Last week I wrote a column about Orange Trump and said that he was too lazy to be any kind of threat. Some of the folks who read my column on Medium took some friendly umbrage at my remarks and posted comments stating their own views about why they thought I was wrong, and that Trump was someone who should be feared.
Here’s one of the comments which made me decide that I needed to respond at length: “I think I’m going to disagree with a Mike here. They said the same thing about Hitler too.”
My problem with the continuing narrative about how Trump is such a threat to democracy is that the conditions that resulted in the collapse of democratic regimes in countries like Germany were so different from what exists in our country today, that making any kind of comparison between the two situations confuses rather than explains anything at all.
Yesterday the Labor Department issued its analysis of the 2nd quarter economic numbers and noted that the economy grew at the rate of 2% over the same period a year ago, much of the growth coming from continued strength in consumer spending. In the late 1920’s the German economy collapsed to the point that most of the middle class was completely wiped out.
The Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democratic government, was 15 years old when it collapsed in 1933. The current United States government started operating in 1789 – that’s only 234 years during which time there was only a four-year period when the federal government didn’t function in 13 Confederate states.
How serious a threat was the riot on January 6th? It was so serious that it resulted in a five-hour postponement of the ratification of the 2020 election with the security forces firing one single shot – by mistake.
Of course, let’s not underestimate the threat posed by someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been calling for secession of red states now and again. Huey Long said he wanted Louisiana to set itself up as a separate country in 1928. Strom Thurmond called for the same thing in his 1948 Dixiecrat campaign. George Wallace echoed Thurmond again in 1968, and now we have some GOP idiot in Texas who tried to put secession on the 2022 ballot as a citizen’s initiative, along with another vote on whether Joe’s 2020 election was a fraud.
Yesterday, the New York judge who is presiding over the state’s investigation of how Trump’s business enterprise has been consciously lying about the value of various properties decided that the evidence of fraud is so overwhelming that he’s not even going to allow this issue to be argued in the civil case against Trump which is slated to start next week.
Of course, Trump’s legal team immediately declared they would appeal. But when you’re a Fascist and you get slapped down in court, you don’t take your case to another court. You call out your private militia the way that Mussolini led his Black Shirts on their march on Rome in 1922.
Who is Trump going to call out? Nick Fuentes or one of those other white supremacist assholes that have had their civil rights trampled by the liberals running the Department of Justice and have the audacity to bring charges against this bunch after January 6th?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to paint Trump as just another Republic(an) who can win a bunch of GOP primaries by being more extreme than anyone else in the race. Of course, he’s an out-and-out racist. Of course, he’s comfortable hanging around with the shithead, white guys who like to sit around on bar stools in Richmond Hill, Queens and tell ‘nigger jokes’ to their friends.
But historically, every Fascist movement seized power by sending armed and organized troops into where the government’s democratically elected representatives were meeting and forcing them to disband or get shot. And when, for example, the head of Chile’s democratic government – Salvador Allende - refused to resign on September 11, 1973, remember what happened to him?
What weapons were those putzes carrying when they stole the date book off of Nancy Pelosi’s desk on January 6th? A Confederate flag? Give me a friggin’ break.
Kommentare