How many times do oblivious voters need to get whacked in their heads with a 2 x 4 before they recognize that Trump is thirsting to go full fascist?
Perhaps, with our democratic way of life hanging by a thread, they’re simply more bedazzled by his endless bread-and circus BS, like his fake work “shift” at a closed McDonalds and his ode to the genitalia of Arnold Palmer. Which is just as he intends.
But maybe there’s a remote chance that John Kelly’s newly-released audio assessment of his former boss may move the election needle just a wee little bit, maybe enough to make a difference. The retired four-star Marine general, who served as Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, has now shared with us a few pithy observations that – if this were a normal country with a normal electorate – would flush Trump down the toilet:
“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. So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that (Trump) thinks would work better in terms of running America. 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.”
Those remarks, in today’s New York Times, jibe with the observations of another sterling military leader, Mark Milley, who served Trump in two high capacities – as chief of staff of the U.S. Army and, later, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the newly-released book by Bob Woodward, Milley describes his former boss as “the most dangerous person to this country” and “fascist to the core.”
Well, duh. Those observations have long been obvious to those of us who’ve bothered to pay attention. To cite just one random example: Last November, he typed this on social media: “In honor of our great veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.” Then he entertained his rally cultists, promising to “root out…the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
Those of us with even a rudimentary of history can recognize fascist talk when it’s thrown in our faces. For Adolf Hitler and his goons, vermin was a go-to smear word, employed most often against designated undesirables for the purpose of rendering them subhuman. Three examples will suffice. A 1940 Nazi “documentary,” entitled The Eternal Jew, described those citizens as “the vermin of the human race.” A 1933 newspaper article by a Nazi apparatchik contended that “the only way to smoke out the vermin is to expel them.” A 1927 headline in a Nazi broadsheet declared: “When the vermin are dead, the German oak will flourish once more.” And so on.
Indeed, people in Trump’s White House orbit heard him pine for Hitler’s brand of power. This Trump quote, heard by two witnesses and posted this week in The Atlantic, is a beaut: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
And John Kelly, in the new aforementioned article, shared a nauseating memory:
“(W)hen Trump raised the subject of ‘German generals,’ Kelly responded by asking, ‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’ (Kelly recalled), ‘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.'”
According to Kelly, Trump didn’t know who Rommel was.
Here on election eve, is it too much to ask the mainstream media to give Trump’s fascism the attention it deserves? Granted, it won’t matter to his cultists; in interviews, many have already signaled that they’re pining for a dictator. And many others, like Trump, are ignorant about history; as he declared in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.” Ignorance is fertile soil for a fascist.
But Bill Kristol, the anti-Trump conservative commentator, shines a potential ray of light: “Voters have become inured to many shocking things about Trump, but maybe the one thing that can shake them out of that torpor is people who knew or worked with Trump stepping up to make the case from their own experience. The messenger matters as much as the message.”
Perhaps the late warnings from Kelly and Milley can sway a small but sufficient share of swing voters. Is the threat of fascism more serious than a circus stunt with McDonald’s fries? It shouldn’t be a tough sell.