America: Slouching Into the Fascism of Donald Trump

The Parallels between Hitler and Trump, the necessity of replacing Joe Biden with or without his consent, and a refutation of the argument that Biden cannot or should not be replaced

By

David Gottfried

America has been unconsciously sinking into the bloody mud of fascism for years.   The culprit has been none of the usual suspects.  The culprit has been ourselves and our predilection to allow ourselves to be duped, seduced and traduced by Donald Trump. 

First, this essay will posit some of the fearsome parallels between Hitler’s mastery of the German mind and Trump’s growing ownership of the American psyche.  Second, I will explain that Biden must be replaced as the Democratic nominee, with or without his consent, and that all arguments to the effect that his replacement cannot be achieved are legally and politically invalid and seem part and parcel of America’s unconscious slide into fascism. 

The Parallels between Fuhrers Hitler and Trump

It seems that Donald Trump, like Adolf Hitler before him, is destined to seize absolute power.   They laughed at Trump just as they laughed at Hitler.    In 1939, Hitler said that the Jews had been laughing at him for years but had stopped daring to laugh at him.    When Trump went down that famed escalator to announce his candidacy, in 2015, the allegedly brilliant talking heads of the  media laughed at him.¹   They are not laughing any more.

It seems to me that Trump has been aided and abetted, by his supposed antagonists, just as Hitler had been abetted by all the powers supposedly arrayed against him.

How the World Helped Hitler Conquer Half the World

Although many German Catholics despised Hitler, the Pope whipped his flock into submission to Hitler by entering into a Concordat with Berlin which provided that German Catholics were not to oppose Hitler.   When Hitler re-militarized the west bank of the Rhine, in 1936, the French could have easily stopped his advance, and most historians contend that action, on the part of the French, would have sealed his doom.  France kept its hands in its lap like a lady.  After Hitler bombed democrats in Spain, American oil corporations were ready with money and munitions to abet the metastasis of Hitlerian poison throughout the Iberian peninsula.   When Italy bombed Ethiopia, the League of Nations played the part of a cowardly neurasthenic and curled up and died.   As Hitler roared across the Saarland, the West was as mighty as a mouse – perhaps because they welcomed Hitler because of his fervent anti-communism.  When Hitler demanded the Sudetenland, Chamberlain meekly consented and rejected Soviet offers of a united front.  When Hitler demanded that Poland cede Gdansk, the world caved, and Hitler grabbed the city and renamed it Danzig. Soon the Slavic towns of Eastern Europe all became Germanized as Kalingrad became Konigsberg, and Bratislava became Pressberg, and centuries of Jewish, Roma and Russian habitation were consumed by Panzer divisions and the viperous vapors of the gas chambers.         

How Trump Conquered the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave”

In the 2016 primary season, the Republican Party deferred to Trump just as German aristocrats, Prussian Junkers and staunch conservatives bowed to Hitler.   Trump lobotomized the Republican brain and implanted, in place of its former ethos, a new fascist ideology for a new and unbrave world. The party that once stood for a strong defense and resistance against Russian aggression became Putin’s plaything.   The party of Abraham Lincoln, Wendall Wilkie, Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits became the party of Southern and Western “know nothings” whose political consciousness was informed by the Fox Network,  the National Enquirer, and a cotton candy, Southern Fried Chicken culture of unabashed, brazen, bellicose stupidity. 

And Republicans are not the only ones to blame.   In 2015, Mr. Comey, the director of the FBI, a man appointed by Mr. Obama, told the American people that the FBI was investigating Hillary but did not tell the American people that the FBI was also investigating Trump.  Essentially, Obama’s FBI disseminated the psychotic notion that Hillary was dirtier than Trump and bolstered Trump’s position enormously.   Why.  WHY.

After Trump became President, Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated Trump’s ties to Russia.  Among other things, we found that a) his first national security advisor was on the payroll of the Kremlin, b)  numerous Trump aides, including Jared Kushner, lied to the FBI about their contacts with Russia, c) Russia enriched Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, with millions of dollars and camouflaged its financial support by giving the money to Manafort’s creditors and not Manafort himself, and D) Russia aided Trump by using social media to reduce the black vote in Michigan by disseminating bullshit to the affect that Hillary was part of a Jewish financial cabal against black people.  

I thought Mueller had amassed a profoundly disturbing and legally overpowering mountain of evidence.  And then the Mueller investigation was terminated and cast into the dust.  Why.  WHY.  Did Trump threaten big shots with death.  After all, Hitler seized absolute power by setting fire to the Reichstag and blaming it on the communists.  And in one of Trump’s trials, one of his ex-wives testified that Trump kept a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand.

