In the course of the vacation season, Donald Trump and his brokers didn’t cease or in any other case relaxation of their marketing campaign to make him America’s first dictator. In that manner, Trump and his forces are possessed by a kind of fascist mania, a compulsive drive for victory and domination. This helps to elucidate why they’re such grasp propagandists. Trump is tied with or main President Joe Biden in lots of early polls.
The previous couple of weeks of relentless assaults and raging by Trump included this Christmas Day publish on Reality Social the place the ex-president proclaimed:
Merry Christmas to all, together with Crooked Joe Biden’s ONLY HOPE, Deranged Jack Smith…
Included are also World Leaders, each good and dangerous, however none of that are as evil and ‘sick’ because the THUGS we now have inside our Nation who, with their Open Borders, INFLATION, Afghanistan Give up, Inexperienced New Rip-off, Excessive Taxes, No Vitality Independence, Woke Navy, Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Iran, All Electrical Automobile Lunacy, and a lot extra, wish to destroy our as soon as nice USA. MAY THEY ROT IN HELL.
AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Trump is clear and direct in his threats and guarantees to be America’s first dictator on “day one” of his “presidency” when he takes energy in 2025. The day after Christmas Trump would reiterate these intentions, sharing a graphic on his Reality Social platform that confirmed how voters affiliate phrases comparable to “dictatorship” and “revenge” with him.
When the autocrat, would-be dictator speaks, you need to imagine him.
In response to Trump‘s “scandalous” habits and “new low” throughout the Christmas vacation and new 12 months, the mainstream information media carried out their drained routine of being “shocked” and “disgusted” on the apparent and predictable. As a substitute, the main target ought to have been on Trump’s rising fascist and totalitarian escalations.
In a sequence of authorized challenges and different strikes, Trump and his attorneys have argued that he’s a king or different kind of divine ruler who’s above the regulation and due to this fact immune from accountability for his apparent crimes together with the Jan. 6 coup try and the bigger plot to finish American democracy. Such claims and arguments have been broadly condemned and mocked as being alien to the Structure and the nation’s authorized and political custom and tradition.
To that time, U.S. District Decide Chutkan wrote the next in her response to Trump’s petition to dismiss the costs towards him for the crimes of Jan. 6 on grounds of presidential immunity and the Structure:
The court docket can not conclude that our structure cloaks former presidents with absolute immunity for any federal crimes they dedicated whereas in workplace. Nothing within the structure’s textual content or allocation of presidency powers requires exempting former presidents….Defendant’s four-year service as commander in chief didn’t bestow on him the divine proper of kings to evade the prison accountability that governs his fellow residents.
Donald Trump’s claims to immunity have additionally been pushed again towards for being an apparent dangerous religion try to delay his trials till after the 2024 election, the place if Trump wins, he may then pardon himself for his crimes after which weaponize the Division of Justice to retaliate towards his and the MAGA motion’s so-called enemies.
Nevertheless, that Trump and his brokers and followers would even assert such “rights” — and relying on the temper of a given Trump-nominated Supreme Court docket justice or right-wing decide may doubtlessly discover a sympathetic ear for such absurd arguments — embodies simply how far down the highway to full-on fascism and dictatorship the nation has already traveled.
There was one other dimension to Trump’s claims to be a dictator king that went largely unremarked upon by the mainstream information media and commentariat. Throughout a speech in New Hampshire a number of weeks in the past, Trump made the next announcement.
I’m additionally going to indemnify our cops. This can be a huge factor, and it’s a model new factor, and I believe it’s so necessary. I’m going to indemnify, via the federal authorities, all cops and regulation enforcement officers all through the US from being destroyed by the unconventional left for taking robust actions towards crime.
In essence, Trump has promised the police will likely be positioned much more above and out of doors the regulation after they interact in thuggery and extra typically violate the civil and human rights of the American individuals. This can be a bare try by Trump to make sure that the nation’s police and regulation enforcement are loyal to him personally.
Trump has certainly mentioned related issues earlier than (for instance: empowering police to shoot and kill shoplifters). Nevertheless, repetition makes such fascist and authoritarian threats and guarantees no much less harmful. For the information media (Church of the Savvy) and different political observers to look away with a shrug of the shoulders or dismiss it as “not information” is to normalize neofascism and the situation of malignant normality that’s fueling it.
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In a wholesome democracy and society, the regulation protects the rights of all individuals equally. Furthermore, the regulation is meant to perform as a kind of social leveler that ensures that the much less highly effective have some safety(s) from the highly effective.
