Trump's weekend included calls for sweeping raids, giant camps and mass deportations. It also included calling his political enemies vermin, a page out of the Hitler/Mussolini playbook.
Historian John Meacham stated:
"to call your opponent vermin, to dehumanize them, is to not only open the door, but to walk through the door toward the most ghastly kinds of crimes.”A Trump spokesperson defended his boss with:
“Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
The spokesperson later amended his statement:
“their sad, miserable existence will be crushed”
Really? That's your improvement. It's kind of sad and miserable...
The U.S. made considerable fun of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini back in the day. Charlie Chaplain's The Great Dictator saw him playing Hynkel:
The message is that Hynkel is not a brilliant strategist or a mighty leader. He is an overgrown adolescent – as demonstrated in the sublime set piece in which he dances with an inflatable globe, dreaming of being "emperor of the world". He is an insecure buffoon who bluffs, cheats, obsesses over his public image, manhandles his secretaries, revels in the luxury of his extravagant quarters, and reverses his own key policies in order to buy himself more time in power. "To me, the funniest thing in the world is to ridicule impostors," wrote Chaplin in his autobiography, "and it would be hard to find a bigger impostor than Hitler."
Trump's values are political retribution, personal aggrandizement, lying, cheating and saying whatever he believes will optimize his image in the present moment, even if it's the exact opposite of something he said just minutes before. That also entails projecting his sins onto his political foes with nary a care, not even the slightest reflection. His mirror tells him one thing. Trump's the greatest of them all....
The Trump of today is far more dangerous than the man who said "We're going to march to the Capital and I'll be there with you..." His retaliatory impulses are on steroids and he plans to enact retribution without restraints.
He's a poor fit for democracy. Please don't destroy.....
Update 11-15-23: Trump called for the citizen's arrest of the New York Attorney General and Judge presiding over his civil fraud trial.
Update 11-26-23: Red Team Senator Mitt Romney called for nearly anyone over Trump.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) signaled that nearly any candidate in the 2024 field, of either party, would be an “upgrade” over another term for former President Trump.
“I’d be happy to support virtually any one of the Republicans — maybe not Vivek [Ramaswamy] — but the others that are running would be acceptable to me, and I’d be happy to vote for them.”
The billionaire class seems to be coalescing behind Nikki Haley.
Update 12-3-23: Trump said "We've been waging an all-out war on American democracy" in a campaign speech.
Update 12-7-23: Trump's minions have plans of the Insane Red variety. His revenge tour could be enacted by a number of wingnuts.
Update 6-11-24: Trump told his supporters at a Las Vegas rally in over 100 degree heat that faithful MAGA would "choose suicide over Biden." Is that one characteristic of a cult?
