In a February survey, 154 scholars rated Donald J. Trump our worst president, more awful than “historically calamitous chief executives.”
Last Friday, more than 400 noted American historians endorsed Kamala Harris and jointly declared Trump an existential menace to democracy.
“Today, Donald Trump, openly hostile to democracy and to American constitutional customs, seeks to return to office as president,” says a statement from the group that includes recognized scholars, bestselling authors, and prizewinning documentarians. “He has flagrantly defied the rule of law. He repeatedly sought to thwart the result of the free and fair election of 2020. His performance has persuaded many of those who worked most closely with him that he is an authoritarian.
“Now a convicted felon, he has stated his intention to use his power to intimidate, prosecute, and imprison his political critics and opponents, whom he designates as ‘the enemy within.’ Given the free hand that he would enjoy today by the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision, we take his threats with utmost seriousness as a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
Trump rivals some of America’s most notorious race-baiting demagogues. He has run the three most overtly racist presidential campaigns since George Wallace’s in 1968. He relentlessly panders not only to racism, but also to sexism, misogyny, nativism, xenophobia, religious bigotry, and LGBTQ hatred.
He scorns our democratic allies and cozies with democracy-despising authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the latter our greatest global threat.
Trump is a serial, if not a pathological, liar. During his four years in office, he made 30,573 false or misleading statements, according to The Washington Post. He is still lying, non-stop. With the next presidential election upon us, he still insists — without a shred of proof — that he was cheated out of the last one.
Trump was demonstrably the most anti-union president since Republicans Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, whose “Only Rich Lives Matter” policies gave the country the Great Depression. But Trump persists in the fiction that he champions workaday Americans.
In addition, Trump, the first felonious former president, is awaiting sentencing later this month.
The Northern Kentucky Tribune’s Bill Straub, a Kentucky Journalism Hall of Famer, echoed many of the historians’ charges. Trump “has vowed to unleash the Justice Department on his political enemies should his campaign prove successful. He has expressed a desire to sic the military on the ‘enemy from within,’ aka those members of the American public with the temerity to disagree with him. He engages in frequent racist and bigoted taunts.
“What’s more, Donny, at age 78, appears addled at times, taking the stage at a recent rally where, instead of discussing his plans for the future, he spent a half hour gyrating to tunes as if he were attending a dance party, pumping his arms, and lifting his feet a full quarter inch off the floor in one of the most embarrassing images of a public figure ever recorded.
“Many of his proposals are patently absurd, including raising tariffs in a manner that could lead to economic collapse and engaging in a wholesale expulsion of undocumented immigrants that would cost billions of dollars and create chaos in the commercial markets.
“Donny is a bully, a cheater, and a liar who engages in vulgar rants and speaks highly of Hitler because he had good generals at his disposal.”
Yet if the polls are right, “Donny” has a 50-50 shot of winning tomorrow.
“Regardless of the outcome,” Straub predicted,” it’s a sure bet that upwards of 70 million people will vote to send to the White House an adjudicated rapist burdened by 34 felony convictions who lies as frequently as most folks draw breath and spent 12 minutes during a recent rally in Latrobe, PA, talking about a dead golfer and his … well … his package, if you know what I mean.’
I do.
Straub is mystified as to “how so many voters, during reasonable economic times, with a lower-than-average unemployment rate, can enthusiastically support a mad man, one Donald John Trump, to serve as president of these United States.”
So am I.
Meanwhile, Trump’s authoritarian, Christian nationalist, some-say-fascistic bent has sparked a revival of a nearly 90-year-old warning attributed to the famous novelist Sinclair Lewis: “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
That was his sentiment, though evidently not his exact words.
At any rate, Lewis’s “it” was a New World variant of Old World fascism. “Writing 13 years after Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy, barely a year after Adolf Hitler installed himself as dictator of Germany, and just before Francisco Franco and his Nationalists overthrew the Spanish republic, Lewis spelled out in dystopian detail how it, indeed, could well have happened in America, too,” S.V. Date explained in HuffPost back in September.
She continued, “Nine decades later, that ‘it’ is also what dozens of Republican donors, campaign consultants, pollsters, and others interviewed by HuffPost say cannot possibly happen. They scoff at any analogy between former President Donald Trump, a man they support with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and the infamous dictators of the past. They insist that worries about Trump remaking the country as an autocracy are overwrought and designed solely to keep a Democrat in the White House.”
Date pointed out that as he strives “to regain the White House, Trump has suggested terminating the Constitution and has accused those who have criticized him of committing ‘treason.’ He has vowed to destroy the bureaucracy that might serve as a check on his power and promised to pardon his followers who took part in his Jan. 6, 2021, attempt to remain in office despite his election loss, which authoritarianism experts describe as an attempted autogolpe, or self-coup. He has even pledged to round up upwards of 20 million people — one in every 15 U.S. residents — for deportation.”
At first, many Italians dismissed the Fascist Mussolini’s overheated rhetoric as just bluster. They didn’t believe he would really wreck Italy’s constitutional monarchy. They even made fun of the soon-to-be Il Duce’s buffoonish, strutting pomposity.
At the same time, many Germans were convinced that the Nazi Hitler’s homicidal antisemitism was just political posturing, however extreme. They laughed off the future Führer as a crank whose fantasies of running Germany as a Nazi dictator were preposterous.
Germans who supported their fledgling Weimar Republic lampooned his silly little mustache and sweaty shrieking oratory. (I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard somebody mock Trump with monikers like “Angry Creamsicle,” “Comrade Cheetolino,” “Mango Mussolini” and “Agent Orange.”)
Cabaret, the 1972 American musical that parodied Hitler, was based on real Berlin nightclub entertainers who played to packed houses by satirizing Hitler during his rise to power in the 1920s and early 1930s. (I bigly miss Alec Baldwin as Trump on Saturday Night Live.)
American journalist William L. Shirer arrived in Nazi Germany in 1934. Writing in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, he admitted that Germany under Hitler baffled him. “The overwhelming majority of Germans did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their culture had been destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work had become regimented to a degree never before experienced even by people accustomed for generations to a great degree of regimentation.”
Even if they’re not sold on a Trump dictatorship, the MAGA true-believers, nearly all of them white, seem convinced that if their Messiah were to become a dictator, he’d be their dictator. They are fired by faith that back in power, he’ll be able to Make America White Again after all.
Trump is their Great White Hope, the One who will, with help from The Almighty and an earthly MAGA majority House and Senate, return the country to a time when white, straight conservative Christian menfolk ran the show. When women were happy helpmeets, June Cleavers, one and all, who were content to stay home and rear Beaves and Wallies. When Blacks were invisible and were dutifully deferential to whites. When teacher-led Christian prayer and copies of the Ten Commandments went back to school. When brown-skinned folks stayed south of the border or tended rich white folks’ gardens stateside. When LGBTQ folks remained in the closet.
Win or lose, that 70-million vote total Straub predicted will say more about the country itself than the candidate who is a “clear and present danger to American democracy.” Even if Trump is issued an orange jump suit to match his complexion and carted off to prison, his MAGA movement will survive.
And like Shirer, the rest of us will wonder how in the world it does.
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| Tip Jars |
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