Mexican Literary Magazine Just Published the Most Powerful Trump Cover Ever
Leave it to a Mexican literary magazine to boldly go where few media outlets in the United States have gone. Here is what Letras Libres
tweeted on Wednesday night:
Every inch a fascist.
Nicholas Kristof points out the undeniable: Trump is moving the national culture – or mood or discourse or limit on what’s acceptable. There are a lot of things you can call it, but whatever it is, Trump is having an effect on it, and not in a good way.
This community of Forest Grove, near the farm where I grew up in western Oregon, has historically been a charming, friendly and welcoming community. But in the middle of a physics class at the high school one day this spring, a group of white students suddenly began jeering at their Latino classmates and chanting: “Build a wall! Build a wall!”
The same white students had earlier chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” Soon afterward, a student hung a homemade banner in the school reading, “Build a Wall,” prompting Latinos at area schools to stage a walkout.
That’s a story, not a study. We don’t really know what Forest Grove was like before this spring, we don’t know how those students were talking and behaving before that day in physics class, we don’t really know that all was Eden until Trump burst on the scene. But the Trump-wall theme does belong to Trump.
Trump only mildly distanced himself when an adviser suggested that Clinton should be executed by firing squad for treason, and his rallies have become toxic brews of hatred with shouts like “Hang the bitch!” The Times made a video of Trump fans at his rallies directing crude slurs not just at Hillary Clinton, but also at blacks, Latinos, Muslims and gay people.
We need not be apocalyptic about it. This is not Kristallnacht. But Trump’s harsh rhetoric tears away the veneer of civility and betrays our national motto of “e pluribus unum.” He has unleashed a beast and fed its hunger, and long after this campaign is over we will be struggling to corral it again.
Kristallnacht isn’t the right comparison, because that was November 1938, when Hitler had been in power for more than five years. The right comparison would be to something before 1933. Of course it’s not Kristallnacht, but it damn well is an openly racist and misogynist campaign, and we should be “apocalyptic” about it.
Here in the Forest Grove area, west of Portland, students of Mexican heritage at four high schools — most of them born in the United States — described to me how some local whites take cues from Trump.
“They say, ‘We’re going to deport your ass,’” said Melina McGlothen, 17, whose mother is Mexican. “I don’t want to say I hate them, but I hate their stupidity.”
Ana Sally Gonzalez, 17, said a school club had put up posters criticizing racism, and they were then marred by graffiti such as “Go back where you came from” and “Trump 2016.”
Trump is like the Twitter misogynists in that way. He models venomous racism and misogyny, and millions of others follow his lead. His poison is going to stay around long after the election, whether he loses or not.
From Ian Kershaw’s The Hitler Myth:
Even after the triumph of the 1930 election, many intelligent and informed observers of the German political scene felt that the Nazi party was bound sooner or later to collapse and break up into its component parts. Its social base was diffuse – that of an out and out protest party; it had no clear political programme to offer, only a contradictory amalgam of social revolutionary rhetoric and reactionary impulses; and not least it was heavily dependent on the personality cult surrounding the demagogue Hitler – seen as the mouthpiece of petty-bourgeois resentments, but ultimately a dilettante who, despite temporary success in the conditions of severe economic and political crisis, was bound in the end to succumb to the real power bastions and traditional ruling elites. [p 29]
Does that sound familiar? It sounded chillingly familiar to me when I read it this morning.
More from Jim Wright on Facebook.
Yesterday, Miami, Florida. Trump interview. Subject: US Navy Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba:
Reporter: “Would you try to get the military commissions, the trial court there, to try U.S. citizens?”
To be clear, the reporter is asking the man who wants to be president of the United States, the man who claims he’s READ THE CONSTITUTION, if he as president would try United States citizens — UNITED STATES CITIZENS, civilians — in a military court.
Repeat, Trump was being asked if he would consider trying US civilians in a military court. That’s what he’s being asked. There is no ambiguity. The question is clear and specific: Should military courts have authority over US citizens?
That’s the question.
Now, as an American, if you don’t already know the correct answer, if you don’t immediately understand why trying a civilian under military authority is 1) unconstitutional, 2) illegal, and 3) unAmerican, then you need to get your ass back to school immediately. Don’t vote. Don’t say another word. Don’t. If that question doesn’t set off every warning bell in your head, then you are not qualified to be a citizen of this republic.