Also, the press disclosed tapes of Trump, on the telephone, threatening  the Ukrainian government that he would withhold any military aid unless they spread dirt on Hunter Biden.

Of course, millions of Americans don’t know this because they get their news from Fox, and  people like that disgusting ogre,  Alex Jones, who made a mint alleging that the massacre, of about twenty 5 and 6- and 7-year-olds, in Sandy Hook, Connecticut was a myth, conjured by their parents, to create more pressure for gun control.   

Since so many Americans get their news from such odiferous charlatans and butchers of decency, our democracy is already almost dead because about half of the American populace have no idea what is going on.   Nevertheless, like Hitler before him, Trump claims that the Democrats and liberals are guilty of “fake news.”  Trump’s deft ability to turn the truth on its head recalls Hitler’s ability  to convince millions of Europeans that Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were Jewish and that the Jews had started World War Two.    

The Roots of American Fascism

It’s no use itemizing all the precursors to Trumpian Fascism.   It has been with us since the Southern States of this country tried to destroy the union in the name of slavery and rejoiced when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.  It was plainly evident in the rantings of Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, Huey Long, George Wallace and Lester Maddox.

The Growth of American Fascism from 2000 to 2016

In the modern era, Fascism crept up on us, gaining with intensity like an overgrown mouse morphing into a sewer rat.  This rat became downright rabid when the Supreme Court, which had been a  staunch guardian of American liberty in the distant days of the Warren Court, rendered its infamous decision in Bush v Gore.   Although many facets of that decision concerned transitory issues, that decision infected our legal system with an alien idea that eternally deformed our democracy: The Court ruled that the decision, in Bush v. Gore, would not have precedential effect.   This was the first time the high court had ever said that a case would not have precedential effect.

Precedent means that like cases should be decided the same way because we are all equal.  If in case number one, it is decreed that an axe murderer will be put to death, then in case two an axe murderer should also be put to death because all axe murderers, like all people, are equal before the law.  When the Supreme Court said, without any explanation at all, that the case would not have precedential effect it was essentially saying that it sided with Bush because it was biased in favor of him, but to prevent its legal wrongs from being perpetuated, this case would not govern future cases.  

2002: The evisceration of our liberties proceeded apace in the case of Jose Padilla, which arose after 9/11,  when our legal system resurrected all of the terror and cruelty of the ancien regime.   I am all for giving people such as the 9/11 terrorists brutal punishment, but generally, when one is arrested, one has a right to counsel and the authorities will notify family and/or friends of the suspect’s arrest.  This was not done in the case of Jose Padilla and the realization that we had locked someone up, without a right to counsel and without the notification of family and friends, only came about because of inquisitive and aggressive reporters.  The Padilla case marked our regression to the tyranny of  pre-Revolutionary France where the king, if he wanted, could use the “lettre de cachet” to have anyone arrested, for a good reason or a bad reason or no reason at all and lock him up, and torture him and kill him, and the right to counsel, and the notification of family and friends, was nonexistent.  

2004: When Bush ran for reelection in 2004, he transformed campaign rallies into tests of political orthodoxy by demanding that people who attended his rallies sign pledges of political support, and  Bush arrested people who had carried anti-Bush placards within half a mile of some of his campaign events.   Bush has been getting good press as of late, but that is only because next to Trump he’s angelic. 

2009: Shortly after Obama was elected, a firestorm of fascist reaction swept the nation.   People were enraged that a black man had become President, ²  and something known as the Tea Party movement was born.  Tea Partiers made all manner of hyperbolic and inane complaints against Obama.  Chief among them was disgust with the growing Federal deficit, and Trump sadistically piled on and decried the growing Federal deficit.  And the intellectually  stunted imbeciles of the Tea Party forgot all about their hatred of evil federal deficits when their satanic savior Donald Trump took power and gave us federal deficits that made Obama’s deficits look like a few extra dollars a wife took from the pantry to buy girl scout cookies.    

Of course, the stupidity of the Tea Partiers was apparent to anyone conversant with American history.  At the time of the Boston Tea party, a leading merchant (If my memory is correct, it was John Hancock) enjoyed a monopoly on the sale of tea, and he was robbing the people of Boston blind.  The British, to aid the citizens of the Bay Colony, had sent a ship loaded with tea to Boston to undercut Hancock’s outrageous prices.  Hancock’s thugs threw the tea into Boston Harbor and that was the famous Tea party.  Of course, popular histories don’t tell you this because it makes the British look too good.  The popular histories of the era tell us that the tea partiers thought the British taste for tea was dainty, affected and queer and that they asserted their masculine pride by dumping tea.  Use your head:  Most of human history has been characterized by want and frequent famine and starvation.  In those days, no one, save psychotics, would discard perfectly good tea, and the people who had discarded the tea would not have been celebrated as freedom-loving patriots.

