat unique in staking out a position as yes and no. “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light,” Paxton said as we sat looking out over the Hudson River. “It’s kind of like setting off a paint bomb.”

Cokie’s Law resurfaces

But that paint is already splattered. Multiple Trump administration officials, including former John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general and Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, and retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, employed the term. Mark Esper, former Trump secretary of defense, won’t use the word fascism but tells CNN “it’s hard to say that” that Trump doesn’t fit the definition: “He certainly has those inclinations.”

The proverbial cat (Trump believes immigrants are eating) is out of the bag. Everyone knows it. Kamala Harris knows it too. Per Cokie’s Law, “it’s out there.”

In “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” Peter Baker and Susan Glasser recount Trump asking Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?”

“Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?” Kelly asked, knowing full well Trump had no idea who Bismark was. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?” 

“Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals,” Trump said in Kelly’s retelling. Those generals tried and failed to assassinate the fascist dictator, not that with his ignorance of history Trump knew.

Paxton tells the Times that, in a way, Trump did not set out to launch a fascist movement, but the consummate marketer nurtured it:

Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,” Paxton said. That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power. Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.”

And here we are. It’s the patriarchy that is breaking down. Trump and Trump’s Men don’t like it. Not one bit.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote about the discontent young men feel at his substack in 2023. The mores that secured men, especially white men, atop the social ladder for millennia are crumbling. First came the civil rights, then came women’s liberation, then came Obama, triggering the alt right movement and the Trump backlash. Now the country faces choosing not only the second Black (and first Asian) president, but the first women president (for the second time). Murphy spoke about it last night with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner [timestamp 2:38]. In a post-patriarchal world, Trump promises to dial America back to a time when men were men and knew where they stood. It’s an explict part of Trump’s pitch.

Team Trump is already flooding social media with “I know you are but what am I” memes depicting Democrats as the real fascists (or communists; they can’t decide). They’re already drawing up their enemies list.

Guess what? We’re not going back. Not without a fight.

Are you ready? They are.

Tonight’s Sick Wingnut Fantasy

Published by digby on October 23, 2024

Good God:

The crowd started chanting “Daddy’s Home.”

Make it stop. Please.

Weirdo Update

Published by digby on October 23, 2024

Trump had a “town hall” with a bunch of rightwing Christians today. He’s been doing a lot of those lately. They must be concerned about the evangelical turnout:

I don’t know about you but I find it very concerning that he’s talking to Netanyahu every day, no doubt telling him to keep that war going to hurt the Democrats and promising that as soon as he wins he’ll give the green light for Bibi to go wild.

How can this be legal? I know it violates the Logan Act but that’s a toothless law that’s been violated many times. But we’ve never seen anything like this before. Trump is running a shadow government from Mar-a-lago.

Oh well, I guess that’s no big deal…

Sure, he’s fine.

By the way, there’s a rumor all over twitter that there’s a video of Trump groping the young daughter of a wealthy donor that’s about to break. The Trumpers are all saying it’s a deep fake. I have no idea if it’s true. But I also doubt that it would make any difference because the right will convince themselves that it’s a Democratic deep fake election interference ploy and who knows, it might even help him. Whatever.

It also may be something like the last big rumpor to take the internet by storm — that Beyonce was going to appear at the final night of the convention. It didn’t happen. This probably won’t either.

Update — Oh my God:

There’s More To Elections Than Just The Top Of The Ballot

Published by digby on October 23, 2024

I would imagine that many of you are filling out your ballots these days and may be wondering about some of the down ballot items. Bolts. com has a very useful  cheat sheet of more than 500 critical races, and our election guides to supreme court races and to local criminal justice races. Editor Daniel Nichanian also responded vo some of your questions in their Ask Bolts feature:

Navigate to the question that most interests you here, or scroll down to explore them all at your leisure:

Which legislative chambers may flip in November?
Jump to our answer.