And what did Donald Trump answer?
What indeed.
Trump “Well, I know that they want to try them [American citizens accused of terrorism] in our regular court systems, and I don’t like that at all. I don’t like that at all. I would say they could be tried there [at Guantanamo Bay, under military authority]. That would be fine.”
That would be fine.
That would be fine.
If you can’t see why this man is utterly and completely unqualified to serve in ANY elected position in the United States of America let alone as President, if that answer alone doesn’t prove as much in your mind, then as I said above, you don’t meet the minimum requirements for citizenship.
CNN reports Trump’s breezy indifference to the Constitution and due process:
The Republican presidential nominee told the Miami Herald that he doesn’t “at all” like the idea of trying terrorist suspects in the civilian court system, even though US citizens are constitutionally entitled to due process. He added that he would be “fine” with trying US citizens in military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay, the US naval base that is also home to a military prison housing captured terror suspects.
…
President George W. Bush authorized the trial of non-citizens who engage or support acts of terrorism after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but a US citizen has never been tried in military courts under that order.
Most constitutional experts and several senior Republican senators — including Sen. John McCain — strongly opposed proposals to try Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers and a naturalized US citizen, in military court.
The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether Trump was concerned about infringing US citizens’ right to due process under the Constitution.
They were too busy frantically googling “due process” and “Constitution” and “military courts.”
Back to Jim Wright:
We have long since passed the point where Trump’s tendency to fascism can be ignored.
We have long since passed the point where the repeated, daily now, multiple warning signs can be dismissed as sarcasm, or jokes, or Trump just being Trump.
In the wreckage following WWII, people asked over and over, and continue to ask up to this very day: How could this have happened? How could you people, you Germans, how could you let that madman destroy your republic, destroy your nation, destroy your people, destroy your civilization? How? How is that possible? Why didn’t you DO SOMETHING?
And the answer was: We didn’t know. We thought he would make Germany great again. We thought he would make Germany for Germans, get rid of the undesirables. We thought he would rebuild our military, make it mighty again. We thought he would make the world fear us, respect us, acknowledge our superiority. He said he’d give us jobs, rebuild our infrastructure, make us all rich. We didn’t know. We didn’t know until it was too late!
Well, America, WE don’t have that excuse.
WE do know.
And you’re looking it. You’re looking at it every single goddamned day. You’re looking at the pinched ugly faces of racists and bigots and haters, the KKK and the Neo-Nazis, Homophobia, Transphobia, Islamophobia, Anti-Semites, violence and fear of every kind touted as American values, jingoism, military fetishism, America for Americans, walls, propaganda sold as truth despite its OBVIOUS AND PROVABLE falsehood, the cult of personality, the fear of the other, the suspicion that our neighbors and our government are plotting against us, the appeal to some supposed lost greatness, the nostalgia for the good old days of glory, and now the suggestion that civilians should be tried by military tribunal — free of the burden of law, the Constitution, appeal, and all the values we Americans hold most dear. The very ideals those like Trump would say make us “exceptional,” that is what we would deny others.
It’s the truth. He’s all too like Hitler, not in a hyperbolic or rhetorical sense, but literally. He doesn’t have to have a stupid little Chaplin-moustache and flattened hair to be all too like Hitler, all he has to do is keep talking monstrous Hitlerian shit the way he does. He’s got it down. Even the fucking mannerisms are similar – the screaming rages are similar.
Hell yes it can happen here.
I go outside for an adventure for a couple of hours and look what happens – Trump suggests assassination for his opponent.
At a rally here [in Wilmngton, North Carolina], Mr. Trump warned that it would be “a horrible day” if Mrs. Clinton were elected and got to appoint a tiebreaking Supreme Court justice.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”
…
Even those in Mr. Trump’s audience appeared caught by surprise. Video of the rally showed a man seated just over Mr. Trump’s shoulder go slack-jawed and turn to his companion, apparently in disbelief, when Mr. Trump made the remark.
My jaw dropped when I read it in a friend’s Facebook post.
Guy behind Trump immediately realized what he said was a problem. https://t.co/F3mSP9GLqt
— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) August 9, 2016
Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, who has made gun reform his signature issue after the Sandy Hook shooting in his state, took to Twitter to castigate Mr. Trump, calling his remarks “disgusting and embarrassing and sad.”
