I follow whatever is posted by the Meidas brothers. They do a great job of pulling together clips from the campaign, to show you what’s happening.
This series of clips is an eye opener. It’s frankly disgusting to see the racist, anti-immigrant appeals that Trump and his surrogates deliver to the voters.
We used to pride ourselves on being a nation of immigrants. Now Trump wants us to see immigrants as murderers, rapists, and criminals.
He says he will invoke a law passed in 1798 to round-up millions of immigrants and deport them. Is this The Final Solution?
Can he be elected by serving up a steady diet of hatred and fear?
No matter what the problem, the cause is always IMMIGRANTS, in the minds of Trump and Vance. The answer to the problem, to them, is always the same: Round up and expel the immigrants!
Greg Olear wonders about their fixation and concludes that it’s fascistic. Are housing prices going up because of immigrants? How many do they want to deport? 25 million? 13 million? 11 million? What about Trump’s idea of building new cities on empty federal lands? Where are those federal lands?
“O, what a happy, contented land this would be if only we could expel the immigrants!” They say. once they are gone, middle-class Americans could occupy the immigrants’ palatial estates. Housing crisis solved.
At the VP debate…, Margaret Brennan addressed “the top contributor to inflation, the high cost of housing and rent,” asking the candidates, Tim Walz and JD Vance, what they’d do about the “shortage of more than 4 million homes in the United States… [that] contributes to the high housing crisis.”
It’s not all bad news. The homeownership rate is not, as I feared watching the debate, in freefall. On the contrary, it’s in the same two-thirds-give-or-take range it’s occupied for my entire lifetime, as this Federal Reserve chart shows:
The decennial census of 1890 was the first to ask basic housing questions and, in particular, whether one owned or rented. The census data since 1890 show three distinct eras of homeownership in America.
In the 1890-1940 period, the homeownership rate fluctuated in the 43- to 48-percent range. From 1890 to 1920, the homeownership rate fell as immigration and urbanization offset the rise in income. Income growth increased the homeownership rate during the 1920s, but the Depression more than wiped out this gain so that the rate had fallen to a low of 43.6 percent by 1940.
During the 1940-1960 period, the homeownership rate rose by over 18 percentage points, from 43.6 to 61.9 percent. This remarkable transformation was facilitated by higher incomes, a large percentage of households being in prime homebuying age groups, the FHA-led revolution in mortgage financing, the GI bill of rights, improved interurban transportation, and development of large-scale housing subdivisions with affordable houses.
For the middle class, homeownership is a critical metric. We don’t want too many Americans living in rentals owned by private equity firms, and at the mercy of rapacious Wall Street speculators.
But that’s only part of the picture. There is a shortage of housing—and the gap is a lot more than the number Brennan suggested. According to a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the U.S. real estate market is plagued by
a shortage of 7.3 million rental homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes—that is, incomes at or below either the federal poverty guideline or 30% of their area median income, whichever is greater. Only 34 affordable and available rental homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. Extremely low-income renters face a shortage in every state and major metropolitan area. Among states, the supply of affordable and available rental homes ranges from 14 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households in Nevada to 57 in South Dakota. In 12 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country, the absolute shortage of affordable and available homes for extremely low-income renters exceeds 100,000 units.
Households throughout the country, particularly those with the lowest incomes, are struggling with the high cost of housing because of decades of underbuilding, high construction costs, and the resulting shortage of homes for sale and for rent, all combined with inadequately funded housing assistance.
So, yes, this is a big problem.
In the debate, Tim Walz proposed rolling out a down-payment assistance plan similar in concept to the GI Bill that helped increase the homeownership rate after the Second World War, as well as incentivizing new construction—boilerplate New Deal-style solutions that will almost certainly work, if Congress could be swayed to vote for them.
But it was JD Vance’s answer to Brennan’s question that gave me pause. The Ohio Senator and eyeliner enthusiast expounded on Donald Trump’s concepts of a plan to tackle the national housing crisis. There were two proposals, if we can call them that, the Republican VP nominee advanced, both of them bone-chilling.
Let’s look at them more closely:
1. Mass deportation of tens of millions of “illegal aliens” to create more housing inventory
“We don’t want to blame immigrants for higher housing prices,” Vance said. “But we do want to blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country, which does drive up costs, Tim. Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country. It’s why we have massive increases in home prices that have happened right alongside massive increases in illegal alien, alien populations under Kamala Harris’s leadership.”
First—and I only say this because a lot of people who watched the debate are probably unaware of how the federal government works: as Vice President, Kamala Harris has zero authority to do fuck-all. She can break a tie in the Senate, and she can succeed the President Biden if he croaks. That is the comprehensive and unabridged list of her constitutional powers. Can she suggest? Sure. Can she propose? Absolutely. But POTUS is under no obligation to listen to her at all, let alone act on what she says. One can mount an argument that Biden is responsible for the housing crisis, but the idea that Harris is to blame is objectively untrue. So, yeah, Vance lied.
Second: it is troubling to me that the alleged number of “illegal aliens” in the United States seems to rise every time Trump opens his mouth. It was 15 million, then 18 million, then 22. Now it’s 25 million, Vance says. Bear in mind that the total U.S. population is something like 333,000,000. Thus, Couchfucker claims that 7.5 percent of the residents of this country—about one in 13—is here illegally, which is preposterous. The actual number, according to Pew Research, is closer to 11 million:
Are Trump/Vance and their surrogates exaggerating the undocumented population to play up the MAGA fear of a border invasion? Or—and this is the scary part—is that how many U.S. residents they intend to round up and deport? Because, like, 25 million is more people than just those here illegally. A lot more. Over twice as many.
But you gotta give the MAGA braintrust credit. Displacing one thirteenth of the entire U.S. population would indeed make available a lot of housing. The Trump/Vance plan would absolutely work. We know it would work, because that’s literally what the Nazis did in Poland in 1939.
