Trump’s Venomous Heart at His Term's Start
(His Presidency is the veritable Fascist Rejoinder to Roosevelt’s robust and bold First One Hundred Days)
By
David Gottfried
Donald Trump in many ways seems to be the incarnation of Adolf Hitler.1 Many people have found this judgment outlandish and irresponsible. Obviously, his crimes do not begin to approximate the cosmic criminality of Hitler. But I never said that the evil he had committed bears any resemblance to the evil commissioned by Hitler. Rather, I contend that his personality defects, his malignant narcissism, and his delight in unleashing hate that mimics cathexis (a release of sexual tension, such as in an orgasm) ominously resembles the pathos of Adolf Hitler, and given time, he could be as monumentally lethal as Hitler.
In plainer term, Donald Trump does not resemble Hitler quantitatively, but he does resemble Hitler qualitatively; his psyche is poisoned by the same germ of genocidal hate that rarely but periodically surges forth like lava erupting from hell.
The Onslaught of Trump’s Odious Orders in his First week in Office
The American People, in a spasm of Hitlerite, Hunnish, hate, voted for a man who, according to unrebutted testimony in his divorce trial, kept a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his nightstand, a well-worn volume which he read and re-read with the keenest interest.
And now America, and maybe the world – he has already threatened Panama, Canada, Greenland, Denmark and Columbia – may suffer the consequences of a Hitlerite revival.
In his first week in office, that very poor excuse for a man, Donald Trump, has been unleashing a cavalcade of Orders calibrated to drown and disable every last shred of independence and gumption in America's psyche. Here are but a few of the Orders that have descended on the American people with fascist alacrity and arrogance:
1) He showed his contempt for the constitution by banning birthright citizenship.
2) He threatened Panama, Canada, Greenland, Denmark and Columbia.
3) He ordered the cessation of the leasing of any federal land to any individuals or companies who intend to put windmills on the land to generate electric power. (Why does he hate the clean generation of electric power ???)
4) He ordered all federal offices, agencies and departments to cease all discussions, meetings, e mails and joint efforts to assess bird flu (That’s exactly how he responded to Covid on the eve of that infection’s attack on America: Deal with frightening news by pretending it does not exist.).
5) He started firing career civil servants, people who, since the 19th century, were insulated from political disputes and could not be fired simply because a new political party came to power.
6) He has fired many of Jack Smith’s colleagues.
7) He has offered money to millions of civil servants if they resign.
8) ICE, like a pack of German Shepards, is, without any notice, invading American cities, seizing individuals who they don’t think belong here and packing them off to other countries. Today, ICE said it hoped to remove over 1800 people per day. Whether a few or hundreds of thousands of innocents are nabbed by mistake doesn’t really matter. (And it’s easy to nab the wrong people when you apprehend them, and chuck them out of the country, in just a few hours)
9) He ruled that all programs to encourage diversity, inclusion and equality be suspended. I never was a fan of affirmative action, but somehow Trump wants to do more than ban affirmative action. He demands that we regress to Jim Crow, to an era when blacks, no matter how qualified, were deemed unsuitable for any jobs requiring education and excellence.
10) He ruled that he does not recognize any sexes other than male and female. Although this contention is factually just plain wrong (A very small proportion of babies are born with extremely ambiguous sexual organs; the Merck’s manual categorizes them as “inter-sex”), it is not likely to alter anything in our social-sexual wars. (A male can be most definitely a male and still want to become a woman), and what Trump recognizes does not have to be recognized by the health departments of New York, California, etc. However, this is the sort of verbal manna that makes his slavish flock send up Hosannas of praise while they ignore every foul thing he does outside of the sphere of what goes into one’s underwear.
And on January 28:
He said that he is impounding almost all federal domestic spending except for transfer payments such as social security payments. (He is also impounding some payments made overseas, such as monies spent to combat AIDS)
Federal monies are spent pursuant to Congressional legislation: Congress votes to spend money, and the money gets spent. The President has no right to unilaterally negate Congress’s decision to spend money. Richard Nixon did try to impound a miniscule fraction of the federal budget, but Congress forcefully rebutted Nixon’s ploy, and reaffirmed that spending money was fully within the jurisdiction of Congress when it passed the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
If he succeeds in impounding money, hundreds of thousands of people will swiftly die.
(Late news insert: A federal judge just rendered an order staying (stopping) the implementation of Trump’s order. I don’t know how the stay will eventually be resolved. It appears that for the next two weeks or so, money will be available – but entities which take federal monies will not be able to make any long-term plans for their clients)
States use a certain portal to obtain Medicaid monies from the federal government. On the morning of the 28th, the same day that Trump violated the Constitution by impounding spending, these portals, in all 50 states, ceased functioning; this meant that Federal Medicaid monies had dried up.