And frightening. This reckless sociopathic narcissist must not be president of the US.
“This isn’t play,” Mr. Murphy wrote. “Unstable people with powerful guns and an unhinged hatred for Hillary are listening to you, @realDonaldTrump.”
And Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, wrote on Twitterthat the Secret Service should investigate Mr. Trump for making a death threat against Mrs. Clinton: “Donald Trump suggested someone kill Sec. Clinton. We must take people at their word.”
That was my first thought. The Secret Service is supposed to investigate all threats of that kind, and Trump’s doing it is way more dangerous than some schmuck on Twitter.
Mr. Trump’s campaign events and rallies have grown increasingly vitriolic, with angry chants and jeers directed at Mrs. Clinton, some of them led by the candidate himself. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump called Mrs. Clinton a “liar” and “wacky.”
Chants of “lock her up,” which first gained traction during the Republican National Convention, were loud and frequent in Wilmington before Mr. Trump took the stage. One speaker, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, tried to steer the crowd away from the chant.
“No, no, we’re here to beat her, and keep her out of Washington,” Mr. Giuliani said as he waved off the chants. He was interrupted by the same chant minutes later, and again paused and tried to wave off the crowd.
Which, again, is fascism. That’s how you get fascism.
Dangerous times.
Trump has decided that the thing to call his foreign policy is America First. I heard that on NPR a couple of days ago and was stunned. Hello Colonel Lindbergh? We’re going openly pro-Nazi now? Seriously?
Plus also it’s just hideous on its face, for the obvious reasons? It’s like sitting down at a crowded dinner table and shouting “Me first!”
I’m late in noticing this, but you know how it is – I was hoping to be able to get away with ignoring Trump, until the convention made that no longer tenable.
The New Yorker was on it a couple of weeks ago.
When the New York Times interviewed Donald Trump in March, one of the reporters, David Sanger, suggested that Trump’s foreign policy could be summed up as “America First”—“a mistrust of many foreigners, both our adversaries and some of our allies, a sense that they’ve been freeloading off of us for many years.”
“Correct. O.K.? That’s fine,” Trump responded. Sanger pressed him to be sure. “I’ll tell you—you’re getting close,” Trump said, in his typically staccato style. “Not isolationist, I’m not isolationist, but I am ‘America First.’ So I like the expression. I’m ‘America First.’”
So he adopted it and ran with it. Ok then, says Louise Thomas.
Sixty-five years ago, the spokesman for America First was another celebrity, Charles Lindbergh, who was famous for his historic solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic, and because of the kidnapping and murder of his child, which was reported so exhaustively and sensationally by the press that it became known as “The Crime of the Century.” In 1935, Lindbergh and his family fled to Europe. Unlike Trump, he didn’t want the notoriety. He was a man of secrets. He sought privacy.
But he also wanted order. In the years immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War, he visited Germany, and it impressed him. While the rest of the world seemed to crumble, Germany struck him for its “organized vitality.” “I have never in my life been so conscious of such a directed force,” Lindbergh recalled in his 1978 memoir, “Autobiography of Values.” “It is thrilling when seen.” He toured the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, and became convinced that no power in Europe—or the United States—could defeat it. A war with Germany would be bad for the United States, he believed. And it would be bad for “the white races.” He condemned Kristallnacht, but he wrote, in an infamous essay published by Reader’s Digest in November, 1939, weeks after the war in Europe began, that Western nations “can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood.”
That’s what Trump is aligning himself with.
In 1940, Lindbergh, who had by then returned to the U.S., was recruited to speak on behalf of America First, an antiwar group founded by several Yale students (including Gerald Ford, the future President, and Potter Stewart, the future Supreme Court Justice) who saw the Second World War as an awful consequence of the First—and who were determined to avoid another disastrous war. The group attracted a wide range of supporters, from celebrities to pacifists (including the leader of the Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, who was my great-grandfather); America First also included more than its share of people whose views had less to do with the catastrophes of the First World War than with their nativism and xenophobia. At its peak, it had eight hundred thousand dues-paying members, many in the Midwest. Lindbergh was the ideal spokesman: charismatic, handsome, brave, sympathetic. His appeal was democratic—until it wasn’t.