In her incredible and horrifying book The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, Lynn H. Nicholas explains Hitler’s attitude toward the Poles:
In an extraordinary speech to his highest commanders, delivered on August 22 [1939] just after he had agreed to sign the Russian treaty, Hitler had urged his forces to “act brutally…be harsh and remorseless,” and had encouraged them to “kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language” in the coming “invasion and extermination of Poland.”
For Poland was to become Germany’s creature totally. Its culture and peoples were to be eliminated and replaced by Hitler’s “New Order.” The Nazis were only too eager to put their racial theories into actual practice in a place where resistance could be countered with total brutality. They believed without any qualms that Slavs, Christian or otherwise, were so inferior they could not be considered human. They, along with the Jews, were the “degenerate art” of the human race.
The Nazis rounded up anyone they considered undesirable and sent them to the concentration camps, and then they took their suddenly vacant homes—and everything in those homes—for themselves. Housing crisis solved!
I trust that by this point, we’ve all heard enough of Trump’s dehumanizing invective about immigrants—a hateful and fascistic theme of his campaigning since he came down the escalator in 2015—to make pointing out its similarly to stuff Hitler said about the Jews unnecessary. In spirit, Donald is a Nazi.
After the debate, CBS showed a graphic comparing the two housing proposals. Walz: “$25,000 Down Payment Assistance; Tax Incentives for Builders.” Vance: “Changing Regulations & Making Federal Land Available; Mass Deportation to Ease Demand.”
This led the attorney who goes by NYC Southpaw to remark on BlueSky: “This is one that I genuinely think will be printed in history books one day to show how insane American media culture has become. CBS News presenting ethnic cleansing as a housing policy to be compared with home construction tax incentives.”
And if Donald’s housing policy being eerily reminiscent of the Third Reich’s weren’t bad enough, when we consider that Hitler modeled the Nazi conquest of Poland on what the United States did to the Native Americans in the 19th century, that makes the second part of the MAGA plan seem even more ominous:
2. Building new cities on federal land.
“Well,” Vance said, “what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything. They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used. And they could be places where we build a lot of housing. And I do think that we should be opening up building in this country. We have a lot of land that could be used. We have a lot of Americans that need homes. We should be kicking out illegal immigrants who are competing for those homes, and we should be building more homes for the American citizens who deserve to be here.”
A former celebrity real estate developer and TV personality, Trump has a long history of outlining audacious new initiatives that are heavy on imagery and light on details. The latest offerings come with a few explanations for how they will be executed.
Trump says he would host a contest for the public to design and then build “Freedom Cities” on a small portion of federal land to “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.”
(A contest? Everything is a reality show with this ass-clown.)
calls for the creation of new tech-controlled sovereign cities that would essentially act as miniature countries. These independent territories can be created in one of two ways.
The first is called Voice. This route entails using the political system to take over existing city governments through elections. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is currently trying the “voice” method in San Francisco, where he is spearheading a tech-funded campaign to capture control of City Hall. (How do I know this is a Network State project? Because Tan has described his project as such.)
The second method is called Exit. The “exit” method involves finding a bare piece of land that can be built up into a new tech city, ideally with tax breaks or other exemptions from “host governments.”
Próspera, on the island of Roatan in Honduras, is an example of this: a tech-run Special Economic Zone where certain rules don’t apply. Próspera has become a mecca for unregulated gene therapy experiments.
And then there’s our local version: California Forever. This proposed tech city in Solano County was supposed to go to voters for approval on November’s ballot, but it has been delayed due to massive community opposition. California Forever denies being a Network State project, but [libertarian tech bro Marc] Andreessen is one of its investors.
In addition, Balaji Srinivasan—the main evangelist of the Network State idea—has strongly suggested that California Forever is a Network State project. (Note: Srinivasan has clearly derived his ideas from J.D. Vance associate Curtis Yarvin, who calls these tech-governed dictatorships “patchworks” or “realms” rather than network states.)
This is an important detail because Andreessen, Srinivasan and Thiel are working closely together to make the Network State a reality.
Peter Thiel, of course, is the very same Sauron-like billionaire who funded JD Vance’s Senate campaign, and before that, his venture capital enterprise. We can safely assume that Vance is nothing more than his whoremaster’s mouthpiece.
To me, this “freedom city” proposal looks less like a solution to the dearth of low-income housing and more like the 21st century version of a medieval stronghold, where well-to-do residents can simply wall off the starving, unhoused hoi polloi: out of sight, out of mind.
Furthermore, the creation of new “network states” run by MAGA puppets would inevitably lead to the creation of new actual states—further gerrymandering the Senate to establish a more permanent minoritarian rule.
Then there’s this vague “federal land” suggestion. Here is a map of all extant federal land:
Most is in Alaska, or in the Western states. The sections in brown are managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Is “federal land” a euphemism for “American Indian reservations?” Donald Trump, remember, hung in the Oval Office a portrait of Andrew Jackson—maniacal conqueror of Native lands, driving force behind the Indian Removal Act of 1830, author of the Trail of Tears, and arguably the most anti-Native American president in U.S. history. Is confiscating more Native American territory how Donald Sr. plans to Make America Great Again?
These MAGA proposals are not just bad policy. They are dangerous, they are Hitlerian, and if implemented, they are sure to bring woe upon tens of millions of human beings.
“That’s never going to happen,” the non-MAGA Trump voters insist. To which I reply: That’s what the Germans said in the 1930s. The only difference is that the Germans in the 1930s didn’t have the Germans in the 1930s as a precedent to learn from.
Heather Cox Richardson pulls together the signs of Trump’s descent into unapologetic fascism. He offers no agenda or policies for the future, but focuses instead of who he will punish. Immigrants, he insists, are the biggest problem facing the nation. He promises to restore the U.S. to its imagined glory of white male Christian supremacy. If elected, he will call out the National Guard or the military to round up not only immigrants but his political enemies. He is a dangerous man. He is increasingly paranoid, determined to punish his enemies. Will he imprison Harris, Biden, Clinton, Obama, Newsom, and others who have opposed him?