The lunge toward fascism was accentuated at Trump’s rallies, in 2016, when a few tepid protests from dissenters aroused the Wagnerian wrath from apprentice storm troopers, and Trump, erupting like a volcano spewing lava, said that anyone who dissented from him should be beaten and sent to the hospital.

Where America Stands Today

      

In 2020, the Democratic Party called upon Joe Biden to be its standard bearer and lead the good fight to oust Trump from the temple of justice.  

Joe Biden has not been a bad president.  Indeed, he has been much better than I had expected as his fellow Senators, according to the New York Times, nicknamed him the “Senator from Mastercard” because of his solicitousness toward peddlers of credit cards and other financial services.  (Of course,  Biden always carefully obscured his allegiance to corporate America by incessantly reminiscing about his allegedly working-class youth in Scranton.) 

However, Biden seems to be utterly exhausted and should be spending his days resting in a hammock and sipping lemonade, or whatever it is that the aged do to seek sustenance and a fleeting semblance of good health. 

The debacle that was the debate signifies that Donald Trump’s conniving claws are on America’s neck like a vise. 

And what are we doing about this ?   We should replace Joe Biden.  However, we are told that such a task is nearly impossible.

The idea that we cannot replace Joe Biden is premised on our stupidity of the nomination process or perhaps our masochistic desire to march, like mindless sheep, toward our doom. 

This is why Biden can and should be replaced:

1) In 1972, the Democratic Party dumped Thomas Eagleton, its nominee for Vice President.  He was dumped because of the revelation that he had shock treatment, for depression, 12 years earlier.   In the case of Biden, who is suffering from senility now, the case for removal is infinitely greater than in the case of Eagleton whose had no major mental problems after his 1960 bout with depression.   If we can dump a nominee because of problems that had not surfaced in 12 years, we can dump Biden for problems that exist today and, because of the inexorable laws of nature and aging, will only get worse.

2) Biden has not been nominated yet.   He is merely the presumptive nominee.   We haven’t even had the convention yet.

3)  Sure, Biden won most of the primaries. (Sanders had been in first place until the Democratic Party establishment in South Carolina nuked his chances as it had in 2016.)  However, in 1952, Estes Kefauver won most or all of the presidential primaries,  but Adlai Stevenson became the nominee because that’s what President Truman wanted.   In 1968, the anti Vietnam war candidates, Robert Kennedy and Eugene Mc Carthy, won 85 percent of the vote in the primaries, but the nomination went to the pro war candidate, Hubert Humphrey.

4) In some of the primaries that Biden won, the delegates might be, supposedly, legally bound to vote for Biden on the first ballot.  This doesn’t matter one bit.   The convention can vote to waive all rules which provide that a delegate must vote for a certain candidate on the first ballot.    Furthermore, in many conventions, delegates easily strayed from their obligation to vote for a given candidate on the first ballot.  In the 1972 Democratic convention,  all of Massachusetts’ delegates were obligated to vote for Mc Govern on the first ballot (In the April 25 primary, he got about 52 percent of the vote and Humphrey came in second with about 21 percent), but Humphrey’s agents finagled their way into robbing a few delegates

5) The credentials of delegates can be challenged for numerous reasons.  In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the credentials of the regular Democratic Party because it violently attacked blacks who tried to participate in the electoral system.  Sometimes delegations are challenged because a state’s rules, in selecting delegates, is deemed to contravene the principles of the national democratic party.  The list is endless.

In Europe, in days of yore, senile people or mere children held onto office because of ancient doctrines such as the divine right of Kings.    Can we please stop behaving in a manner antithetical to the way allegedly freedom-loving Americans behave.  Let’s show some gumption and make Biden retire.  NOW.   

I loved Bernie Sanders, before he showed so much hostility toward the State of Israel.  But this advertisement still moves me; it is the shining antithesis of the muck and manure of our political norms:

1. The media helped Trump even as it disparaged him.  In 2016, CNN spent hundreds of hours broadcasting his rallies in full, giving him hundreds of millions of dollars in free media

2. America’s turn toward fascism, because a black man had been elected President, is analogous to the development of fascism in France, in the 30’s and 40’s, because of rage arising from the rise of a progressive Jew, Leon Blum, to the position of Prime Minister in 1936 https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/the-stench-of-vichy-in-the-regime