On September 11, 1941, Lindbergh gave a speech to a huge crowd in Des Moines, in which he described the agitators for the U.S. to enter the war. There were three groups: the British, the government, and “the Jewish race.” “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” he told the audience.
That’s what Trump is aligning himself with.
Anti-Semitism was prevalent in Lindberg’s time; his attitudes were not fringe. He had not made a secret of his interest in eugenics, nor his racial attitudes, which today seem reprehensible. But with that 1941 speech he seemed to cross a line. He was strongly and swiftly condemned for his anti-Semitic and divisive words—not only by interventionists who were opposed to America First but by those who had lionized him. The Des Moines Register called his speech “so intemperate, so unfair, so dangerous in its implications that it cannot but turn many spadefuls in the digging of the grave of his influence in this country.” The Hearst papers, which were generally sympathetic to the non-interventionists—and open about their hatred of Franklin Roosevelt—condemned Lindbergh, calling his speech “un-American.” His home town took his name off its water tower. Three months later, the Japanese attacked at Pearl Harbor. Lindbergh, who had resigned his commission in the Air Force at the demand of Roosevelt, asked to be recommissioned; Roosevelt denied the request. In the public’s view, too, Lindbergh was disgraced. His reputation did not fully recover.
I hope Trump will join him in that fate.
The Harvard Republican Club has “for the first time in 128 years” declined to endorse the Republican candidate for president.
The club gives policy reasons but the real energy is in the problems with Trump the human being.
Perhaps most importantly, however, Donald Trump simply does not possess the temperament and character necessary to lead the United States through an increasingly perilous world. The last week should have made obvious to all what has been obvious to most for more than a year. In response to any slight –perceived or real– Donald Trump lashes out viciously and irresponsibly. In Trump’s eyes, disagreement with his actions or his policies warrants incessant name calling and derision: stupid, lying, fat, ugly, weak, failing, idiot –and that’s just his “fellow” Republicans.
He isn’t eschewing political correctness. He is eschewing basic human decency.
That’s good. That’s a good line. Mind you, people who make a show of “eschewing political correctness” usually are eschewing human decency, but Trump is doing it on a national stage.
Donald Trump, despite spending more than a year on the campaign trail, has either refused or been unable to educate himself on issues that matter most to Americans like us. He speaks only in platitudes, about greatness, success, and winning. Time and time again, Trump has demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge on critical matters, meandering from position to position over the course of the election. When confronted about these frequent reversals, Trump lies in a manner more brazen and shameless than anything politics has ever seen.
Millions of people across the country are feeling despondent. Their hours have been cut, wages slashed, jobs even shipped overseas. But Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan to fix that. He has a plan to exploit that.
Donald Trump is a threat to the survival of the Republic. His authoritarian tendencies and flirtations with fascism are unparalleled in the history of our democracy. He hopes to divide us by race, by class, and by religion, instilling enough fear and anxiety to propel himself to the White House. He is looking to to pit neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, American against American. We will not stand for this vitriolic rhetoric that is poisoning our country and our children.
Trump will say they’re losers.
The New York Times did a 3 minute compilation of the sexist racist xenophobic homophobic dreck people shout at and after Trump rallies. “Fuck that nigger,” “Trump the bitch,” “fuck political correctness,” men (and a few women) swelling with rage like water balloons.
It’s worth watching.
Fareed Zakaria called Trump a bullshit artist on CNN this morning.
Zakaria pointed to the pattern that has emerged in Trump’s efforts to defend or clarify his controversial statements.
“Every time it is demonstrated that Donald Trump is plainly ignorant about some basic public policy issue, some well-known fact, he comes back with a certain bravado and tries to explain it away with a tweet or a statement,” Zakaria said.
“Bravado” is a very sweet way of putting it. Psychopathic shamelessness is how I would put it.
“It’s entertaining,” Zakaria said of Trump’s shtick, “if the guy is trying to sell you a condo or a car. But for the president of the United States, it’s deeply worrying.”
It was deeply worrying in Bush Junior, and it’s that squared in Trump.
At the end of the post there’s a note:
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
Yep.
If you watch the video you will see: Zakaria does call him a bullshit artist.
“I’m afraid the election’s gonna be rigged, I have to be honest,” Trump told the crowd.
