When in Doubt, Stick With the Classics

      “But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.” -Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“Every robber or oppressor in history has wrapped himself in a cloak of patriotism or religion, or both.” -Eugene V. Debs

 

     It never fails, even if Trump always does. Whenever Trump is hit with horrible news, whether it be the Iran War or the Epstein Files or some other of his countless scandals and clusterfucks, his default setting is as predictable as a fart after a Mexican dinner: Stoke and fan the flames of racism.

     It was a tried-and-true tactic with which he'd launched his presidential bid in 2015. As soon as he came down that escalator, the future convicted rapist and fraudster began telling a largely paid crowd that Mexicans were rapists and criminals. It was a largely mercenary crowd, yes, but people were watching. People twisted with hatred of anyone with skin darker than their own. And, as with Reagan's own campaign launch in Philadelphia, MS in 1980, the bigots heard the dog whistle and knew exactly what it said. From that point on, Trump never had to look back. The Republican primaries were just a formality, an exercise in futility for any other Republican.

     Last Wednesday, Trump posted a video by Michael Savage, a virtually forgotten right wing hag, in which Savage railed about birthright citizenship, especially pertaining to places such as China and India. Savage said,

     “A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet. … [T]here’s almost no loyalty to this country amongst the immigrant class coming in today. No, they’re not like the European Americans of today and their ancestors. … We’ve gone from the melting pot to the chamber pot.”

     Trump did this because indications are that the Supreme Court is going to strike down his brainless Executive Order trying to invalidate birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Constitution under the 14th amendment. 

     Hours before Trump temporarily gave Savage some unearned relevance, Trump posted something on Truth Social calling Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson a "low-IQ person", a favored phrase he uses to disparage women of color and power.

     When his own DOJ released millions of pages of the Epstein Files, which mentioned him thousands of times, Trump posted an AI video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as primates.

     When the Epstein Files Transparency Act was overwhelmingly passed by Congress on November 19th last year, Trump typically went to his default setting and called Somali immigrants "garbage" who "contribute nothing to society".

     It's impossible for me to fathom how Trump thinks riling up his nativist base is going to help him in the federal courts or even the court of public opinion. He gets the results he wants. When Trump, their avatar of hatred and racism, spews a few buzz words, they immediately lose their shit like Curly Howard when he gets a whiff of Wild Hyacinth. They've been conditioned to. It's been baked into their inbred DNA.

     And Trump, being a dyed-in-the-wool sociopath, doesn't care how his toxic rhetoric translates on the streets of America. Starting in 2016, while Trump was packing stadiums and leaving a slimy trail of bronzer across America, law enforcement noted a spike in crimes of violence against Muslims, Jews, Chinese and Hispanic people. And some of those assaults occurred during Trump's rallies, in which he exhorted his supporters "knock the crap out of them" and promising to pay their legal bills.

     Don't forget, this resurgence was spearheaded by a guy who slept with Hitler's speeches next to his bed, the only book that anyone can accuse Trump of actually reading. Trump was very aware of Hitler using the same rhetoric to great effect once he got out of prison in 1925. Hitler Otherized the Jews primarily, blaming them for Germany losing WWI, then expanded his bigotry to the gay community, Roma, Communists, intellectuals and basically anyone who'd publicly opposed him. All those groups wound up in concentration and death camps.

     And Trump's DHS is busy snapping up huge warehouses, spending as much as $111 million on some of them, to concentrate his enemies. Which, theoretically, is anyone not named Donald Trump.

      We've long since gotten past credible accusations of Godwin's Law. Not only is it apt to accuse Trump of being a fascist, it would an intellectual and moral dereliction of our duty as Americans to not do so.