Yes, I get it. The most extreme Trump supporters frankly deserve to be mocked, since they take themselves so damn seriously, and empower the master of inflated egos to take himself far too seriously, as well. Often times, they hold political beliefs that would be, under other circumstances, downright comical, buttressed by necessity on conspiracy theories. It is a blemish on this nation that such a political force, if you want to call it that, ever got power.
But the danger is over now, right? Trump is out of the White House, and currently on trial in the Senate. He is already the only president in history to have been impeached twice, as well as the only president to have impeachment proceedings against him go beyond the time that he is actually in the White House. Never was he especially popular, in terms of approval ratings, but his disapproval ratings have never been higher than they are right now. Most Americans finally began to realize, after four long years, that this man has decidedly fascist leanings, after he followed up months of trying to discredit election results that were not favorable to him by inciting an insurrection. It seemed that he got a pass on everything for four long years, but that final thing was a bridge too far. Now, his threat has surely been neutralized, and we can breath easily, right?
Maybe we got past the immediate, specific danger of a coup d'état by Trump and his supporters before he leaves the White House, sure. And that is something, so let's be clear about that. We can be happy that it failed, and that the perpetrators (some of them, anyway) are being brought to justice.
However, Trumpism is not going away. Maybe he will be impeached, and maybe other criminal charges will be brought against him at some point. But this man was the real Teflon President. Nothing stuck to him, and in fact, this tendency was already in place well before he reached the Oval Office. In fact, he has grown used to getting away with things. Why else would he claim that he could shoot somebody in broad daylight in the middle of a crowded city and still get away with it. Trump is not likely to face serious consequences. I hope that I am wrong about this, because no major American leader has ever more deserved being taken down, and frankly made to pay for his crimes, as Donald Trump. But he is still free, and he will continue to twist things around to make it seem to some that he is the victim, and those who try and hold him accountable for his actions are unreasonable tyrants, and that all of this is a witch hunt. And you just know that his loyal base of supporters will believe his every word. At least if you have been paying attention since Trump's political rise beginning in the summer of 2015 or so, you know it.
No, Trump supporters never constituted a majority of Americans, although they were a far too significant presence among voters to ignore. Surely, Trump also lost some support from the more modest numbers who voted for him. However, he still has that base of support, and yes, many of them believe - truly believe - that this election was stolen from him, and from them. My suspicion is that many of them also secretly know only too well that they are in the minority, and that a majority of Americans reject what they believe. That includes Donald Trump himself, as well as most of his strongest supporters in his former cabinet, as well as in Congress and elsewhere. They know that he lost the election, and that there was no massive voter fraud. Yes, they know that they could not get not only a majority in the nation, but even a majority in most of the closest, key battleground states to outright give Trump another term in office.
They know this, and that is why they turned to violence. Because the anti-democratic spirit was real. They want some things to go their way, and they were only too well aware of how lucky they got in 2016, when everything just happened to work in their favor, and they still just barely saw Trump get a term in office. To extend it, they were going to have to try and turn the screw more aggressively, and they sure tried. I considered the Capitol insurrection close to being the American neo-fascist movement's answer to the Beer Hall Putsch. They are not to be overlooked or dismissed, because clearly, the threat is real. Nor is it over now, simply because the events of January 6th did not yield the results which they were after, which was and is to overturn the results of the election and place King Con Don in the White House for another term.
It seems to me that there was a narrative involving concerns over Trump and his most loyal supporters having decidedly fascist tendencies.
Early on, some of his detractors warned that he was fascist, but many of these same (myself included, admittedly) did not take his candidacy seriously. It seemed like a typical publicity stunt by a known con artist. The idea that he would actually be taken seriously enough by tens of millions of Americans - enough to be voted into our highest office - seemed inconceivable and, frankly, ridiculous.
This was the consensus. And so, these warnings of his being a fascist (as well as many of his loyal supporters) tended to be dismissed on the grounds that, in the end, it would not matter. There seemed no way that this man could ever come within a thousand miles of winning the election.
These warnings increased dramatically when he became the frontrunner, but again, everyone seemed to expect his candidacy to fall apart. It was just a matter of time. But Republicans were afraid to attack him, since he would unleash a torrent of personal attacks that effectively would destroy their campaigns. Had they attacked him, as if he was any other candidate, he might not have won. However, he kept gaining and gaining, until it was too late, and he had effectively clinched the Republican nomination, stunning many.