Concretely, this means that if New York University Medical Center requested that the State of New York give it 50 million dollars for Medicaid patients it had treated, the State of New York would not have gotten the money, from the federal government, to give to New York University.
The medical provider won’t get paid,
The medical provider will be free to oust the patient from his practice.
Consequently:
Cancerous tumors will not be extracted from Medicaid patients – oh, maybe they will be extracted when the dispute is “settled,” but in two months’ time, while the lawyers for Trump make histrionic and baseless arguments before the Court, the cancer will have metastasized, and the patient will be at death’s door.
Asthmatics won’t receive anti-inflammatory drugs and inhalers and will confront breathlessness and death.
Diabetics won’t receive anti-hyperglycemic drugs and will suffer comas, blindness and amputations.
The trend toward fascism can also be gleaned from the ready capitulation of other centers of power to the whims of Trump
Mark Zuckerberg told his fact-checkers to get lost, facilitating the publication of more utter lies on Facebook.
Jeff Bezos instructed the Washington Post to refrain from making an endorsement in the last presidential election. (In the past, the Post reliably endorsed Democrats in presidential elections)
CNN spat on Jim Acosta because he had the integrity to stand up to Trump.
ABC gave Trump 15 million dollars to settle Trump’s baseless suit for libel.
Pennsylvania’s junior Democratic Senator, Mr. Fetterman (a man seemingly fettered to infancy as he refuses to come to the Senate dressed in anything other than shorts and hoodies), is now playing political patsy cake with Trump.
Reporters continually ask the President, and his Press Secretary, questions that any smart 8th grader could answer. Indeed, the questions are beyond soft ball. At today’s conference, the Press Secretary, before answering one of the questions posed, complimented the reporter for raising such a nice question.
Hitler and Trump both were propelled to power by the same violent reaction against progressive change, toward minorities, in their respective countries
During the enlightenment, and with greater speed and fervor during the French Revolution and the Napoleanic Wars, the Jews of Western and Central Europe were emancipated. The ghetto walls came down, and Jews were no longer consigned to a life of pushcarts and peddling. All the Jewish intelligence and striving kept down during 18 centuries of repression suddenly burst forth, in the 19th and early 20 th century, like a many-colored garment as beautiful as Joseph’s coat in the Old Testament.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Jewish stature, in Western and Central Europe, speedily advanced. The Rothschilds were one of the greatest banking houses of Europe. Disraeli was Great Britain’s Prime Minister and an intimate of Victoria, Regina. Jewish brilliance sparkled in the discoveries of Freud, the polemics of Karl Marx, and the spectacular symphonies of Gustav Mahler.
Europeans were furious: How could such an accursed people profit so mightily. The success of the Jews seemed to impugn the accuracy of Christianity which had prophesied that the Jews must suffer for killing Christ.
The Holocaust, in my view, was the explosion of generations of accumulating rage that had been percolating and germinating in Europe ever since the dawn of the Enlightenment.
This is why the Holocaust was not simply a German phenomenon. In Vichy France, in the Baltics, in the Ukraine --- wherever the Jews were hated because the people had been taught that the Jews must suffer for killing Jesus – people could not accept that such an accursed race could do so well.
(Much the same thing explains Muslim hate toward the West today: Muslims believe that the Christian West should suffer because Christians do not accept Islam. However, the West, by and large, is wealthier and more powerful than the Levant. This dissonance, between what is supposed to be and what is, is intolerable to Muslims and incites insatiable wrath.)
Trump’s success is in large measure explained by Hitler’s success. Hitler obtained the support of Europeans who were furious that Jews, who once were denizens of miserable ghettos, had scaled the heights of professional and business life.
In this country, millions of whites could never get over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Lyndon Johnson said that the Civil Rights Act meant Republican control of the South for the next 100 years)
In this country, capitalism can make a poor man feel very, very low. However, for decades poor whites could console themselves by remembering that at least they were white.
With the second or 20th Century emancipation of America’s blacks, poor whites were divested of this nugget of consolation. Hence, poor whites are consumed with Hitlerian wrath toward blacks which is so great that it spills the boundaries of race and encompasses the LGBTQ community, feminism, etc.
Trump is exploiting anti-black pathos just as Hitler exploited anti-Jewish pathos.
Some of the similarities with Hitler are enumerated here: https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/a-chilling-and-heretofore-unknown