What happens in elections where no one is running?
Jump to our answer.

Which party will win more congressional delegations, in case that matters for the presidential election?
Jump to our answer.

What happens if you walk into the wrong polling place by mistake?
Jump to our answer.

I spent hours trying to research our local candidates’ platforms and it was fruitless. Shouldn’t every candidate have a website with their platform?!
Jump to our answer.

I can’t seem to get people to care about boards of canvassers. Can you explain the significance of the offices that play a role in elections?
Jump to our answer.

It’s almost here folks and if we’ve learned anything in these looney MAGA years, it’s that we need to pay attention to the state and local elections where the Republicans have focused much of their energy. At some point that power starts to accumulate and there’s no end to what they can get away with.

A Strong Response

Published by digby on October 23, 2024

It’s true and it’s necessary to take that seriously. It’s also a strategy. Here’s Greg Sargent in a fascinating interview with Ron Brownstein, one of the best:

Sargent: Ron, you sometimes hear pundits argue that Harris should stop putting so much effort into attacking Trump as a threat to democracy and highlighting his authoritarianism, that the economy and health care will matter more to swing voters and so forth. But in your reporting, you’re finding that this large reservoir of voters, right-leaning moderates, independents, pretty affluent suburban, are absolutely gettable with messages about Trump’s authoritarianism. They’re deeply troubled and motivated by the anti-democratic threat Trump poses, right? Those voters are there. They’re a big growth opportunity for Harris still, and they are the swing constituency now, or at least one of them. Would it be malpractice not to go after them in this way?

Brownstein: Big is a strong word, in terms of how many voters we’re talking about on any front. But yes, I thought her appearances with Liz Cheney this week were a precision-guided missile aimed at exactly the voters she needs in exactly the places where they are most concentrated with exactly the message that will move them. I thought it could not have been more precisely targeted at what she can actually achieve.

She has made progress on the economy, particularly on questions of “Who fights for you?” But in the end, the share of voters who think that they were better off under Trump’s policies than Biden’s policies before Covid is an insurmountable obstacle if the frame of the election is solely “Who is going to deliver more for your bottom line?” She’s gotten more competitive on that, but if that’s the question people are asking the last week and going into the ballot box, I don’t think she can get there. But there’s no reason for that to be the question, right? Trump, every day, shows you why that shouldn’t be the question.

Sargent: Right, but there is a bit of a split-screen effect here. Harris is making these major appeals to affluent suburbanites, Republican-leaning, educated women, and so forth on the anti-democratic threat on how disgusting Trump is and what a menace he is, but an immense amount of resources is going into Democratic ads about the economy, touting her plans to reduce childcare costs, health care costs, home-buying costs, etc. Much of the ad spending is going to that according to some analysis I’ve seen. That’s aimed at these more working-class voters, both nonwhite and white. How do we make sense of these two tracks happening at the same time? Are all those ads just an effort to just contain Trump’s advantage while they win the election or try to win it on the anti-democratic stuff? How do we think about this?

Brownstein: Just think of it as different tracks aimed at different voters. In 2012, [I was] writing a story about how Obama was focusing on Romney as a plutocrat who closed the factory in town in the Rust Belt battlegrounds, which by then included Ohio, and running more on values in the Sun Belt battlegrounds. You have to be able to communicate to multiple audiences at the same time. As we said, all votes are fungible. For Harris in the former blue wall states, so I always put that former in there to distinguish, she has to get into the mid 40s among the noncollege white women. She can grow then among the college white women, try to hold her own among the college white men. And then she could withstand some erosion among the blue-collar white men and Black men.

Don’t forget, the paradox is that these states look best for her because generally speaking, Harris, like Biden before her, is holding the 2020 levels of support more among whites than nonwhites. College-educated white women, Greg, are three to four times as big a share of the electorate across these three states as Black men. So if she can increase, I hope my math isn’t wrong here, five or six points among college white women in these states—which don’t forget Biden won—she could withstand losses of 15 points, I think, among the Black men, which is not going to happen.

