Trump: The First President Honest about His Fascism
Long Before Trump became President, American Government Displayed the Brutality and Contempt for Democracy Characteristic of Fascist Regimes.
By
David Gottfried
Many liberal Americans believe that with the election of Donald Trump we have crossed a Rubicon of sorts: We have left the world of predictable, old-fashioned conservatism and ventured into an alien, European world where the land is punctuated by barbed wire and ghetto walls and the mind is manacled to ancient, apocalyptical ideologies whose nihilistic north star is a siren song of death. In other words, classical, murderous, Fascism.
I propose something else: We have often been highly fascistic. Donald Trump is different not because he is necessarily more antediluvian and Neanderthal than what preceded him, but because he is honest about being a fascist.
Whereas Richard Nixon repeatedly insisted that he adhered to the truth, every sound out of Trump’s mouth conveys a moral malice as swampy waters in the tropics transmit deadly microbes such as malaria, yellow fever, Ebola and Marburg. He makes no bones about being a crook and suggests that we consider him cool and “with it” as our strange and sick culture found Anthony Soprano a really cool, hip dude. (I loved the Sopranos series, and I did fairly decent impersonations of the lead characters, but I never started to look kindly upon loan sharks.).
Trump’s predecessors often employed the tactics of Anthony Soprano while pretending to be as ethically spotless as a boy scout or a kiddie taking communion.
This country, and its leaders, conspired to assassinate, and did in fact snuff the life out of, President John F. Kennedy. We lied and said that one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed Kennedy. This was Fascism.
Of course, it is considered a sign of a poor intellectual upbringing to suggest that a certain event may be the result of a conspiracy. Smart and sardonic people are supposed to roll their eyes and maintain that any talk of a conspiracy smacks of the juvenile, jejune and jack assey. Sure, some right wingers have a predilection to believe in conspiracies that are positively bonkers – such as the Q anon delusion that deep state pedophiles use a Washington DC pizzeria as their “white slavery" headquarters.
But the fact that some allegations of conspiracy seem to be textbook cases of psychotic delusions does not mean that all allegations of conspiracy are meritless.
These factors, singly and certainly in the aggregate, buttress the notion that the Warren Commission’s report was a Fascist lie:
1) The idea that President Kennedy was killed by a single bullet, that collided into his body, Governor Connolly’s body, the structures within the automobile, and made numerous right turns, left turns and partial reverse turns because it kept ricocheting all over the killing scene, and then left the site in a pristine condition, without any dents or disfigurements suggesting the slightest collision or impact, is nonsensical.
2) The Zapruder film clearly showed that Kennedy was killed by a bullet fired from a spot in front of him, not behind and above him, as the Texas school book depository was. The Zapruder film was not released until 1967.
3) Numerous witnesses said they heard shots coming from the grassy knoll. The Warren Commission did not like that evidence; they therefore buried it.
4) Security for the President was minimal to nonexistent in Dallas on the fateful date.
5) Most of the cabinet was on a plane in route to Japan.
6) Telephone service in New York and Washington was suspended for 1 hour after the assassination.
7) The government apparently made a strong effort to suggest that Oswald was a Leftist when in fact he was probably a double agent:
A) When he was in the Marines, he made statements lauding Communism --- yet our military was training him to speak Russian
B) After he defected from the United States and lived in the Soviet Union as a Soviet Citizen, he supposedly “had a change of heart,” and defected back to the United States. Upon entrance into the United States, he was not debriefed, a glaring departure from proper procedure.
C) To appear to be a leftist, he was part of an organization known as “Fair Play for Cuba.” The address of this organization was the same address as that of Guy Bannister, a right-wing CIA operative implicated in the transmission of arms to foes of Fidel Castro. In fact, Guy Bannister appeared to control “Fair Play for Cuba.”
According to the Warren Commission and the Police Deparment of Dallas, Texas, no recordings, stenographic notes or notes of any kind, of the interrogation of Oswald after he was arrested, exist.
9) The Warren commission, the BS commission established to solve the assassination, submitted paperwork to show that Oswald allegedly bought a mail order rifle which was a very poor, notoriously inaccurate rifle that the Italians stopped making in 1941 1
However, Dallas at that time was saturated with Gun stores, and if Oswald wanted to get a gun, he probably would have done what every other Texan did: He would have gone to a local store, instead of sending money away for something he hadn’t seen yet.
10) The Ruling Establishment killed Kennedy because he wanted peace and was progressive.
11) At first Kennedy did not seem to be a forceful and committed progressive. His Father, Joseph Kennedy, was rather right wing, anti-black and anti-Jewish, thought England should have given Hitler whatever he had wanted and tried to undercut Roosevelt’s attempt to aid Great Britain.
12) However, Joseph Kennedy wanted his sons to have prodigious intellects, and he arranged for John F Kennedy, and his elder brother, Joe, to be tutored, while in England, by Harold Laski, a Jewish socialist. John F Kennedy became a man with a capacious mind that was receptive to penetrating, if disturbing, thought.
13) At first, Kennedy’s presidency was not distinguished by liberal reforms or courage. But by 1963, he expressed increasing disaffection with the cold war order and a state of affairs in which the US and the USSR were poised, at any minute, to vaporize planet earth.
