Hillary Clinton was right — again.
If more Americans had heeded her 2016 warnings about the so-called MAGA deplorable and their leader Donald Trump, we could have avoided this reality of neofascism as a dagger to the heart of the American experiment. Instead, we have a rapidly worsening crisis. During a recent appearance on ABC's "The View," Hillary Clinton warned Americans again:
I think it would be the end of our country as we know it, and I don't say that lightly…When I was secretary of state, I used to talk about ‘one and done’. What I meant by that is that people would get legitimately elected and then they would try to do away with elections, and do away with opposition, and do away with a free press….Hitler was duly elected. All of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like ‘OK we’re gonna shut this down, we’re gonna throw these people in jail.’ And they didn’t usually telegraph that. Trump is telling us what he intends to do.
Clinton is part of a small and diligent chorus of public voices who, for at least seven years, have boldly told the truth about how Trump and the larger “conservative” movement represent an existential threat to American democracy. Others, such as former US Attorney Joyce Vance have correctly described Trump and his acolytes’ plans to end American democracy. Blueprints like Agenda 47 and Project 2025, which call for martial law, imprisoning the MAGA movement’s "enemies", mass deportation of “illegal aliens," ending the rule of law, gutting the First Amendment, criminalizing the LGBTQ community, and taking away the civil rights of other marginalized groups, have been correctly called out by some as “Stalinist."
As Hannah Arendt so insightfully observed in her landmark work “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, Stalinism and Hitlerism were the two major totalitarian movements of the first half of the 20th century. Given Trump’s admiration of such leaders and his desires for total power and control like a type of God, the following passage from Arendt's book is ominous in how it accurately describes Trump and his MAGA people and the larger neofascist movement:
... Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous than mere political opposition. The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
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Hillary Clinton made her comments on "The View" before Trump amplified his channeling of Hitler and Nazism. In a series of recent speeches, interviews, and posts on his Truth Social platform, the former president called nonwhite migrants and immigrants monsters who were the equivalent of serial killers. On Veterans Day, Trump basically told his followers that their "enemies" (meaning the Democrats) are “vermin” and a threat to the country who should be eradicated. He also publicly threatened to prosecute anyone who opposed him.
Trump even went so far as to declare that special counsel Jack Smith and the other members of law enforcement who are attempting to hold him responsible for his obvious crimes are afflicted with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and that he is going to have them put in “mental institutions." This is a common practice in authoritarian and totalitarian states.
Trump’s ex-wife has told reporters that he kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet near his bed. It is increasingly clear that Trump, who for decades has shown himself to be a casual antisemite, did in fact read from and internalize Hitler’s words and evil. In a Truth Social post last Saturday, he took another next step on his journey towards Nazism by invoking the evils of the Holocaust and the “final solution”:
2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!
This is not the first time Trump has promised a final battle and apocalypse where he and his MAGA people take revenge on the Democrats and their other “enemies." These most recent threats by Trump are deadlier and more menacing given the ex-president’s growing Hitler and Nazi energy.
Unfortunately, the American people, the news media, and the country’s political class have mostly become numb to the danger, preferring denial, happy pills, hope peddling, and being drunk on American exceptionalism and bromides like “It can’t happen here."
In his new essay, “Listen to the Cassandras," Reed Galen, who is one of the co-founders of the pro-democracy organization The Lincoln Project, summarizes these failures and surrender:
Trump’s reality, after all he’s said, done, and what he promises to do in a second White House term, still haven’t awoken enough people from their collective slumber. Republicans have heard MAGA’s siren song and are drawn closer to the rocks. Many voters who’ve managed to strap themselves to the mast have chosen the lotus eater’s life; seeing nothing, hearing nothing, hoping to disappear into their phones and realities of their own creation….It's time to listen to the Cassandras. We must not be a nation who is unwilling to heed warnings. America’s democracy headed for a Thelma and Louise-like trip into the abyss. We’re headed for the cliff, we must apply the brakes while there is still time. When democracies die, there is no soft landing.
In a 2022 essay, Thom Hartmann makes the following intervention:
First, and essential to American fascism, Republicans envision a strong-man Leader who will hold power for as long as he (it’s almost always a “he”) chooses, with the transition to the next Leader determined by The Leader himself.
This has been the primary characteristic of every fascist-type of government to emerge in the 7,000-year written history of the modern world….
