It's the Hitler, Stupid
Yes, Trump is a Hitler stan. Use it.
Donald Trump’s keen nose for transgression follows a known pattern. You’ve all seen it play out over and over again:
Trump says something outrageously beyond the pale. “Hitler really is misunderstood.”
Normies and the media recoil in horror.
Trump world shrugs it off. “You’re just delicate libtard snowflakes crying salty tears because Trump speaks like ‘Merica. And by the way Trump is right about Hitler being misunderstood.”
Normies and the media point out, for the 1000th time that Hitler is not misunderstood and no one, ever, should speaking approvingly of the architect of the most horrific genocide in the modern era.
Trump defenders leap immediately to inversion and projection. “Trump wasn’t approving of Hitler. Democrats are the REAL NAZIS.”
Normies and media — stupidly — say, “No, we’re not!”
The massive media conspiracy machine churns and burns a hundred stories about how the Deep State and Joe Biden are the incarnation of Adolph Hitler and Trump is just standing up for the little guy by invoking the famous Nazi.
Normies and media mutter darkly, “How are we losing to this guy?”
Trump senses that he’s had another successful cycle of reducing one more norm to ashes and doubles down, over and over.
Rinse, repeat Step 1.
For the last three weeks, Trump’s dictator-curious streak, Hitler fanboying, and flirtations with publicly autocratic promises to govern as a dictator have stirred the waters of American politics.
Why Does It Keep Working?
It works because Trump, in the words of Steve Bannon, is the global master of flooding the zone with shit.
It works because the media still to this day almost 9 years into this terrible political arson still largely refuses to say the word “fascist” or “dictator” or “evil.” The clownishness of Trump, his obvious mental infirmities and quirks, his endless role as the source of clicks and eyeballs mean the punches often get pulled.
The bothsideism of his coverage too often redounds to “Democrats say…” and “Republicans deny…” when it comes to Trump’s overt, outright, obvious, unironic loving embrace of the tropes, policies, language, ideals, and hatreds of Adolph Hitler and other dictators.
Embracing Hitler even in the most tangential way would, once upon a time, terminate the political aspirations of anyone in American political life. It should still.
The Novelty of Evil
“Poisoning the blood’ rhetoric is a song as old as time. At one point during a research jag for my first book I found an online archive of Der Strumer, the bleeding edge of the Nazi propaganda papers. The translations would remind you of the pages of Breitbart, the Gateway Pundit, the Twitter stylings of Catturd, or anywhere else in the fever swamps of the racial right. The only difference is the font and the date.
None of this is new, but all of it is novel. That’s the terrible cognitive trick of autocratic and fascist rhetoric; it gives people with a low sense of political engagement and self-worth a powerful rhetorical and psychological shortcut and a set of excuses for their lives. Not rich, powerful, or attractive? It’s their fault. The they alters in race or creed or origin, but there’s always a target, always a phony victim narrative, and always the justification for violence and oppression.
I’m not making any excuses for the MAGA base, but honestly, a large fraction of them are so brain-wormed and broken mentally by a constant diet of agitporn and algorithmically engineered social manipulation that they really do believe that a truly radical solution to America’s problems is called for.
And by radical, they mean the Red Caesar solution; Trump as an autocrat unconstrained by the law, the Constitution, or American political tradition. I think those people are lost to reason and argument, but pushing some knowledge about the precedents Trump so warmly cites as inspo for a 2025 dictatorship is necessary and useful.
Trump supporters are fervent, but are they universally Hitler fervent?
We’d better hope not.
The Gentry GOP Always Returns to Trump
We expect the massive and massively funded MAGA right media machine to keep those folks scared and angry. There’s nothing even close on the left or in mainstream culture to rival the power of the most sophisticated propaganda machine in history and its work to undermine America.
But it takes more than keeping white male non-college graduates in line. It’s more than churning up the Alex Jones set. No, one of the reasons we’ll slip into the warm bath of fascism is that even now, Trump’s fascism is getting plenty of top cover from the Gentry GOP.
It’s always struck me as a political oddity that the Gentry GOP, from the lobbying class to the big donors to the National Review boys are vastly more frightened by the notional, hypothetical terrors in their Closet of Imaginary Demons than they are of an actual radical in form of Donald Trump retaking the Oval Office. The rare moments of critical mention of Trump’s Hitler-stanning are so few and far between they’re like political unicorns, running through and enchanted forest in a mystical fairy kingdom.
No, their line of argument is that a second Trump term will be as weak and feckless as the first, and that the — wait for it — power of American institutions will stop from his autocratic intent.
I’ll spare you the link, but the opening graf of this Dan McLaughlin at NRO piece is rife with wishcasting, magical thinking, misreads of history, overconfidence in the power of institutions in the era of Trump, and the utterly fallacious belief that the Trump of today will ever let a single guardrail constrain him in a second term.