Devastating

Published by digby on October 23, 2024

I urge you to watch this. This sort of thing is happening all over the country where there are Trump abortion bans. People’s futures are being destroyed. Women’s health is being ruined and some are dying. Families are going through desperate heartache at an already traumatic time in their lives.

We are an uncivilized country for doing this to our own citizens. If they are rewarded for this by re-electing that monster who made it all happen he will genuinely believe that he is impervious to all accountability. At that point it will be hard to argue that he’s not.

It’s The Stakes, Stupid

Published by digby on October 23, 2024

Media critic Margaret Sullivan is exhorting the media to discuss the stakes in the election in these last two weeks, noting that there have been some good signs in the last couple of weeks .She also taks issue with the people who say that we should all just calm down and look at the polling averages instead of stressing out. (I say don’t even look at those, for all the reasons Greg Sargent and Michael Tomasky lay out in this article in TNR.)

Sullivan explains why even those of us who know that the polls will drive us crazy and are trying to keep the horse race in prspective are still freaking out over the election: the stakes:

Believe me, it’s not the shifting polls that are stressing me out; it’s the knowledge that if Trump is elected, American democracy may well be over. Her take reminded me of the infamous column from Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post on Nov. 4, 2016: “Calm down. We’ll be fine no matter who wins.”

Readers, we weren’t.

I’m barely sleeping and drinking too much and generally stressing out not because of the polls which are out of my hands but because I know it’s going to be even worse this time. Way worse.

Lovin’ Hitler? No Biggie

Published by digby on October 23, 2024

I hate to say it, but his guy is the one who gets it right:

If you think nothing matters, this actually might:

The Democratic polling and messaging firm Blueprint recently tested the effectiveness of several closing messages for the Harris campaign. (This was before Kelly’s new remarks.) Here’s one message the group put before voters: 

Donald Trump doesn’t have the character it takes to be president. He’s erratic and can’t control himself. He denied the results of an election just because he lost and is a threat to the fundamental American principle of democracy. He instigated a riot at the Capitol that left three police officers dead.

This general (and true) statement barely moved the needle on voters’ preferences. It presumably simply sounds like a reiteration of things voters have heard before.

What did move the needle was this message:

Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Cabinet have refused to endorse him. When Trump learned during the Capitol riot that his supporters were threatening to kill his own vice president, he said ‘so what?’ and refused to do anything to assure the vice president was safe. Republican governors, senators, and House members have all said the same thing: We can’t give Trump another four years as president.”

As soon as the message turned from an abstract argument against Trump into an unambiguous case that Trump’s own former allies were making against him, it became the single most persuasive line tested by Blueprint. It was stronger even than abortion rights and Social Security. In other words, hearing about Trump’s unfitness from people who worked with him, and from Republicans one would expect to defend him, seems to make a difference.

I’m going to guess that his own chief of staff calling him a Hitler loving fascist might have an effect.

The “F” Word

Published by digby on October 23, 2024

Yes, Trump is a fascist. Everyone knows it.

Back in 2015, before the Republican primaries when Donald Trump was considered nothing more than a circus sideshow, some of us were noting that his rhetoric and agenda bore the hallmarks of the “f” word: fascism. Historian Rick Perlstein wrestled with it as early as September of that year. I wrote about it just a couple of months later.

At the time, Trump was extolling the virtues of torture, talking about a massive surveillance program to be used again American Muslims and promising to send Syrian refugees, including children, back to their war torn country. He hadn’t yet declared his intention to ban all Muslims from coming to the US but it was easy to see the writing on the wall. It was also very easy to see that fascism was on the menu in the the United States of America if Donald Trump won the election

That was nine years ago and there have been zillions of pixels spilled about Trump’s dishonesty, corruption, unfitness as well as his authoritarian philosophy. We’ve learned over the years, through many reports, memoirs and tell-all books that Trump tried to govern in dictatorial fashion at every turn but was either too mentally undisciplined to follow through or was held back by people around him who kept him from acting on his worst impulses.