Still, people were sure that he would not win the general election. And while many warned that he seemed indeed to have authoritarian and xenophobic tendencies, these were generally dismissed because his campaign was still not taken seriously. While on some level, my own unease was increasing, it still seemed impossible that he could or would actually win. Now, however, I was beginning to grow seriously nervous, and just tried to push the thought out of my mind. Yes, Americans had lowered their standards towards their political leaders quite a bit, but it could not possibly be that bad, could it? Trump would surely lose, right? Enough Americans must be able to see through him, to see the shallow narcissism and the xenophobia and the transparent, anti-democratic spirit behind his campaign to prevent him from winning.
Yet, Hillary Clinton was not pulling away and making this race laughable, as it seemed she surely should. For a while, she began to take a double-digit lead, and then, everyone said, "Ah-ha, that's it! Told you he was not going to win!" And so it was assumed that Hillary Clinton would win the White House, and that relative normalcy would return. Hillary was hardly an exciting candidate, and a return to normalcy was hardly pleasing for many (myself included), but at least Trump would just be a bad memory of a relatively close call.
Then, on Halloween of 2016, about ten or so days before the election, I began to understand that, in fact, Trump would likely win the election. This was the first time that I felt real fear that this country was about to enter a nightmare that I had long worried about. You see, like many other people, I had long felt that a tyrant gaining the highest power was an inevitability. Somehow, though, Donald Trump never seemed like a serious candidate. A rich, transparently narcissistic and decadent city slicker billionaire tycoon would never get the vote of self-identified Christian conservatives who championed family values, right?
Right?
Wrong.
My trepidation began to grow. Long ago, I lost the initial, and admittedly naive, view that elections were good for the country, that they informed citizens of the most pertinent issues of the day. But never before had I actively been dreading an election day like the one in 2016. Part of me still refused to believe, and even though the prospect of a Hillary win did not exactly excite me, I just wanted it to be over, and to know that, at worst, she would be in charge, and Trump and our national flirtation with a 21st century version of fascism and xenophobia would be a bad memory, like LePen was in France in 2002, or the Golden Dawn in Greece from some years back.
Donald Trump won that election. Sure, he did not win the popular vote, which in any normal country, would have meant that he lost the election. But with our absurd, antiquated Electoral College system, the man who received 2.7 million fewer votes was crowned the winner. Then, we got four years.
Once again, his detractors warned that he was a serious threat to democracy. Many felt that we (I am including myself here, because I warned of that, and was dismissed as if such a claim were ridiculous) were being alarmists. The fact that he had incited his supporters to violence, and betrayed racist, xenophobic, and sexist behavior, most infamously when he mocked a disabled reporter, and when he claimed that he could do anything with women, that he could grab them by the pussy.
Then came the relentless attacks on the press, suggesting that the media is the "enemy of the people," a frankly chilling phrase used by both Hitler and Stalin, among other fearful tyrants of the past. Then came his attempts at a ban of immigrants from Muslim nations, and his suggested that we create a national registry of Muslims. And then there was Charlottesville, and Trump's inability to clearly condemn outright Nazis. Then came his dismissal of dozens of nations in Central America and Africa as "shithole nations" where he apparently asked why we should accept immigrants from these countries, and not a country like Norway. Then he "joked" (repeatedly) about becoming "president for life" and about running for a third term, and later would "joke about being president into the 2030's. There were the constant, blatant stream of lies throughout his presidency. There were criminal dealings, such as the Ukrainian phone call, for which he was impeached. There was censorship f information that, frankly, Americans had a right to know, particularly when it came to science, such as with climate change and the coronavirus crisis. There was that time when he posted a brief video of one of his supporters shouting "white power." There were the claims that he could not possibly lose an election, which paved the way for the unsubstantiated claims, both before and after the election, of massive voter fraud, which he offered not a shed of proof of. And, of course, there was the constant incitement of his supporters to resist the official election results, and "take back your country." He outright stated that, and directed the crowd of supporters in Washington to the Capitol building just prior to the attack on that building, and the attempted insurrection, for which he earned the dubious status as the only president in history to be impeached twice.
