Category: Trump Era Page 13 of 19

On October 17th, I wrote that demonizing Trump as fascist had consequences.

To most Americans fascist = holocaust, Hitler, and World War II. To be a fascist is to be the worst thing possible.

Popular culture is full of references of going back and killing Hitler before he became powerful. We bewail that no one did anything. We blame Neville Chamberlain for responding to Hitler’s provocations by making concessions.

It is generally accepted that trying to make peace with a fascist is foolishness.

Donald Trump is a fascist, so are many of his followers, and those who follow him but who aren’t fascists are still working to try and get a fascist into power. They must be stopped, and our culture believes violence is justified in stopping fascists.

That is the logic of the rhetoric.

I think it is now pretty clear that Trump is not Hitler reborn. He is not even Mussolini reborn. He was, at most, a right-wing populist, but he’s not even that. He’s just another oligarch who flirted with populist-right ideas, but has mostly not even followed through on those.

He was never Hitler. I didn’t think he was during the campaign, and said so.

And now we have polarization: antifas and fascists. People who didn’t exist on the public stage before they were vaulted there, and with that polarization, we have violence.

I don’t have anything in particular against punching Nazis (though I do have something for free speech), but these people have been elevated from cranks no one knew about, to somebodies.

Only one prominent Trump advisor can credibly be called something of a fascist: Bannon, and he is outweighed by people who are just standard, out-of-the-can neoliberals, like Trump’s daughter, and son-in-law, and, well, almost everyone else. There are a few nasty racists, like Sessions, but they existed long before Trump. There are climate denialists, but that’s a Republican party thing, and so on.

Trump’s not Hitler. He never was. There is not going to be a Reichstag fire in which he seizes power.

The fascist line, like the Russian pawn line, were simply anti-Trump political lines. Extremely dangerous, and in the case of the Russian line xenophobic and dangerous, but just propaganda.

And millions have fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker and are now basing their lives and identities around it, on both sides. This hasn’t weakened the “alt-right,” it has strengthened it, and it sure as hell didn’t stop Trump from being elected.

Skipping a few half million dollar a plate dinners and campaigning in the rust-belt? That might have stopped it. Not opposing a $15/minimum wage, that might have stopped it. Not trying to get “moderate” Republicans to vote Democratic and ignoring traditional Democratic constituencies, that might have stopped it.

Not Hitler, and calling him Hitler didn’t work.

Genius.

I wonder if our next dynastic appointee, Chelsea Clinton, is even just a little more competent as a campaigner than her mother?

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On January 26th, I wrote that Trump had yet to break his core promises; that his actions at that point were consistent with the major promises he had made during the election. He had ended TPP, was moving on the immigration bill, was working on the wall, and so on.

He might have lied about a lot of things, but he had yet to lie about what mattered.

However Trump made promises that lay at the core of his ur-promise, which was to make things better for those who the old economy had failed. He is now making those promises into a lie.

Trumpcare is clearly worse than Obamacare. It will not cover things Obamacare covered, will cover fewer people and will cost more.

The budget is a direct strike at the poorest and weakest and at people who voted for Trump in regions whose support he needed, like the Rust Belt. It’s one thing to “cut the state,” it’s another to cut programs that feed hungry adults and children. The extra money to the police state and military will help his people, but not as much as the cuts and the Trumpcare failure will cost them.

He has yet to move on NAFTA, a core promise.

It’s not possible for me to look at what Trump is doing and say, “This will really make a difference to his core supporters.” It won’t.

It’s quite possible than Trumpcare won’t pass, and it’s almost certain that Trump’s budget will take some huge hits before passage as well. But both indicate a failure by Trump to take his promises, and his ur-promises seriously.

Course correction is possible but unlikely. It is rare for Presidents to change from who they are during their first year: Obama never changed from the man who bailed out bankers and the rich, and fucked over small people, for example.

In one sense, this changes little. It will continue the loss of faith in the political system, continue America’s decline and continue on the glide path to the age of war and revolution our world is in. It will happen faster than it would have under Clinton, and more Americans will suffer sooner, but the trend lines remain intact.

In another sense, this is a lost opportunity, not to do the right thing, though some of what Trump promised was the right thing, but to restore some faith. Trump failing, but doing what he promised would be quite a bit different than Trump not even trying to keep his ur-promise, the same as Obama (Change!) or Bush.

So it has been, and it looks like, so it shall be.

So be it.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.