This campaign has shown him ratcheting up the fascist rhetoric to previously unseen heights, saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” and calling his political opponents “vermin” and “enemies within” that must be purged.

Lately he’s even suggested that he would call out the military against “the enemy from within.:

Yet Trump has very little respect for the military either. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg chronicled his odd antipathy toward it during his first term, the details of which were further confirmed bya Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and Peter Baker of the NY Times in their book The Divider: Trump in the White House and the NY Times’ Michael Schmidt in his book Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, among others. They all relied on former General and Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly as a primary source for such anecdotes as Trump’s contemptuous references to service members as “suckers and losers” and his frequent demands to use the military unconstitutionally.

Goldberg has published a piece in the Atlantic this week with some new revelations about Trump’s disdain for the military, quoting from witnesses and contemporaneous notes an episode in which Trump exploded over the cost of a funeral for a service member which he’d promised to help pay for:

“It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”

The lawyer for the family said he never paid it but members of the family say he did. His loyal henchman Meadows naturally denies that he ever said those things. Nobody can say that it doesn’t sound like something he would say.

Goldberg also recapitulates the stories about Trump’s fascination with Adolph Hitler as told to him and the other authors by John Kelly. Trump had said to Kelly at one point, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” and Kelly explained that those German generals had tried to assassinate Hitler three times and almost succeeded. Trump didn’t believe him, insisting that they were totally loyal. Kelly went on the record with about that conversation this week:

This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.

Trump also asked at one point who the “good guys” were in WWI. Apparently, he missed that semester in military school.

Michael Schmidt also got Kelly on the record for the NY Times yesterday and published voice recordings of his comments. Schmidt asked him if he thinks Trump is a fascist:

“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.

Mr. Kelly said that definition accurately described Mr. Trump.

“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Mr. Kelly said. He added: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Mr. Kelly said. Mr. Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Mr. Kelly said.

Kelly isn’t the only former general saying this. Just a week or so ago, Bob Woodward reported in his new book “War” that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley describes Donald Trump as “fascist to the core” calling “the most dangerous person to this country.” Woodward told The Bulwark podcast that former Defense Secretary and Retired Gen. James Mattis agreed with this assessment.

It’s good that these former high ranking military leaders are saying all this. But they really need to go on 60 Minutes or at least cut an ad so that people who aren’t reading the Atlantic and the NY Times (or Salon, for that matter) will know about it. There’s no reason for them not to do it at this point. If they fear retribution from Trump, I’m afraid that ship sailed. You can bet they are already on his list. If they just don’t want to be in the line of fire it’s a sad comment on the military ethos for which they claim to be speaking.

Donald Trump is a fascist. He’s an ignorant fascist, but there’s really no requirement for education to be one. It’s driven by an authoritarian, nationalist, racist instinct and that he has in spades. He may not have been fully able to accomplish his true desires in his first term since he was so unfamiliar with even the rudimentary levers of power but he’s no longer afraid to go for it. Here’s Trump on the campaign trail just yesterday:

“As president, you have tremendous — it’s called extreme power. You have extreme power. You can, just by the fact, you say, ‘Close the border,’ and the border’s closed. That’s it. Very, very simple. You don’t need all of this nonsense that they talk about.”

If he wins there will be no John Kellys or Mark Milleys to stand in the way. He’ll only be served by accomplices who agree with him.

Don’t expect his minions to balk:

Real Patriots Or Sears Patriots?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 23, 2024

IYKYK

Crowd of Trump supporters marching on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, ultimately leading the building being breached and several deaths. Photo by TapTheForwardAssist (CC BY-SA 4.0).

There’s a difference. A big one.

https://x.com/stuartpstevens/status/1849080745521811519