Trump knows this. His capos know this. Only National Review and the Gentry GOP (Lookin’ at you, Lindsay Graham) seem to believe that Trump’s words, actions, and stated intent are inconsequential.
How odd they give the architect of January 6th more of a break than they’d ever extend to Joe Biden.
Let’s be honest; Joe Biden has passed a handful of major bills that move the needle ever so slightly toward the middle and working class in the country. He’s made a few pro-union moves and statements. He’s passed infrastructure spending in a nation falling apart.
But none of it amounts to even an opening bid on socialism or communism, which seems — after their portfolio of equally imaginary culture war claptrap — to be the driving force behind their seething hatred of Joe Biden. Do most of them actually believe that Biden is a Marxist hell bent on seizing the means of production?
It’s hard to say anymore. Five years ago, they were trying to survive and playing the bit for all it was worth. Now? It’s hard to detect even a flicker of conscience there.
As Trump embraces his inner autocrat more and more frequently, and in increasingly public manner, the political and media world are holding their breath…but not inside the hallowed halls of National Review and its imitators. Oh, no. They’re all in with the callow, dumb formula that lets them keep getting paid and hosting cruises.
“Well, Trump isn’t perfect and he sometimes says things we find crude but he’s better than the woke socialist demonic avatar of all evil, Joe Biden, who will force your children into mandatory sex change operations and make you eat cricket loaf.”
The Good News
The Biden campaign seems to actually get it. They’re not letting the Hitler statements go unnoticed or unpunished, as well they should not. Dear Biden Team: keep going.
Strategically, every Democrat running for anything from dogcatcher to U.S. Senate should constantly hammer their GOP opponents on these points.
“Do you support Donald Trump’s embrace of Adolph Hitler? How many days is it acceptable for a U.S. President to be a dictator? Do you agree immigrants “poison the blood” of America? Should we deport children who don’t speak English?”
I could go on, but this is an example of a campaign style the Democrats always seem loathe to adopt. You will not win in 2024 on policy. You might win on opposing the normalization and mainstreaming of the greatest monster of the 20th century.
Confronting evil and its enablers is always hard. Toughen up. The bad guys aren’t taking any time off.
To paraphrase and modernize Jame Carville’s classic line; it’s the Hitler, stupid.
“It works because Trump, in the words of Steve Bannon, is the global master of flooding the zone with shit.....It works because the media still to this day almost 9 years into this terrible political arson still largely refuses to say the word “fascist” or “dictator” or “evil.”
Agreed! Not only does he flood the zone with shit; it creates a “shock doctrine”, and instead of focusing on what the country needs to be a greater and more just nation, the MSM just regurgitates all his and the GQP’s fantastical nonsense in a 24’hour News cycle, before the MSM unloads another barrel of shit.
As for the media refusing to do its job? I can spell it out in one sentence: The MSN is afraid of Trump, while the “right-wing media justifies and rationalizes his worst impulses and agendas.
That said, it’s the same as in 2016. They all jumped on Hillary with the emails, and we bought it hook, line and sinker. The MSM wants access to Trump because he’s ratings gold, so they interview him on his terms, with no hard or “gotcha” questions.
Additionally, these media conglomerates also know that if Trump wins, he’ll try to destroy their companies, like DeSatan is doing to Disney, so they don’t want to completely get on his bad side, since all these companies have business before Congress.
When democracy dies, let’s make sure that the history books acknowledge and label the MSM as enablers, and co-conspirators; because that’s their only legitimate function right now. They certainly aren’t impartial actors.
Bottom line: Biden gets a hard time from the media no matter what he accomplishes, while Trump is free to say and do everything he can to destabilize this nation and apparently, they don’t give a damn as long as the green-backs keep rolling in!
From my perspective, Biden has to seize the narrative.
Impending fascism should be sufficient, and it will be enough for a large segment of the 2020 coalition...but that will fall short of a 2024 win. No amount of ad buys are going to reenergize the Democratic base unless he actually makes some bold moves. I can think of 4:
1) Address the country on abortion. Make it clear that government cannot legislate pregnancies...there are too many issues and too many exceptions. Have some of the brave women who've gone public join him. Have doctors explain that there is no such thing as "voluntary" late-term abortions. These are always due to complications or fetal abnormalities. Talk about the need for Congress to pass legislation to help new mothers, reduce maternal mortality, etc.
2) Use frozen Russian funds to fund the war in Ukraine, and give a significant amount so that Ukraine funding doesn't become a reusable form of extortion by the GOP.
3) Appoint 2 new members to the Postal Board of Governors, who will fire DeJoy and stop his decimation of the Postal Service, and tell Americans that he saved this vital institution.
4) Put in place a new Operation Warp Speed to fund a cure for pancreatic cancer (which seems to be far more prevalent in younger and younger groups). There should be money from his Cancer Moonshot initiative.
Biden can't continue with quiet competence. He needs to grab both the narrative and the news cycles.