She writes:
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.”
This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position.
Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant stories. But since the September 10 presidential debate when he drew ridicule for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets, Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed, with the help of the military.
Myah Ward of Politico noted on October 12 that Trump’s speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.” He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris “has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called The True Believer, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people are willing to follow a leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again.
But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who that is doesn’t really matter: the group simply has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him.
According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader’s behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and in order to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that enemy is not good-intentioned, as they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly.
According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. Indeed, their loyalty will only grow stronger as his behavior becomes more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their own part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves.
At a MAGA rally in Aurora, Colorado, on October 11, Trump added to this formula his determination to use the federal government to attack those he calls enemies. Standing on a stage with a backdrop that read, “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW” and “END MIGRANT CRIME,” he insisted that the city had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs and proposed a federal program he called “Operation Aurora” to remove those immigrants he insists are members of “savage gangs.” When Trump said, “We have to live with these animals, but we won’t live with them for long,” a person in the crowd shouted: “Kill them!”
Officials in Aurora emphatically deny Trump’s claim that the city is a “war zone.” Republican mayor Mike Coffman said that Aurora is “not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs” and that such statements are “grossly exaggerated.” While there have been incidents, they “were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.” The chief of the Aurora police agreed that the city is “not by any means overtaken by Venezuelan gangs.”
In Aurora, Trump also promised to “invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.” As legal analyst Asha Rangappa explains, the Alien Enemies Act authorizes the government to round up, detain, and deport foreign nationals of a country with which the U.S. is at war. But it is virtually certain Trump didn’t come up with the idea to use that law on his own, raising the question of who really will be in charge of policy in a second Trump administration.
Trump aide Stephen Miller seems the likely candidate to run immigration policy. He has promised to begin a project of “denaturalization,” that is, stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship. He, too, spoke at Aurora, leading the audience in booing photos that were allegedly of migrant criminals.
Before Miller spoke, a host from Right Side Broadcasting used the dehumanizing language associated with genocide, saying of migrants: “These people, they are so evil. They are not your run-of-the-mill criminal. They are people that are Satanic. They are involved in human sacrifice. They are raping men, women, and children—especially underaged children.” Trump added the old trope of a population carrying disease, saying that immigrants are “very very very sick with highly contagious disease, and they’re let into our country to infect our country.”
Trump promised the audience in Aurora that he would “liberate Colorado. I will give you back your freedom and your life.”
On Saturday, October 12, Trump held a rally in Coachella, California, where temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) sparked heat-related illnesses in his audience as he spoke for about 80 minutes in the apocalyptic vein he has adopted lately. After the rally, shuttle buses failed to arrive to take attendees back to their cars, leaving them stranded.
And on Sunday, October 13, Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents. After weeks of complaining about the “enemy within,” Trump suggested that those who oppose him in the 2024 election are the nation’s most serious problem.
He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that even more troubling for the forthcoming election than immigrants “is the enemy from within…we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi “race science” and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states—Colorado, California, New York—that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.
Longtime Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told Matt Dixon and Allan Smith of NBC News: “This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing vote locations—it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes.”
Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strongman, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality. And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas.
Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina: “[Trump] is not being transparent…. He refuses to release his medical records. I’ve done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 Minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate…. It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?… Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”
“For these reasons and so many more,” she said, “it is time to turn the page.”
In an opinion piece in Scientific American, Cecilia Menjívar of UCLA and Deisy Del Real of the University of Southern California contend that the United States and other nations are sliding toward autocracy. They believe we can learn from the experience of other nations.
They write:
An autocratic wave has crept up on us in the U.S. and over the world in the last decade. Democracy and autocracy were once seen as two separate and distant worlds with little in common, and that the triumph of one weakened the other. Now, however, autocrats across the globe, in poor and wealthy nations, in established and nascent democracies, and from the right and left, are using the same tactics to dismantle democracies from within.
With the upcoming U.S. presidential election in November, questions about the future of American democracy take on urgency. As the American public seems increasingly receptive to autocratic tactics, these questions become even more pressing. Will the U.S. slide into autocracy, faced with a presidential candidate in Donald Trump who promises to be a dictator on his first day in office? Can lessons from autocracies elsewhere help us detect democratic backsliding in the U.S.?
To answer these questions, we first need to identify how the new breed of autocrats attains and retains power: their hallmark strategy is deception. How does a roll call of modern autocrats, and wannabe autocrats, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro implement this modus operandi for the latest model of autocracy? They twist information and create confusion within a façade of democracy as they seize power. They do not overthrow democracy through military coups d’état but by undoing core democratic principles, weakening the rule of law, and eliminating checks and balances between branches of government.
Rather than eradicating democratic institutions as leaders like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko did in the past, today’s established and emergent autocrats (as is the case of Maduro or Orbán, for instance) corrupt the courts, sabotage elections and distort information to attain and remain in power. They are elected through ostensibly free elections and connect with a public already primed to be fearful of a fabricated enemy. Critically, they use these democratic tools to attain power; once there, they dismantle those processes. Autocratic tactics creep into the political life of a country slowly and embed themselves deeply in the democratic apparatus they corrupt. Modern autocracy, one may say, is a tyranny of gaslighting.
We gathered a group of scholars who have looked at successful and failed autocracies worldwide in a special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist, to identify common denominators of autocratic rulers worldwide. This research shows that modern autocrats uniformly apply key building blocks to cement their illiberal agenda and undermine democracies before taking them over. Those include manipulating the legal system, rewriting electoral laws and constitutions, and dividing the population into “us” versus “them” blocs. Autocrats routinely present themselves as the only presumed savior of the country while silencing, criminalizing and disparaging critics or any oppositional voice. They distort information and fabricate “facts” through the media, claim fraud if they lose an election, persuade the population that they can “cleanse” the country of crime and, finally, empower a repressive nationalistic diaspora and fund satellite political movements and hate groups that amplify the autocrats’ illiberal agenda to distort democracy.
