Let’s dispense with what this is not and with historical analogies that only obscure.
We are not in an American Weimer nor in any variation of a pre-war Hitlerian Germany.
The populace is not in the grip of a fear of Bolshevism brought on by a world shaking revolution in a nearby country and street fighting between Communists and members of the Republican Party in every city of the nation. No four years of a devastating War, no loss of 2 million dead, no Treaty of Versailles with its burden of onerous reparations, no tornado of inflation and widespread hunger, no military stripped of its power, no lost colonies, no sense of national humiliation. No occupation of US land by a foreign power, no universal, vitriolic anti-Semitism. No equivalent to the Brown Shirts or Kristallnacht. No equivalent to Hitler Youth. No universal flying of the Trump flag or omnipresent martial music in public spaces. No national, government organized propaganda campaign. No government sponsored book burnings. No grand marches nationwide, no proliferation of uniformed, government paid thugs. No school wide indoctrination from a centrally designed curriculum, one that in addition to encouraging a German love of Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil — racial purity and a mystical connection to the Fatherland), also asks students to identify the characteristics of Aryans and Jews. No Enabling Act. No SS. Nothing remotely like the universal use of Heil Hitler seen all over Germany by the mid 1930’s. MAGA hats do not compare.*1
However, a calling forth has taken place. Trump, because he dismisses reasonable discourse on politics, because he demonizes opponents, because he plays the victim so well with his supporters (and victims have victimizers), calls forth hatred. His talent is for making hatred easy as laughter, easy as smiling. This is his genius. Like it or not, he is charismatic, and when charismatic figures wish to rile up a devoted following, their remarks are taken not so much as truth but as a call to arms.
Truth demands a willingness to examine facts and counter-claims relatively dispassionately. A call to battle needs raw emotion and enemies, and no politician in my lifetime has shown more talent in naming enemies — politicians by name, the Press (other than Fox), Robert Mueller, anyone who investigates him, athletes, the Democratic Party, Muslims, people of color. Trump roars what others have only muttered, that it is just fine to hate, to finally have a leader who says aloud Yes, I hate that group and that person, who has such fun mocking others and who enjoys the laughter of his acolytes when they join him in mockery.
Case in point, at the CPAC Conference he went on a two hour stream-of-consciousness screed that included this nugget: “We have people in Congress who hate our country.” Take 5 minutes and using Google count how many times Trump has accused individuals and groups of crimes*2.
The SPLC has shown that “the number of American hate groups surged to 1020, an all-time high in 2018*3. Since Trump’s election — more right wing militias and white supremacy organizations have formed. Fear breeds these groups. Trump breeds fear. He gives them license to say the awful things which before they had only murmured on the Dark Net or in lonely groups of the like-minded. In a nation saturated in guns, one with a history of lone gunman-assassins, one wonders how long will it be before one or a group attacks a political opponent of Trump or one he saturates with his abuse?
Trump is a pretend gangster, a live-show smasher of politeness, a hyperbolic master of the present moment. He is President as vaudeville entertainer, the cruel comedian in a baggy suit who says terrible things but knows how to give his audience delight. He does not care about history or cause and effect. He makes pronouncements. He claims that he alone speaks the truth. In his absolute narcissism, he believes he is the master of destiny.
Allied with Fox News, “the closest we’ve come to having a state TV*4″, Trump has an megaphone to spread his lies and hatred that no other President has had. Their deal is Faustian: Fox makes money and keep its influence and Trump stays in power. The poison they both inject into the body politic is deeply embedded.
I have wondered how neighbors in Northern Ireland, Serbia, and Iraq turned on each other and began to kill. People who had known each other for years, who had intermarried — Catholic to Protestant, Muslim to Christian, Shia to Sunni — how do they suddenly take up arms and drive the suddenly impure from neighborhoods where they had kept watch over each others’ children as they played?
The answer is to make them fear each other. Keep saying the others are less than human, inferior, dangerous, that they commit infanticide, fill the voting rolls with frauds, steal elections, hate America, hate Jews, are terrorists by nature of their religion, that they are rapists, that their opposition to Trump is fake and populated by liars, that the Deep State threatens his supporters and wishes to take their guns, that anyone who questions him is dishonest, dishonorable, stupid. Enlist a major TV network as an accomplice in all this. Thoroughly intimidate His Party into submission. Be cunning enough to ally himself with a Senate Majority Leader every bit as ruthless as himself.
The answer is to lie about everything. Lie every hour.
The answer is to always act so as to appeal to the church of Trump, to the ever faithful, to those who pledge their devotion at each rally and to each tweet, to those he addressed when he said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Trump is the recipient of white rage, the wild man ‘antidote’ to President Obama. He is the fourth American catastrophe of the 21st Century#, a daily nightmare driving disunion deeper into the bloodstream, the sociopath we have earned through our refusal to pay attention to the ubiquitous cynicism corrupting our politics.
Unless Robert Mueller indicts Trump’s children and perhaps Trump himself, his report will change nothing. Trump and Fox have already inoculated themselves against its indictments, guilty pleas, guilty verdicts and findings of fraud and rampant criminality.**
Only the willingly blind turn away from “the levels of corruption, conflict of interest, and untruth in this administration [that] are without parallel. What we saw at Helsinki was without parallel, what was done to Jamal Khashoggi and the refusal to address it is without parallel, threats of “retaliation” against the press are without parallel. We don’t need to read this in a report. We live it every day.”*5
Trump could win in 2020. Even without the odious Clintons to run against, his screaming Be Afraid for 20 months, and the Republicans’ efforts to suppress voting may be enough to make him President until 2024.
The election is going to be a horror show.
The additional damage he and his cohorts will do to this nation if they continue in power will bring us to our collective knees. I think more pain than we can now imagine is coming. I have grave doubts we can survive as a Union. We are not near the end.
I wish I had answers. I wish I could see what might work politically to defeat the fearful rapture he has harnessed and the storm of hatred he represents. I have only one idea and that is to not despair and to keep speaking out as honestly and as clearly as possible. In his novel Dalva, Jim Harrison said that sometimes we use “a rite of lament to describe a period where you expressed all your anguish, then received a new vision of life to keep you going.”
We need that new vision. We need something solid and hopeful to offer in place of our harrowing disintegration.
*1List gathered from Travelers In The Third Reich by Julia Boyd
*3 Heidi Beirich, Rage Against Change, p. 37. The SPLC Intelligence Report. Spring, 2019.
*4 Jane Mayer, Trump TV, p. 40. The New Yorker, 11, March, 2019.
# 9.11, the Iraq War (a catastrophe for us, the end of the world for Iraqis), the 2008 Crash and of course Trump
** Heather Digby Parton, What did the president know and when did he know it? Trump knew it all, from the beginning, Salon Magazine, 8, March, 2019.
*5 Dahlia Lithwick, “Prepare for Mueller to Ghost, Slate Magazine, 22, Feb. 2019.