Now, finally, many more people have come around and finally see that, indeed, this is not the behavior of a man who loves America's democratic traditions. He wants to retain power, no matter what. There was never a circumstance in which he would have humbly accepted electoral defeat, and he would always claim that he was cheated. Once the images of hordes of his supporters - among them many white supremacists, once again - came back to a shocked nation, then, and seemingly only then, was the vast majority of the country finally ready to end the damn Trump presidency.
I understand how people do not want to accept that he really is a threat to democracy, the way that many of his most vehement detractors and political opponents were suggesting. Of course, we do not want to imagine that we are so close to losing it, and that we truly are standing on the edge of an abyss as a nation. It would be comforting to think, instead, that attacks against Trump are just greatly exaggerated, and that he is, for all intents and purposes, a normal president.
But there is nothing normal about this man, his cult-like following, or the times that we live in that created the climate in which a Donald Trump could get in. We need to seriously look at what happened in this country, and what is still really happening in this country right now, and address the more serious, deeper issues.
Unfortunately, the problem is that we Americans, collectively, have fallen back on the comforting thought that things are not really as bad as they sometimes - even often times - appear. It seems that ever since the 1960's and 1970's, the age of the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission and the Vietnam War and the divisions within the country with anti-war activists and civil rights activists and women's liberation activists, and then the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, we seem to have lost our appetite to hold our so-called leaders accountable. So we convince ourselves that Reagan selling weapons illegally to Iran to fund an illegal war in Central America, or the Savings and Loan scandal, is not all that bad. Or that Clinton's various scandals, including obstruction of justice, is acceptable. Or that the increased government surveillance, the various corporate scandals of the Bush administration, especially the "no bid" contracts in an illegal war in Iraq fought under false pretenses also are not that bad, or that Obama launching drone strikes and the attack on habeas corpus is acceptable. And when all of those things become acceptable, then the relentless lies and xenophobia and attacks on our democratic institutions and the dramatic increase in polarizing politics and even outright violence seen under Donald Trump, to say nothing of the corporate conflicts of interest which bleed through in such an obvious manner, also become acceptable.
But these are not acceptable, and most certainly not normal. As you can see, the crimes have grown more and more serious over time, and also, hit much closer to home. It now seems obvious that our democracy is under attack. Perhaps the message that these elected leaders who, let us remember, are supposed to be our public servants, and not divinely elected leaders who should demand unceasing and unquestioned loyalty from their subjects, is to try and test out just how much they can get away with. The obvious solution, then, is to no longer accept it, to not take this crap any longer, and to hold them accountable. Impeaching a president for serious crimes should not be this unthinkable thing, and yet, that is exactly what it has become in America, ever since Watergate.
Still, it seems obvious that the level of seriousness of Trump's undermining of the 2020 election results, and in particular, of the incitement to action and violence by he and Rudy Giuliani in the lead-up to the insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington - long the very symbol of American democracy - seems particularly egregious, as it obviously seriously undermines the faith that Americans have in our collective democracy and political stability.
Indeed, there have been numerous comparisons of Trump to other tyrants in history, often especially Mussolini and Hitler. And while I have generally shied away from these comparisons for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the critical role these men played in the outbreak of World War II and the Holocaust, nevertheless, there can be comparisons made. After all, the political rise of Trump saw a spike in violent hate crimes and in political polarization, as well as a xenophobic intolerance and militarism, as well as what sure appears clear leanings to increased authoritarianism and an obvious erosion of America's traditional democratic traditions and institutions. And it is exactly in the style of what we saw on January 6th, which a loud and militantly stupid and stupidly militant bunch of rowdies who wear their false patriotism on their sleeves, while actually undermining what the nation's flag actually represents. There have been comparisons with this to the Beer Hall Putsch led by Hitler and the Nazis in the 1920's, years before the Nazis actually took power in Germany. It could and should have served as a warning, but Hitler got off easy. Before long, he was allowed to define how that event was portrayed inside of Germany, with the Nazis seen as heroes and martyrs, rather than traitors and tyrants.
We should not make the same mistake here. And it is imperative that we see the similarities, lest our democracy itself become a quaint relic of a noble past, rather than an active beacon of hope and pride in our present and for our future.
Below is the link to the article by Gino Dinuro that got me on this topic:
The Sturmabteilung: Hitler’s Unofficial Army Of Thugs By Gina Dimuro Published January 8, 2019 Updated April 1, 2019
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