In February, Bukele, the popular Salvadoran autocrat and self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” spoke at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an annual convention for U.S. right-wing elected officials and activists. There he received a standing ovation after he flaunted his crackdown on crime in his country and suggested the U.S. should follow his tactics. His speech demonstrates how, regardless of political history and ideology, or their nation’s wealth and place on the global stage, autocrats today deploy a similar “toolbox of tricks” aimed at legalizing their rule. That’s because they copy from one another and learn from one another’s successes and failures. Vast interconnected networks enable autocrats to cooperate, share strategies and know-how, and visit one another in public shows of friendship and solidarity to create an international united front. Just ask Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and autocrat, who received a warm reception when he spoke at the CPAC in 2022, reminding the crowd of the reason for his visit: “I’m here to tell you that we should unite our forces.”
Global networks of autocratic regimes also provide economic resources to other autocrats and invest in their economies, share security services to squash popular dissent, and sometimes interfere in each other’s elections.
Modern autocrats do not act alone; their connections with one another are complemented and sustained by a varied cadre of legal specialists, political strategists and academics who tend to be economically secure, well-educated and cosmopolitan. These individuals, like Michael Anton and those tied to the Trump-defending Claremont Institute, the over 400 scholars and policy experts who collaborated on Project 2025— the extreme-right game plan for a Trump presidency—and Stephen K. Bannon, who called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” by filling government jobs with partisans and loyalists, move in and out of government positions and the limelight. They are nimble and, moreover, fundamental to the autocrats’ strategies, as they create videos and podcasts and write books to fabricate good images of the autocrats, write detailed blueprints for an autocratic form of government, and consult aspiring autocrats on best practices.
Evidence indicates that we are in a critical moment in U.S. democracy. Will the U.S. inevitably descend into autocracy? No, not with an alert and well-informed electorate. Recognizing the strategies that autocrats use and share, veiled behind a façade of democratic elections and wrapped in fearmongering, equips us to understand the harmful consequences of these strategies for democracy, and perhaps to stop the wave in time.
Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a Nicaraguan opposition politician and prospective presidential candidate, was accused of treason, arrested and banished simply for running as an opposition candidate by the regime of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo (who is also first lady). In exile, Chamorro has described a danger countries face: autocrats who come to power through democratic systems are “like a silent disease—the early symptoms of this silent disease are usually dismissed, but once it begins to consume the body, it is usually too late to stop it.”
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale University, expresses his alarm about Trump’s turn toward fascistic rhetoric in this post. Trump knows how to excite his base by repeating conspiracy theories and blaming the Jews if anything he wants goes wrong. Snyder does not invoke the reference to Hitler lightly. He knows European history.
He writes:
Trump just had quite a Hitlerian month.
But before broaching the subject of Trump and Hitler I have to say a with a word about the American taboo on “comparisons.”
Anyone who refers to Trump’s Hitlerian moments will be condemned for “comparison.” Somehow that “comparison” rather than Trump’s deeds becomes the problem. The outrage one feels about the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s is transferred from the person who resembles the criminal to the person who points out the resemblance.
This cynical position opposing “comparisons” exploits the emotional logic of exceptionalism. Americans are innocent and good (we would like to believe). We are not (we take for granted) like the Germans between the world wars. We would never (we imagine) tolerate the stereotypes German Nazis invoked. We have learned the lessons of the Holocaust.
Since we are so innocent and good, since we know everything, it just cannot be true — so runs the emotional logic — that a leading American politician does Hitlerian things. And since we are so pure and wise, we never have to specify what it was that we have learned from the past. Indeed, our our goodness is so profound that we must express it by attacking the people who recall history.
And so, in the name of our capacity to remember great evil, we make it impossible to actually remember great evil. A taboo on “comparison” becomes a shield for the perpetrator. Those who invoke the past are the true villains, the real source of the problem, or, as Trump says about journalists, the “enemy of the people.” Indeed, the more Trump resembles Hitler, the safer the man is from criticism on this point.
I hope that the irony of all of this is clear: the idea that “comparison” is a sin rests on the notion of the inherent and unimpeachable virtue of the American Volk, who by definition do nothing wrong, and whose chosen Leader therefore must be beyond criticism. In this strange way, outrage about “comparison” reinforces fascist ideas about purity and politics. We should hate the dissenters. We should ignore whatever casts doubt on our sense of national virtue. We should never reflect.
Democracy, of course, depends on the ability to reflect, and that reflection is impossible without a sense of the past. The past is our only mirror, which is why fascists want to shatter it. In fascist Russia, for example, it is a criminal offense to say the wrong things about the Second World War. The reason why we keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes is not because it could never happen here, but because something similar can always happen anywhere. That memory has to include the details of history, or else we will not recognize the dangers.
“Never again” is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.
Before we think about this past month, we also have to consider the past four years. This entire election unfolds amidst a big lie. It was Hitler’s advice to tell a lie so big that your followers would never believe that you would deceive them on such a scale. Trump followed that advice in November 2020. His claim that we actually won the election in a landslide is a fantasy that opens the way to other fantasies. It is a conspiratorial claim that opens the way to conspiratorial thinking generally. It prepares his followers for the idea that other Americans are enemies and that violence might be needed to install the correct leader.
This year we have seen that explicit Nazi ideas are tolerated in the Trump milieu. The vice-presidential candidate shares a platform with Holocaust deniers, and defends Holocaust denial as free speech. This is a fallacy people should see through: yes, the First Amendment allows Nazis to speak, but it does not ennoble Nazi speech. The fact that people say fascist things in a country with freedom of speech is how we know that they are fascists — and that, if they themselves comes to power, they will end freedom of speech and all other freedoms.