For example, in a fascist state the way that you as an average citizen ensure your own advancement and economic, personal, and political security is by sucking up to that one man (albeit often through one of his factotums). You either become an acolyte/follower or you find yourself on the outside looking in.
Hartmann continues:
You end up doing things on The Leader’s behalf, whether you’re supporting his party, working at a private corporation, or engaged in the nonprofit sector like teaching at a university or medical center.
Defying or challenging The Leader brings opprobrium; supporting The Leader is the path to career advancement. The Trump White House and DeSantis Governor’s Office are filled with examples.
Everything is done for The Leader because The Leader is the state. The state and The Leader have become one.
If you challenge The Leader, you’re challenging the state, and that’s treason….Whatever The Leader says becomes the law. This is called “rule by decree” and it’s where every fascist in history — including those for the thousands of years before Benito Mussolini “invented” the word — has ended up.
One of the reasons that the American people have not responded with the correct amount of alarm and energy to the dangers of Trumpism is that the mainstream news media and the political class have not explained in direct, consistent, and clear ways what life will be like for the average American under a second Trump regime. Even though they are consistently sounding the alarm and trying to rouse the American people to defend their democracy and nation, Hillary Clinton and other pro-democracy leaders are not placing enough emphasis on how Trumpism and American neofascism – and today’s version of “conservatism” more broadly – are a type of religion for the followers which in turn makes them largely immune from reason and other forms of rational intervention.
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Moreover, many of Trump’s most diehard followers are White Christians, who see in their Dear Leader’s evil, profligate sinning, transgressions, and other wicked behavior, as a type of role model and outlet for their own foul desires to hurt those people who they view as “the enemy” of their “real (White) America." And like other forms of fascism, Trumpism and the MAGA movement is a space for wish fulfillment and cathartic violence; this is mass sociopathy as politics.
The mainstream news media and respectable political class are afraid to voice that alarming truth – assuming they even comprehend it – about the intersection of emotions and the political in a failing democracy. To wit. Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post’s coverage of Trump’s recent trip to Iowa:
“Joe’s gotta go,” said Lori Carpenter, 59, as she left the Fort Dodge event. “And the ho shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” The “ho” was Harris, she clarified, before offering another nickname for Harris that was even more vulgar.
“It doesn’t bother me,” she said of Trump’s insults and crudeness. Her relative,
71-year-old Marsha Crouthamel, agreed. “It doesn’t bother me either because his policies are strong,” she echoed, adding that Trump got a lot of laughs and added, “Sometimes you just gotta excite people a little bit.”
“We’re Christians, and we can look past that,” Carpenter said. “We see the good that he did our country when he was in.” Asked what she thought of GOP rivals arguing they could deliver Trump-like policies without the baggage, she said: “They’re weaker than him.”
In a recent conversation with me here at Salon, Robert P. Jones, who is the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, highlighted the larger context of White Christianity and its relationship to Trumpism, neofascism, white supremacy, and political violence:
What they see is a society adrift from where they think it ought to be. That explains the reactionary language about "taking America back" and "(Re)Awakening America." It's basically a narrative of loss and decline. Trump repeats those themes of decline and American carnage and how he is the only person who can save America.
There is a real belief in Apocalypticism among conservative white Christians, specifically, and white conservatives and the right, more broadly. That is very much tied to changing demographics: we are no longer a majority white Christian country, and we were just 20 years ago. That has set off a visceral reaction, and a kind of panic among conservative White Christians in particular. As I document in The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, most white evangelicals sincerely believe that God designated America to be a promised land for white European Christians. That is not a joke to them. If a person sincerely believes such a thing and the country is changing and is not in agreement with that vision, it opens the door to political extremism and violence to secure that outcome. Many conservative White Christians truly believe that they have a divine mandate and entitlement to the country.
In the end, Trump wants to create a Fourth Reich in America.
Hitler’s dreams of a thousand-year Reich lasted only twelve years and ended with the destruction of the regime and loss of life measured in the many tens of millions. Trump’s Fourth Reich will not be a copy of Hitler’s (or Stalin’s regime). Instead, it will be crafted to fit the American mold. But even then, that crafting will be done by similar forces of cruelty, misery, and unnecessary death and destruction.
The American people have a choice to make on Election Day 2024 and in the year or so preceding it. Will they make the correct one by first stopping Trump and then confronting a Republican fascist party and larger white right that is much bigger than any one man or leader? Or will the American people surrender to what feels like the near-inevitable tides of history and a growing dread that “what’s past is prologue”?
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