Freak Out Friday – November 2, 2018

Godwin’s law is out of date when it comes to Trump, since the comparisons to Nazism are legion by this point. However in the last seven days Herr Trump (or, if you prefer, Hair Trump) has absolutely reaffirmed his resemblance to Hitler in pretty much every way imaginable.

Trump is legendary for his incessant sleight of hand, conman powers of distraction. The oldest magician’s trick in the world: spouting misdirection to make us ignore one thing by distracting us with another. The GOP passed a tax cut that highly favored the richest individuals and attempted to repeal health care seventy times. Yet now they are endeavoring to run away from their actions, repeating incessantly the lie that they support health care for preexisting conditions and want to provide tax cuts for the middle class. Obviously they hope that if they say it enough times, credulous voters will ignore their records and forget things that they witnessed with their own eyes. Which of course might very well work for some of them.

But Trump realizes that more is required, because people are stupid but they’re not THAT stupid. And so he is following Hitler’s playbook, using the powers of the office to try and scare his followers…in this case, to get them to the voting booths.

Because that’s what it’s all about in today’s world of politics. It’s not about issues. It’s not about character. It’s about fear. Scare the voters enough and hopefully they will turn out in large enough numbers to prevent the evil Democrats from throwing open the borders (because what are we, anyway? A nation of immigrants or something?) and repealing health care.

So let’s see what Herr Trump has been up to.

1). The Others are evil.. Hitler blamed the loss of World War I on the Jews, and pretty much everything else that was going wrong in Germany. Since Europe had a solid history of anti-Semitism, that blended right in and played to peoples’ beliefs. America likewise has a tradition of fear and hatred for outsiders, whether it’s black slaves, Asians, the Irish, and of course Jews. Trump has been playing to this hatred going back to the days when he wouldn’t rent apartments to blacks and the very beginning of his campaign when he launched with the fear technique of talking about all those evil Mexicans: the gang members, the drug dealers, the rapists, etc. Now he’s got a brand new talking point: a caravan of desperate immigrants who are on foot and schlepping toward the United States. They are currently over 2000 miles away. Average human foot speed is four miles an hour, but over a third of the travelers are children, so let’s assume they’re moving at two miles an hour, ten hours a day. This so-called invasion won’t be at the border for at least a hundred days, assuming any of them make it that far.

Yet Trump and his cronies are claiming that they are bringing diseases such as leprosy (with no evidence, of course) and smallpox (declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980). And people are genuinely buying into it, convinced that they are only days away from having the Walking Dead swarm over the borders illegally, as opposed to what they are doing which is applying for asylum.

And of course Mr. Conspiracy Theory even has his own notion about who is behind the caravan: the Jews. Specifically, one Jew, philanthropist George Soros. Because of course there is a grand tradition of seeing Jewish influence behind everything. The Jews must be stopped because they are trying to use immigrants to do away with white Christianity. We know this because the Pittsburgh shooter made it quite clear before he killed people.

Not to be too Jewish about this, but the concept of the POTUS condemning an exodus of desperate people strikes most definitely home. The fact that his daughter is a converted Jew does nothing to excuse the hatred he’s been spreading that has caused everything from shootings to attempting bombings. He is creating at atmosphere of hate, and there are plenty of people out there breathing it in deeply and letting loose their inner hatred and homicidal mania.

2). Camps.. Trump, in addition to dispatching thousands of troops to stand around with their fingers up their asses for the next three months, loves the idea of setting up encampments where the refugees will live for…well, forever. Camps where they can live in concentrations of people. Granted, he hasn’t suggested gas chambers to execute them, but he has zero interest in helping them enter the country to become citizens. He just wants to imprison them, on no charges, for good. Just like Hitler did with the Jews or, for that matter, FDR did with the Japanese. Ignore their rights. Ignore their desires. Ignore their pleas to be treated like any other people seeking asylum. Just stick them in camps. That’s the ticket.

3). The Great Dictator.. Remember that whole procedure about states having to ratify changes in the Constitution? Trump doesn’t care about that. He is convinced that he can unilaterally change a constitutional amendment with a wave of his executive power. His supporters immediately scream “Obama! DACA!” completely oblivious to the fact that using an executive order to expand an existing policy to help people is lightyears away from using an executive order to change the constitution in order to hurt people. But that is of course what he wants to do. Screw congress, screw the states. He wants to change unilaterally the Fourteenth Amendment to declare that its assurance of people being born here were American citizens is no longer applicable. “We’re the only country that has that policy!” he declares, oblivious of the thirty others that have similar policies including both Canada and Mexico.

This is why it’s useless to claim thet Trump lies. Lying requires intent to deceive. You have to know that you are stating falsehoods. I think more often than not, he really doesn’t know. He says whatever occurs to him and just assumes that if he said it, it’s true, QED. His cries of “fake news” are really condemnations of reporters who are writing the truth that he doesn’t like, which is any truth that is critical of him…which is pretty much all of them. Trump literally doesn’t know what the truth is, nor does he care. According to CNN, for instance, on October 22 he told untruths eighty-three times. All those people who try to claim all politicians lie must understand that yes, sometimes they do. But not ALL THE TIME. Not INCESSANTLY. Not EVERY TIME THEY OPEN THEIR MOUTHS.

And yet he claims that he can single handedly rewrite the constitution.

Let’s project this: He issues an executive order to rewrite the fourteenth amendment. It gets fast tracked to the Supreme Court and his judges are actually insane enough to say yes, the President can change the constitution via executive order. Fine. Has he considered that the next Democrat to take office will use that precedent to abolish the Second Amendment? Executive order, SCOTUS backed it, boom, it’s gone. Done deal. The NRA can howl all they want; their man lay the groundwork.

It would almost be worth it to see that happen. Almost.

Did he do anything right? . Remember all the crap he stirred up with China and trade wars? Ostensibly he is making arrangements with a trade agreement that is sparking a turnaround on Wall Street. So I suppose it’s good in the same sense that the Fantastic Four, in their first movie (not the Corman one, the one after that, that featured Captain America as the Torch) managed to defeat Doctor Doom. Except Doom’s creation entirely came about because Reed Richards talked him into joining them on a space experiment that went insanely wrong. Doom’s anger against Reed was totally justified and the FF were basically doing damage control for Reed’s screw up. So apparently Trump is managing to undo some of the stupidity that he launched. Yay, I guess?

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