Which brings us to North Carolina and to the gubernatorial candidate Trump once called the country’s hottest politician. No one is denying that Mark Robinson has the right under the First Amendment to call himself a Nazi or to praise Mein Kampf. The question is what we do about this. Trump will not intervene here because he believes that Robinson is more likely to win than a substitute candidate would be. Consider that for a moment: for Trump, the reason not to distance himself a self-avowed Nazi is that he hopes that the self-avowed Nazi will win an election, take office, and hold power.
This is not surprising. Trump and Vance are running a fascist campaign. Its main theme in September was inspired by a lady in Springfield, Ohio, who lost her cat and then found it again. For J.D. Vance, who knew what happened, this became the basis for the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating domestic animals. For Donald Trump, that became a reason to promise that Haitians in Springfield would be deported. He had found people who were both Blacks and immigrants, who could serve as the “them” in his politics of us-and-them.
It is fascist to start a political campaign from the choice of an enemy (this is the definition of politics by the most talented Nazi thinker, Carl Schmitt). It is fascist to replace reason with emotion, to tell big lies (“create stories,” as Vance says) that appeal to a sense of vulnerability and exploit a feeling of difference. The fantasy of barbarians in our cities violating basic social norms serves to gird the Trump-Vance story that legal, constitutional government is helpless and that only an angry mob backed by a new regime could get things done.
It is worth knowing, in this connection, that the first major action of Hitler’s SS was the forced deportation of migrants. About 17,000 people were deported, which generated the social instability that the Nazi government the used as justification for further oppression. Trump and Vance plan to deport about a thousand times as many people….
In international politics, the key moment concerns Ukraine and its head of state. Since February 2022, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, has been rightly understood and admired as a symbol of physical and political courage. When Russia began its full-scale invasion that month, the American consensus was the Ukraine would crack within days and that Zelens’kyi would (and should) flee. Instead, he stayed in Kyiv despite the approach of Russian assassins and the Russian army, rallied his people, and oversaw the successful defense of his country. He has since visited the front every few weeks.
This is how Trump characterized Zelens’kyi in September, echoing comments that he has made before: “Every time he came to our country, he’d walk away with $100 billion. He’s probably the greatest salesman on Earth.” Trump seems threatened by Zelens’kyi. As Trump has made clear numerous times, his first and only impulse is to give Putin what Putin wants. The idea of taking risks to defend freedom from the Russian dictator is well beyond the pinprick-sized black hole that is Trump’s moral universe.
And of course the claim itself is false. The number is too big. And the money does not go to Zelens’kyi himself, obviously. That Zelens’kyi does personally profit is a favorite idea of Vance, who repeats Russian propaganda to this effect. The money does not even, for the most part, go to the Ukrainian government. Most of the military aid does to American companies who build new weapons for American stockpiles. We then send old weapons to Ukraine, to which we assign a dollar value.
The essential thing, though, is the antisemitic trope Trump chose to express himself. It goes like this. Jews are cowards. Jews never fight wars. Jews stay away from the front. Jews only cause wars that make other people suffer. And then Jews make vast amounts of money from those wars. Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, the Ukrainian president, is Jewish. And thus “the greatest salesman on earth” for Trump. And the corrupt owner of “yachts” for Vance. A war profiteer, as in the antisemitic stereotype, not a courageous commander, as in reality.
Indeed, most of what Trump says about Zelens’kyi, Ukraine, and and the war itself makes sense only within the antisemitic stereotype. Trump never speaks about the Russian invasion itself. He never recalls Russian war crimes. He never mentions that Ukrainians are defending themselves or their basic ideas of what is right. He certainly never admits that Zelens’kyi is the democratically-elected president of a country under vicious attack and who has comported himself with courage. The war, for Trump, is just a scam — a Jewish scam.
And that, of course, is why he thinks he can end it right away: he thinks he can just shoulder the Jew aside and deal with his fascist “friend” Putin, who for him is the “genius” in this situation, and who must be allowed to win. Despite the evidence, Trump says that Russia always wins wars, dismissing both history (regular Russian losses such as the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Polish-Bolshevik War, the Afghan War) and the actual events of the ongoing Russian invasion, in which Ukraine has taken back half the territory it lost and driven the Russian fleet from the Black Sea. Russia is counting on Trump. They need him in power to win their war, and they know it.
It need hardly be said that if Trump throws American power on the Russian side, the “deal” that follows will not end the war. It will only mean that Russia is able to kill more Ukrainians faster. Trump will then claim that the deal itself was beautiful and perfect — and try to change the subject from the slaughter he brought about through his antisemitic hubris and admiration of Russian fascism.
And, of course, Snyder explains, Trump has warned Jewish groups that if he loses, it will be the fault of Jews. Anti-Semitism will be Trump’s legacy.
Staten Island is one of the five boroughs of New York City. It is the only borough that consistently votes Republican. Trump is, not surprisingly, popular in Staten Island.
Brian Laline, the editor of The Staten Island Advance, wrote the following editorial:
Hi Neighbor,
There’s talk of investigations, subpoenas and Florida officials charging the suspected gunman with attempted murder in the aftermath of the second assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump.
As there should be.
There is something seriously wrong when, in this climate of intense political divide, someone with an AK 47 can hide for 12 hours in the bushes on the perimeter of a golf course owned and used by a combative presidential candidate, without being spotted.
Twelve hours!
This after another madman lurked the perimeter of an outdoor Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, eventually firing an AR-15 at the former president, grazing his ear.
Another quarter-inch and the man would have been dead.
After the latest attempt at Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, a sheriff told reporters that “when somebody gets into the shrubbery, they’re pretty much out of sight.”
