Trump Promises to Flip America Fascist if Re-Elected
Let's not ignore it this time.
America has traditionally regarded itself immune to the fissures that condemn weaker democracies.
We hail ourselves (most of the time) as the exemplar of elections, peaceful transitions of power, and civilized political discourse.
We understand intellectually we are imperfect and have done things for which we should not be proud and for which we must atone, like slavery, segregation, and the genocide of Indigenous Americans.
We have supervised elections in other countries to ensure honesty and transparency.
While economic interests and hubris have too frequently been behind our decisions more than good intentions, we want democracy to grow across the globe.
It’s hard to think of the United States of America as a fascist dictatorship.
Yet that is exactly what certain sycophants supporting a certain twice-impeached, twice- (soon to be thrice) indicted slumlord former host of Celebrity Apprentice who happened to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for four years want to turn the United States into should their favorite orange wanna-be dictator stumble his way back onto 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that people close to Donald Trump’s campaign and scrutiny of campaign policy proposals reveal a plan “to alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”
“Alter the balance of power.”
“Every part of the federal government.”
Specifically how?
According to Salon:
This wide-ranging plan would include bringing independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency directly under the president, the return of “impounding” funds — a strategy banned during the Nixon administration that empowered a president to refuse to spend Congressionally allocated money on programs they dislike — as well as the removal of employment protections for thousands of career civil servants and an intelligence agency purge of officials he holds personal vendettas against and has deemed to be “deep staters” and “the sick political class that hates our country.”
Former Trump adviser (and still not behind bars), Steve Bannon, screamed at a recent Turning Point USA conference:
https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1680720347170058240
Apparently laid our during Trump’s tenure in the White House, the plan was require independent agencies, like the Federal Reserve and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to submit action proposals directly to the president himself “for review.”
Former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) head during the Trump administration, Russell Vought, told the Times:
What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them. It’s very hard to square the Fed’s independence with the Constitution.
In other words, if it isn’t in the Constitution, it’s perfectly fine to hand it off to the president to control it.
Former White House personnel chief John McEntee was behind Trump’s scheme to purge officials perceived as opposed to him.
He explained:
The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal. Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies. There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.
“Our current executive branch was conceived by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies”?
Typical rhetoric from a former staffer for the former president who spewed recently:
We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.
(Note: fascists and Marxists polar opposites.)
We don’t have to go that far back to recall variations of those very words being promoted before.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung boasted:
[Trump has] laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done. Voters will know exactly how President Trump will supercharge the economy, bring down inflation, secure the border, protect communities and eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.
They’re coming right out an saying it.
The worst part is, there are people fine with it.
It’s one thing to hear it from the mouths of a washed up bureaucrat desperate to stay out of prison and his hangers-on.
But when average, ordinary, hard-working Americans hear it and say, “Yeah, so? It’s not like Nazis are going to goose-step through the streets of Laredo,” we are really in danger of sliding into all-out fascism.
The most insidious feature of fascism is its ability to appear normal to people who aren’t targets of the government’s anti-democratic agenda.
Life appears to be “normal.”
There’s historical precedent for this.
Milton Mayer was a reporter for the Chicago Sun in the 1940s and 50s.
Ten years after World War II, he wondered how Germany, the most cultured country in Europe with a strong democratic republic, could have slipped into fascism so quickly.
So he traveled to Germany and befriended 10 average German citizens who were members of the Nazi party but were not soldiers or people of particular consequence. They were average working Germans: a college professor, high school teacher, baker, janitor, tailor’s apprentice, cabinetmaker and volunteer firefighter, salesman, bill collector, bank clerk, and a police officer.
What they told Mayer, chronicled in his book They Thought They Were Free, should serve as a warning to all — even the “invincible” United States.
The college professor reported:
This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
Explaining what happens when we “put our heads down” and try to just get on with our lives, he added:
You see, one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, everyone is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. “In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.
But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.
Nearly one year ago, Donald Trump returned to the Washington, DC to deliver a rant at the “America First Policy Institute” summit.
First, he called for concentration camps.
Yes, concentration camps, this time for the homeless, in addition to the ones he established for migrants at the Southern border with Mexico.
Combining the human rights violations we committed against Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries and Japanese Americans during World War Two, Trump asserted the government should “remove” thousands of homeless Americans and relocate them to tents on “large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities” with “permanent bathrooms” and “medical professionals.”
Then, channeling his inner former Philippine president Roderigo Duterte, Trump suggested executing drug dealers.
He praised China’s undemocratic policies toward suspected criminals.
In addition to favoring a return to the racist “stop-and-frisk policies in cities,” Trump insisted that if he were still in office, he would override governors and mayors, and deploy the national guard to high-crime neighborhoods.
Echoing shades of his 2017 inaugural speech in which he intoned about a dystopic nation ravaged by “American carnage,” Trump claimed:
The dangerously deranged roam our streets with impunity. We are living in such a different country for one primary reason: There is no longer respect for the law and there certainly is no order. Our country is now a cesspool of crime.
We might be inclined to laugh and dismiss this as mere bluster, the tormented rantings of a delusional, ill-qualified, washed-up old wanna-be despot.
But we do so at our own peril.
Should Trump or anyone aspiring to be like him ever again gain the levers of power, this is part of the road map toward autocracy we can expect.
About the most recent details of Trump’s authoritarian blueprint should he — or anyone who wants to be like him — reclaim the levels of power, Laura Clawson, writing for The Daily Kos, explained:
In 2016, Democrats warned that a Trump presidency would mean the end of Roe v. Wade. That warning was widely ignored, even mocked and dismissed by the traditional media. Then Trump, with the help of then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, packed the court, and those predictions came true with the 2022 Dobbs decision. This time around we have a warning just as dire: Trump and Republicans want to expand the president’s powers to have fewer checks and balances and more decisions in one man’s hands. That Donald Trump is their current plan for who that man will be isn’t even the scariest thing about this.
How long are we still going to pretend we are immune to fascism?
We do so at our own peril.