By comparability, in an authoritarian society, the regulation is a software for the highly effective to abuse the much less highly effective and to say their will and pursuits over others in a manner that’s corrupt, unaccountable, and unchecked. In some ways, that is survival of the fittest and a kind of state of nature that’s anathema to democracy, human flourishing, and progress. Trump and the Republican fascists and the bigger white proper are dedicated to this second challenge.
For all of their discuss “regulation and order,” Trump and the opposite Republican fascists and “conservatives” truly view the regulation as primarily being a weapon they’ll use towards their “enemies,” the opposite, and people individuals they deem to be lower than and never “actual Individuals.” And for all of his claims about “backing the blue” and “Blue Lives Matter,” Trump has promised to pardon the Jan. 6 MAGA rioters (a bunch he describes as “heroes” and “patriots” and “political prisoners”) and endorses placing the Capitol police who defended American democracy on that horrible day in jail.
On this, Thom Hartmann warns in a latest essay:
As fascist followers act out their violent threats towards their leaders’ perceived enemies, they get an interior sense of energy and the sensation that they’ve joined a neighborhood: that diminishes their very own worry for a short time.
The extra an “different” — political enemies; racial, spiritual, and gender minorities; ladies — are blamed for the ills of the nation, the extra vigilante-style violence towards them is justified and the extra violent the longer term turns into.
When the state pushes again towards that violence, as America did after January sixth, the requires elevated violence change into even louder. Trump is virtually shouting “kill them!” with a bullhorn and even our court docket system is afraid to cease him by throwing him into jail as they’d have some other frequent prison who inspired such violence towards judges, juries, witnesses, court docket officers, and their households.
Quickly, no one in or out of the federal government is prepared to face as much as the fascists; it’s too harmful and too exhausting. Being the article of normal threats of violence or dying just isn’t one thing anyone would volunteer for except they noticed the stakes as being very, essential.
That is what Trump and the GOP he’s captured are working towards: the silencing of dissent and accountability, changing them with worry and a responsible complicity. Simply check out the state of social media at the moment, significantly Xitter and Fb, which have dialed again on their content material moderation and thus loosed the fascists on anyone who dares criticize Trump or the GOP.
In a wonderful new essay at The New Republic, Brynn Tannehill makes this intervention about how shut America is to being taken over by Trump and the Republican fascist Social gathering’s MAGA dictatorship and the horrors that might carry:
As dangerous as that is, I haven’t even gotten to the actually miserable half. Most individuals assume that if fascism got here to America, we’d acknowledge it as people and refuse to go together with it. In actuality, only a few individuals are immediately affected by dwelling in an authoritarian nation; life is usually “boring and tolerable” for almost all. “Sure,” most individuals would say, “but when requested to do issues I do know have been unsuitable, I’d refuse to conform. As a result of I’m an American, and I do know higher.”
Besides, we’re already testing this day by day in crimson states, and failing miserably….
Finally, when the facility of the state involves bear on individuals, together with Individuals, the overwhelming majority is not going to do the precise factor. Most (sane) individuals admire Martin Niemöller, however when confronted with the truth of how fascism corrupts peculiar males, virtually nobody emulates his willingness to do the precise factor by defying the state. When Trump takes energy and turns the complete may of the federal government towards anybody who may resist, the guardrails of particular person conscience will evaporate sooner than a snow flurry in hell.
Trump and his brokers have additionally repeatedly threatened to deploy the navy to occupy black and brown communities in “blue states” and invoke martial regulation to combat “crime,” i.e. crush any type of resistance or dissent. And as I warned in an earlier essay right here at Salon, Trump is already empowering his MAGA followers to behave as his violent enforcers when he takes again the presidency. In whole, Trump and his brokers are trying to create a kind of inside safety pressure that can implement the regime’s will and energy over the American individuals. Such plans are virtually actually from the dictator’s playbook.
As a substitute of feigning shock and shock at Trump’s repeated foul and vile habits, the American information media ought to as a substitute be specializing in his and the Republican fascists and MAGA motion’s escalating threats to democracy, the rule of regulation, and civil society — after which educating and mobilizing the general public about find out how to cease them.
As soon as once more, when the autocrat, would-be dictator speaks, you need to imagine him. Trump and his MAGA individuals are declaring loud and clear precisely what they’ll do if he wins the 2024 election and turns into dictator for all times.
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