That, neighbors, is a ridiculous statement. Maybe I watch too many cop shows, but they have these things called “thermal drones,” sheriff. They find people. Even in shrubbery.
When a mayor or governor visits the Advance offices for an editorial board meeting, a security detail arrives hours earlier and sweeps the building, wanting to know what room the official will be in, how the official will get to that room, which chair the official will be seated, and the names of every person who will be in the room.
But then the sheriff told the real story . . .
“At this level that he [Trump] is at right now, he’s not the sitting president…”
In other words, the near assassination in Butler didn’t make much of a difference in the level of the protection Donald Trump received.
You can bet that will change. As it should, because the level of divisive rhetoric is only increasing – despite pleas that everyone calm down.
And frankly, as much as this will inflame neighbors who make up Donald Trump’s base, the former president, his VP pick, his campaign people and his supporters are not helping to calm the roiling political waters.
Donald Trump cannot play nice to save his life – literally.
True, he called for unity after the Butler assassination attempt, positing on social media, “it is more important than ever that we stand United.”
That didn’t last long, following up at a rally with this . . .
“They say something happened to me when I got shot . . . I became nice. When you’re dealing with these people . . . they’re very dangerous people . . . you can’t be too nice . . . I’m not going to be nice.”
What “dangerous people” he was referring to was never made clear.
The former president, his VP pick and his cable news mouthpieces blame Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for the latest attempt on his life.
“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out,”Trump told Fox News.
Democrats have “taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust,” he wrote in another social media post.
Dems, for their part, say that Donald J. Trump is a “threat to democracy,” which the Trump camp takes umbrage. I guess constantly ranting that he lost an election because Democrats fixed it, and thousands of supporters taking siege of the Capitol Building to overthrow said election is not a threat to democracy.
To paraphrase Billy Joel, Mr. Trump, Democrats didn’t start this fire.
Who insisted Barack Obama was not born in the United States? Who threatens to jail political foes? Who, to this day, says Democrats “stole” the 2020 election? Who continually calls Kamala Harris a communist? Comrade Kamala? A radical left Marxist? A woman who will cause a Great Depression? “She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.”
Donald Trump.
Mr. Trump and his sidekick Vance ought to get on the same page. They seem to differ on who calls whom a fascist.
“Look, we can disagree with one another, we can debate one another,” Vance told a crowd in Georgia just the other day, “but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist . . .”
We can’t? But your running mate just called Harris . . . oh never mind.
There’s an old saying that Donald Trump just doesn’t get:
Words matter.
Let’s take the absurd claim he made during the recent debate.
“. . . They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he told millions watching. It has become a national joke.
Guess what? It’s not funny.
Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and by extension, everyone in Springfield, have become a target. Bomb threats are constant. Schools have been evacuated or closed. Hospitals have closed. College campuses have been shut down. Festivals have been cancelled.
All because of threats against Haitians. All because of absurd claims by Trump and Vance. And to make it even worse, Vance admits he makes up stories to get attention.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.
Political violence has been part of the American experiment since the beginning. Think the American Revolution and Civil War. Lincoln didn’t survive his visit to Ford’s Theatre. JFK lost his life in Dallas. Bobby Kennedy was killed in L.A. and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King assassinated in Memphis. Presidents Garfield and McKinley were murdered. Ronald Reagan was shot while in office, while Teddy Roosevelt was shot after he left office. Alabama Gov. George Wallace was shot and paralyzed while he campaigned for office.
There have been many others, the latest being Mr. Trump.
Will these heinous acts ever be eliminated in our country? I think you’ll agree it’s doubtful.
But do we have to make the possibility even worse?
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University. He specializes in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust.
He wrote this as he was flying from Europe to the U.S. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Snyder has been an outspoken champion of that beleaguered nation. He has used his deep knowledge of history to debunk Putin’s justifications for invading his neighbor. He has even raised money to buy defense weapons for Ukraine when the Republican Congress dithered for months before passing an aid package.
Words make their way through the world with us, changing their senses as we change our lives. Think for example of the word “launch.”
Today and in days to come I will “launch” my book On Freedom, in the sense of the word all of my publishing friends like to use. They want to book to “launch,” to soar, to do well. In this spirit I talked to Tom Sutcliffe of the BBC in London this morning, and I am hoping to speak to Rachel Maddow of MSNBC tonight. And no doubt throughout this long day, which begins in Europe and ends in the United States, I will say “launch” several times myself.
I am returning from Ukraine. My first true conversation about On Freedom this month was a week ago in Kharkiv, a major city in northeastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border and to the front. The Literary Museum there had invited me for a presentation at an underground site. It was a lovely place, with a bar that made me the coffee that I needed after a long trip, and a crowd of people invited to talk about freedom (we could not announce the event for safety reasons, which I regret). In a sense, this Kharkiv discussion was the real launch of the book.
We were underground, though, because of another kind of launch, the unmetaphorical kind, not the literary launch but the literal launch — of Russian missiles.
Kharkiv, Budynok “Slovo”.
The Russians seemed close to taking Kharkiv at the beginning of the war. There was intense combat in Saltivka, a district of the city home to about 600,000 people. Major buildings in the city center of Kharkiv are still in ruins. The Ukrainians held the Russians back, but Russia itself remains close. A missile fired from Russia can reach Kharkiv before people have a chance to get underground. That, in Kharkiv, is what a “launch” too often means.
The difference in the sense of a word can help us to catch the difference in reality. In Kharkiv, the drones and the bombs and the missiles are a normal part of the day. People want to talk about books, they want to go to restaurants and movies, they want to live their lives, and they do, despite it all.
Those of us beyond war zones catch all of this, if at all, indirectly, through media. We do not hear the sirens and we do not have to go underground. We do not have to check social media to see if friends and family are alive. The word “launch” retains a kind of innocence.