While Trump has often questioned the integrity of the primary contests in both parties, his newest remarks seemed to begin laying groundwork for him to contest the Nov. 8 election results.
“Contest” it as in inciting a coup to overturn it. That’s the logic of what he’s saying, whether he realizes it or not.
It was a line of attack that longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone pushed on a podcast with Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos that was posted online Friday. Stone suggested voter fraud is “widespread” and said if Hillary Clinton wins a state like Florida after polls show Trump in the lead, the election would be “illegitimate.”
“If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government,” Stone said. He also promised a “bloodbath” if the Democrats attempt to “steal” the election.
“And the government will no longer be the government.”
These people are terrifying.
Robert Kagan on Trump back in May:
We’re supposed to believe that Trump’s support stems from economic stagnation or dislocation. Maybe some of it does. But what Trump offers his followers are not economic remedies—his proposals change daily. What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence. His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger. His public discourse consists of attacking or ridiculing a wide range of “others”—Muslims, Hispanics, women, Chinese, Mexicans, Europeans, Arabs, immigrants, refugees—whom he depicts either as threats or as objects of derision. His program, such as it is, consists chiefly of promises to get tough with foreigners and people of nonwhite complexion. He will deport them, bar them, get them to knuckle under, make them pay up or make them shut up.
And what is that? That is fascism. An aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of democratic culture, playing on feelings of resentment and disdain intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger, attacking “others” and threatening them with violence: that is fascism.
As Alexander Hamilton watched the French Revolution unfold, he feared in America what he saw play out in France—that the unleashing of popular passions would lead not to greater democracy but to the arrival of a tyrant, riding to power on the shoulders of the people.
This phenomenon has arisen in other democratic and quasi-democratic countries over the past century, and it has generally been called “fascism.” Fascist movements, too, had no coherent ideology, no clear set of prescriptions for what ailed society. “National socialism” was a bundle of contradictions, united chiefly by what, and who, it opposed; fascism in Italy was anti-liberal, anti-democratic, anti-Marxist, anti-capitalist and anti-clerical. Successful fascism was not about policies but about the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Fuhrer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation. Whatever the problem, he could fix it. Whatever the threat, internal or external, he could vanquish it, and it was unnecessary for him to explain how.
He wrote that before the Convention, before Trump got up and screamed that he alone can fix it.
Another rung on the fascism ladder:
An official adviser to the Trump campaign has escalated the attacks on Khizr Khan, the gold star father who was critical of Trump at the Democratic convention, baselessly accusing him of being a “Muslim Brotherhood agent.”
The adviser, Al Baldasaro, tweeted a link to an article from Shoebat.com, a fringe anti-Islam conspiracy website. The article also suggests (without any evidence) that Humayun Khan, who was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze, was a jihadist who joined the military to kill Americans.
…
The piece, written by Theodore and Walid Shoebat, is less of an article and more of a fever dream of conspiracies strung together.
Tell us more about Theodore Shoebat.
In recent days, Theodore Shoebat has also called on the government to execute gay people for sodomy and Hillary Clinton for witchcraft. He also said women who have abortions should be lined up and shot by firing squad.
SAY WHAT???
Let’s look at that last link, to a piece at Right Wing Watch.
Shoebat had particular praise for Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals judge Steven Colloton for issuing a decision in 2014 upholding the constitutionality of the death penalty, which Shoebat again said should be applied to gays … as well as to witches like Hillary Clinton.
“We need judges who uphold the death penalty for evildoers,” he said. “We need judges who would uphold the death penalty for those, not just murderers, obviously murderers deserve death, I think most people would agree with that. But you also have other people who deserve the death penalty, not necessarily murderers; people who are involved in witchcraft, who promote witchcraft. Witchcraft is very, very dangerous, very demonic and look how much destruction it has caused in the United States. Look at Hillary Clinton. That’s a witch that needs to be arrested and put to death. Most definitely. As the scriptures says, I believe in Leviticus, ‘Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.’”
“Homosexuals also need to be put to death,” Shoebat continued, “because it is evil, it is demonic and it is against human nature.”
So to sum up, Baldasaro is an official adviser to the Trump campaign and Baldasaro considers Theodore Shoebat a trustworthy source.
Down, down, down we go.
