Three paragraphs in a recent posting of Heather Cox Richardson’s daily blog, Letters from an American, tell us all we need to know about today’s Republican Party.
I quote:
“The (Republicans’) quest for power … showed up this week when a federal appeals court released secret text messages from Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) to other participants in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, revealing his drastic attempts to end the fight of the American people to choose their president.
“In that attempt, Perry communicated with Justice Department attorney Jeff Clark, Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Director of National Intelligence John Ratclife, many of Trump’s lawyers, and numerous Pennsylvania state lawmakers including Doug Mastriano, none of whom contacted authorities about the attempt to overthrow our democratic system. (Italics mine.)
“Perry also contacted other Republican representatives, including Jody Hice (R-GA), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chip Roy (R-TX), and representative-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) about the effort. They didn’t alert anyone to the anti-democratic effort, either.” (Italics mine again).
That’s nine named Very Important Persons and a large number of other VIP Republicans who knew Donald Trump was committing those crimes against their government, and not one of them – not one of them! – reported it to the authorities! That makes them participants in his felonies. In his sedition.
This is not normal, people. Think about it. A former and would-be president runs a Mafia-like conspiracy to overturn a legitimate national election by denying millions of Americans their basic right to vote and have their votes counted. And even though that constitutes sedition, many of America’s leading Republicans were happy to go along with him, even though his plan would destroy our democracy and get himself installed as America’s first fascist dictator.
Yes sedition. And yes fascist dictator. And federal prosecutors have noticed. Last week, in a new court filing, they accused Trump of a long pattern of lying about elections and encouraging violence, saying he “sent” supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, to criminally block the election results. That is the dictionary definition of sedition.
Predictably, Trump is saying that the federal government, not he, staged or incited that Jan. 6 violence to discredit him and his supporters. He offered no proof, of course. Not even any evidence. Just another lie among his tens of thousands of others.
Donald Trump is a fascist, a neo-Nazi, and his minions and his party either have not realized that yet or they do realize it and they also are fascists. Or lunatics. Trump is a devoted student of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Fuhrer who ordered the murder of 6 million Jews and 500,000 gypsies. The connections between Hitler and Trump are undeniable. (See The Hitler-Trump Connections, 10/16/23).
Trump has even said publicly what he will do if he regains the White House, and it’s just what Hitler did.
He will weaponize the Justice Department to explicitly go after his political opponents, including the Biden family, district attorneys across the nation, journalists, and the “deep state.”
He will stack his cabinet and government agencies across the board with Trump loyalists who will understand they are free to break the law because they will be pardoned.
He will incarcerate and expel millions of immigrants and children of immigrants.
He will ban Muslims, silence LGBTQ+ Americans, prosecute journalists, end abortion across the country and send federal troops into Democratic cities.
He also promised to dole out pardons to convicted felons who would work for him — and that he has already done. The Washington Post broke the story last week that Trump used his constitutional clemency powers as president to free or forgive many felons who would be useful to him.
Post reporters reviewed Trump’s 238 clemency orders and discovered that dozens of them are now working with his 2024 campaign. Some are praising him through social media and national interviews, some are raising or contributing money to his campaign, and others are disseminating his false claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
Never before had a president used his constitutional clemency powers to free or forgive so many felons just so they could be useful to him.
All of that is right out of the Hitler playbook.
I realize I harp on this topic, but I am convinced that most people do not realize that Trump is a would-be fascist dictator, the once-grand Republican Party supports him, and if these people don’t wake up and vote next November the result could be catastrophic.
Their ignorance of that fact probably can largely be blamed on the news media because the media is focusing on the campaign’s horserace aspects instead of what the candidates are saying and doing. Mainstream news sources rarely if ever use the words fascist or neo-Nazi, preferring instead to use weaker synonyms such as authoritarian, so a lot of people are not aware the next election could result in a dictatorship.
As Liz Cheney recently told a CBS interviewer, “One of the things we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”
The Atlantic Daily put it this way a few days ago:
“Trump’s autocratic instincts have now fully mutated into an embrace of fascism. And yet, America shrugs: Millions of voters think of the upcoming election as just another contest between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat, instead of an existential contest between democracy and authoritarianism.”
The Atlantic magazine has found Trump’s actions and promises so alarming that it contracted 24 writers to “explain how Donald Trump could destroy America’s civic and democratic institutions, including its courts, national political culture, and military, if he succeeds in returning to the Oval Office.” Their articles, which will appear in The Atlantic’s January/February issue, will “describe the threats that a second Trump term would pose to the United States government, to the country’s institutions, U.S. national security, and the American idea itself.”
Robert Kagan, a contributing editor for The Washington Post, expressed even deeper pessimism recently when he wrote that a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.
“Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality,” he wrote. “There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States and it is getting shorter every day.”
Kagan argues that Trump leads his closest Republican opponent by 47 points and that doesn’t appear to be changing, so Trump will effectively be the Republican nominee when Super Tuesday ballots are counted March 2. When that happens, there will be a swift and dramatic shift in the political power dynamic, all in his favor.
“Votes are the currency of power in our system, and money follows, and by those measures, Trump is about to become far more powerful than he already is. The hour of casting about for alternatives is closing. The next phase is about people falling in line. … As perilous as it is for Republicans to say a negative word about Trump today, it will be impossible once he has sewn up the nomination.”
That would put tremendous momentum behind Trump going into the General Election, and a rolling boulder is hard to stop – especially since many or most Democrats, especially the young ones, are not happy with Joe Biden and therefore might not even vote.
I can see Kagan’s point, and I agree with him as far as he goes. But I believe that when American voters of all stripes wake up to why Americans joined hands 80 years ago to defend democracy from the very same fascism Trump and his party pushing on us today, they will turn out in record numbers to preserve our precious democratic republic.
I simply cannot believe that a majority of awakened Americans – woke Americans if you will — would even consider turning the presidency over to a person and his party who lie, conceal, misguide, scheme, cheat and even commit felonies up to and including sedition to get their way, to destroy democracy, and install a neo-Nazi as our dictator.
I see a blue tsunami coming
- Donald Trump Makes a Mockery of Populism
- How America could slide first into Oligarchy and then Fascism without the infrastructure of Democracy
- Russian dissident journalist warns no country — not even the US — is safe from fascism after Ukraine war
- Scoot: How many Christians are supporting fascism in America?
- The Left’s fear of fascism under Trump is the ultimate example of projection
- The F Word: The debate over whether to call Donald Trump a fascist, and why it matters