13) Among other things, he entered into the Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, spoke out vigorously for civil rights, proposed closing dozens of military bases and, shortly before he was killed, he indicated that he was going to start withdrawing troops from South Vietnam. Also, about two to three weeks before he was assassinated, he approved, or did not vocally protest, a plan to kill South Vietnamese President Diem. Much of the hard right was gung-ho about Diem, even though he persecuted the numerous Buddhists in South Vietnam, as he was furiously anti-communist and authoritarian.
Kennedy may have been killed by the “military industrial complex.” Or he may have been killed by any one of a number of factors. But it is a disgrace that this nation let itself be duped by the farce that he was killed by one lone assassin.
Operation “Wet-Back” was infinitely more brutal, to foreigners and people who are perceived as foreign, than anything Trump has done to aliens and undocumented workers.
In 1954, President Eisenhower, convinced that too many Latinos were taking jobs from Americans, and possibly soiling and adulterating the lily-white Anglo-Saxon complexion of America, launched Operation Wet-back.
Ostensibly, it was designed to get rid of immigrants and aliens who were here illegally. Actually, the objective, and its actual operation, aimed at essentially just one goal: Getting rid of Latinos. (It purported to try to oust illegal immigrants from Mexico, but I doubt the program would have been implemented with such violent gusto if Mexicans had the same ethnicity as Frenchmen or Germans).
In a few months’ time, 1.3 million Latinos were thrown out of the United States. Some of those Latinos were American citizens, but when officers, and thugs working for officers, conduct raids in the middle of the night, the victims of those raids often didn’t have any time to get documents establishing that they were here legally. Before they know it, they are lying in an isolated part of Mexico, without any papers or any money, and if they were to claim that they were American citizens, they would have been laughed at and derided as delusional.
Eisenhower is often thought of as a gentle President. I suppose that’s because he did not scowl or rant and rave in the manner of Trump or Hitler. But he was fierce. To crush the Iranian revolution that transpired toward the outset of his presidency, he threatened nuclear weapons. In 1954, to try to deter the French from quitting the fight in Vietnam, he offered the French two atom bombs, suggesting that one be dropped on Hanoi and the other one dropped on Haiphong.
And when Eisenhower disregarded due process and American laws defending the rights of American citizens, and summarily ejected 1.3 million Latinos from this country in 1954, he exhibited the authoritarian contempt and scorn for human rights most characteristic of fascists.
When Geroge Bush the Second waged war against Iraq, a nation that had never attacked us, he resembled Adolf Hitler who had attacked Poland, which had never attacked Germany
9/11 was a dire, devastating attack, and the perpetrators of that heinous crime deserved the most miserable tortures the most sadistic minds could ever design.
However, 9/11 did not give us carte blanche to employ the sort of retributive “justice” enjoyed by big fat assholes in malignant middle America. They seemed to think that 9/11 somehow authorized a jihad against various racial and religious minorities which seemed too exotic for our tastes.
And so the administration suggested that Sadaam Hussien was in league with Al Qaida and Osama Ben Ladin. Although Osama Ben Ladin was staunchly Islamist and decried any deviation from Islamic teachings as it existed in the depths of the monstrous Middle Ages, Bush denied or did not notice Sadaam’s tilt toward Socialistic, Soviet-directed Arabism which deemed strict Islamist teachings a millstone sapping the strength of the Arab Masses. Very simply, hardline Islamists consider vodka-drinking Arabs with a soft spot for the old Soviet Union a hellish, satanic menace. The idea that Sadaam supported Osama bin Ladin did not make any sense ideologically or theistically, and there was no evidence of such support.
Furthermore, our war against Iraq was just dumb because it damaged American interests.
Iran and Iraq have hated each other long before those modern nation states had been born. Iran was the home of Shiite Islam, and Iraq was within the realm of Sunni Islam. Given the Islamic world’s innate hatred of any nonconformity or difference, Shiite and Sunni Islam have had to hate one another and Shiite Iran and Sunni Iraq have hated one another since the rift between these two camps were formed about 1300 years ago.
In any event, Washington and Israel both benefited from the chronicity of the Iraq-Iranian feud. While Iran and Iraq were embroiled with their own battle with one another, they were too burdened and exhausted to be a thorn in the side of the United States or an existential threat to Israel.
However, George Bush the Second seemed to be too stupid to be cognizant of the tendency of Iranians and Iraqis to murder each other. After he blitzed and bombed Iraq to hell, Iran, quite ineluctably, grew dramatically in strength as it no longer had to contend wiith Iraqi power. And until some critical battles which Iran lost in 2024 because of the diplomatic deftness of Joe Biden, Iran was truly menacing Israel.
In any event, there are numerous instances of dictatorial conduct, brutality and lawlessness in American government, which are quite congruent with fascism, before Donald Trump.
The Greek-Yugoslavian defeat of the Italians may have been responsible for Hitler’s loss of World War Two. Hitler invaded Russia on June 22, 1941. By December 1941, he was paralyzed by the Russian winter; Russia got a life-saving breather when Hitler’s forces were stopped by the snow and cold. However, Hitler had wanted to attack Russia in March or April of 1941. That would have given him more time to defeat Russia before the Russian winter set in. However, he was delayed, all through the Spring of 1941, because he had to salvage the Italians who had been defeated by the Greeks.