This is not about countries being different, but about situations being difference. Kharkiv in normal times is a major literary city. In the 2020s, before the Russian full-scale invasion, Kharkiv was a center of Ukrainian book production. Before February 2022 there were plenty of launches, in the literary sense, in Kharkiv. And there are still some now!
Genocide is not only about killing people, but about eliminating a culture, making it untenable by destroying the institutions that transmit it. Thus Russia burns books, steals museum artifacts, and bombs archives, libraries, and publishing houses. Russia deliberately destroyed the publishing houses in Kharkiv, including where one of my own books was being printed. One sort of launch would seem to obliterate the other. But, to the Ukrainians’ credit, only for a time. The book publishing industry, like a number of others, picked up in other places. The public book culture in Ukraine, expressed in new stores and cafes, is defiant.
I was thinking of “launches” in Kyiv, a couple of days after the Kharkiv visit, as I pretaped an interview about the book. For me it was the end of a long day, spent beginning (“launching”) a big history project. The first conference had gone well, and we had a press conference complete with a Viking sword, a Byzantine cross, and Scythian and Trypillian vessels kindly loaned by the national museum. Ukrainian colleagues on the stage had spoken of the importance of cooperation and listening in our grand cooperative project. I was in a good mood when I went to a side room to tape the interview.
At around the time the interview began, a missile was launched from Russia, aimed at Kyiv. The air raid sirens began outside the window. An air raid siren can mean different forms of attack, some more rapid and some less so. Drones can cause terrible damage and kill large numbers of people, but they are not very fast. If a missile is in the air, on the other hand, you have to move right away. Since there was in fact a missile bearing down on Kyiv, I explained this to the interviewer and hastened to the stairs. I learned that Ukrainian air defense had destroyed the missile as I reached the staircase.
This was all completely normal. The Russians launched a number of very large strikes last week with missiles and drones. Ukrainian air defense is excellent — when the Ukrainians are given the tools, they protect their people extremely well, and Kyiv is where their limited equipment is concentrated. We picked up the interview as soon as I could re-establish the connection.
One sort of “launch” had been briefly interrupted by another, my literary book launch by a literal missile launch. This was an infinitesimally tiny taste of the interruption tens of millions of Ukrainians face all the time from Russia’s senseless war, which changes the shapes of lives even when it does not end them. Russia launches these attacks on civilians all the time, almost every day. The point is not only to kill people and destroy civilian architecture but to instill a certain view of life. Nothing good ever happens. Be afraid at all times. Undertake nothing new yourselves. Give up.
But people do start new projects in Ukraine. Ukrainian writers have been productive during this war, including writers serving in the armed forces. Serhiy Zhadan, an extraordinary Kharkiv poet and novelist, has just published a book. I was able to have three discussions with him in two cities. One day there will be a collection of Ukrainian war poetry in translation, and it will be astounding. Ukrainians launch cultural projects one after the other, even if the word seems odd just now. I took part in two such launches in just one week: the big history project in Kyiv, called Ukrainian History Global Initiative; and a new cultural institution in Lviv, INDEX, which is based around recording war experience from multiple methods and multiple perspectives. The Literary Museum in Kharkiv has an interesting new (partly interactive) exhibition by K. Zorkin.
When we can meet, we can gather the senses of words from the settings. I am grateful to all my friends and colleagues and hosts in Ukraine. Without the time in Ukraine On Freedom would be a different and poorer book. And so, much as I am happy to be speaking about the book today in the UK and the US, it seems right that there was something like a launch in Kharkiv first.
When we cannot meet, we still have the words. We can follow the senses of the word “launch,” from the rougher to the gentler and back, along an arc that perhaps leads to some understanding.
TS, 16 September 2024
In Kharkiv, September 2024, in conversation with Volodymyr Yermolenko
Putin wants to control all access to information that citizens of Russia can see so he cut off YouTube. The channel was popular in Russia, as it is here in the U.S. He previously closed all independent Russian media.
The Washington Post reported:
Russians are losing access to YouTube, the last major Western social platform freely available in the country, cutting them off from information independent from the Kremlin and alarming internet freedom advocates, journalists and opposition activists.
The throttling of YouTube, widely used for everything including watching cartoons and exposés on government corruption, comes amid fears that Russia will also shut down the Telegram messenger app after its founder, Pavel Durov, was detained by France.
The move comes as Russia is increasingly cracking down on any alternative sources of information, especially online, and has been pushing its citizens away from foreign-based social media apps to locally developed ones over which it has tighter control, such as its video-streaming alternative RuTube.
In early August, Russian users who had grown used to playing cartoons on YouTube to distract their children or having meals with shows playing in the background began reporting that the videos were not loading. By Aug. 3, state media reported that the service stopped playing high-resolution videos in almost all browsers running the desktop version in Russia.
Liz Cheney is a conservative. She supported Trump during his term in office. She is opposed to abortion. But, unlike other conservatives, she was outraged by what Trump did on January 6, 2021. She was outraged that he refused to accept his loss and the peaceful transfer of power. She was so outraged that she agreed to co-chair the January 6 Commission.
And now she has announced that she will vote for Kamala Harris. Trump has threatened to prosecute her for treason if he regains office. She is not afraid of Trump. She is, she said in this interview with ABC News, afraid for her country.
She sacrificed her career and stood on principle. Her principle is the dominance of the Constitution and the rule of law.
In this post, historian Heather Cox Richardson writes about the Russian effort to buy the voices of rightwing “influencers,” as well as the right’s apologetics for Nazism.
She writes:
One of the things that came to light on Wednesday, in the paperwork the Justice Department unveiled to explain its seizure of 32 internet domains being used by Russian agents in foreign malign influence campaigns, was that the six right-wing U.S. influencers mentioned in the indictments of the Russian operatives are only the tip of the iceberg.
Since at least 2022, three Russian companies working with the Kremlin have been trying to change foreign politics in a campaign they called “Doppelganger,” covertly spreading Russian government propaganda. “[F]irst and foremost,” notes from a meeting with Russian officials about targeting Germany read, “we need to discredit the USA, Great Britain, and NATO.” Through fake social media profiles, their operatives posed as Americans or other non-Russians, seeding public conversations with Russian propaganda.
In August 2023 they launched the “Good Old USA Project” to target swing-state residents, online gamers, American Jews, and “US citizens of Hispanic descent” to reelect Donald Trump. ”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” one of the propagandists wrote. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” Using targeted ads on Facebook, they could see how their material was landing and use bots and trolls to push their narrative in comment sections.
“In order for this work to be effective, you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information,” the propagandists told their staff. “At the same time, you should continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you about it or show it to you.”
According to the documents, one of the three companies, Social Design Agency (SDA), monitors and collects information about media organizations and social media influencers. It collected a list of 1,900 “anti-influencers,” whose accounts posted material SDA workers thought operated against Russian interests. About 26% of those accounts were based in the U.S.
SDA also identified as pro-Russian influencers more than 2,800 people in 81 countries operating on various social media platforms like X, Facebook, and Telegram. Those influencers included “television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians.” About 21% of those influencers were in the U.S.
YouTube took down the Tenet Media Channels associated with the Justice Department’s indictments, and last night, Tenet Media abruptly shut down. In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last noted that the Tenet influencers maintain they were dupes, although they must have been aware that their paychecks were crazy high for the numbers of viewers they had. He asks if, knowing now that their gains are ill-gotten, they are going to give them to charity.
Earlier this week, former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson hosted Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper on his X show, where Cooper not only suggested that the death of more than six million Jews was an accidental result of poor planning, but also argued that British prime minister Winston Churchill, who stood firm against the expansion of fascist Germany in World War II, was the true villain of the war.
Cooper’s argument puts him squarely on the side of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who insist that democracy undermines society. During the recent summer Olympics, Cooper posted on social media an image of Hitler in Paris alongside another of drag queens representing Greek gods at the Olympic opening ceremonies, an image some on the right thought made fun of the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples. “This may be putting it too crudely for some,” Cooper wrote, “but the picture [of Hitler in Paris] was infinitely preferable in virtually every way than the one on the right.”
The idea that Churchill, not Hitler, is the villain of World War II means denying the fact of the Holocaust and defending the Nazis. It lands Carlson and Cooper in the same camp as those autocrats journalist Anne Applebaum notes are “making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.” Elon Musk promoted the interview, saying it was “very interesting,” and “worth watching,” before the backlash made him delete his post. The video has been viewed nearly 30 million times.
Carlson told Lauren Irwin of The Hill that the Biden administration is made up of “warmonger freaks” who have “used the Churchill myth to bring our country closer to nuclear war than at any moment in history.” Carlson is on a 16-day speaking tour, on which he will interview Trump allies, including Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and Donald Trump Jr.
Trump today continued his effort to undermine the democratic American legal system in a “news conference” of more than 45 minutes, in which he took no questions. Although Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty on 34 counts, decided today to delay sentencing until November 26 to avoid any appearance that the court was trying to affect the 2024 election, Trump nonetheless launched an attack on the U.S. legal system and suggested the lawsuits against him were election interference.
He spoke after he and his legal team were in court today to try to overturn a jury’s conclusion that he had sexually assaulted writer E. Jean Carroll, a decision that brought his judgments in the two cases she brought to around $90 million. He began with an attack on what he said was a new “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax, and promised he had not “spoken to anybody from Russia in years.”
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice recorded what amounted to close to an hour of attacks on the American Justice Department and the laws of the country, and also on American women (he not only attacked Carroll, he brought up others of the roughly two dozen women who have accused him of sexual assault). He attempted to retry the Carroll case in the media, refuting the evidence the jury considered and suggesting that the photo of him and Carroll together was generated by AI, although it was published in 2019.
Attacking women was an interesting decision in light of the fact that he will need the votes of suburban women if he is to make up the ground he has lost to Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
For her part, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) appears to see this moment for what it is. Although a staunch Republican herself, she is urging conservative women to admit they’ve had enough. Referring to both Trump and Vance in a conversation sponsored by the Texas Tribune, she said: “This is my diplomatic way of saying it: They’re misogynistic pigs.” She assured listeners, quite accurately, that Trump “is not a conservative.” “Women around this country…we’ve had enough.” “These are not people that we can entrust with power again.”
Her father, former vice president Dick Cheney, agreed that Trump “can never be trusted with power again” and announced today that he will be voting for Harris. “As citizens, we each have a duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution. That is why I will be casting my vote for Vice President Kamala Harris,” he said. Eighty-eight business leaders also endorsed Harris today, including James Murdoch, an heir to the Murdoch family media empire. Citing Harris’s “policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment,” they said in a public letter, “the best way to support the continued strength, security, and reliability of our democracy and economy” is by electing Harris president.
Meanwhile, at his event with Sean Hannity of the Fox News Channel yesterday, Trump embraced the key element of Project 2025 that calls for a dictatorial leader to take over the U.S. That document maintains that “personnel is policy” and that the way to achieve all that the Christian nationalists want is to fire the nonpartisan civil servants currently in place and put their own people into office. Trump has tried hard to distance himself from Project 2025, but last night he said the way to run the government is to “get the right people. You put the right person and the right group of people at the heads of these massive agencies, you’re going to have tremendous success, and I know now the people, and I know them better than anybody would know them.”
One of those people appears to be X owner Elon Musk, whom Trump has promised to put at the head of an “efficiency” commission to audit the U.S. government.
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that the arguments against democracy and in favor of a few people dominating the rest were always the same. In his era, it was enslavers saying some people were better than others. But, he said, those were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”
In our era, Indiana Jones said it best in The Last Crusade: “Nazis. I hate these guys.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 