Trump is a FASCIST!

[The Don]

I'm not sure he's exactly a fascist. He has said or supported some very questionable positions, but I'm not sure how easy it is to separate the words from the man. I'm not sure about just writing him off as just another Pol, though, he's clearly something different.

I'm pretty sure that he isn't but some of his techniques he employs, his apparent rapid political rise and his seeming imperviousness to criticism is redolent of the culture of personality employed by Mussolini. I seriously doubt whether Trump's aims and beliefs align in any appreciable way with any known form of Fascism.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

I'm pretty sure that he isn't but some of his techniques he employs, his apparent rapid political rise and his seeming imperviousness to criticism is redolent of the culture of personality employed by Mussolini. I seriously doubt whether Trump's aims and beliefs align in any appreciable way with any known form of Fascism.

The country needs to be guided by a strong leader, who should not be criticized, to become Great again, corporations need to work for, not against America (domestic production, etc), the problems are caused by groups of despised minorities...

 

[malbec]

the problems are caused by groups of despised minorities...

Like decent Americans .

 

[mgidm86]

I think the fascists are the people trying to disrupt his events so that he can't be heard. Trying to silence an opposing viewpoint is fascist. All these dummies need to take a good long look in the mirror. If your message is that good then why worry about Trump?

Funny thing is that Trump has dominated the headlines for about a week now because of this. I don't see that it has hurt him one bit. I'm sure he'll be thanking all of his haters on his way to the general election.

I am really concerned about this whole thing. I've long hated the idea of the career politician - but Trump? Why did it have to be Trump? Why not someone people actually like?

 

[Ziggurat]

Trump is totally Hitler. Sure, whatever.

And Hillary was happy to hang out with him before he became a competitor. So what does that say about her?

 

[angrysoba]

Trump is totally Hitler. Sure, whatever.

And Hillary was happy to hang out with him before he became a competitor. So what does that say about her?
[qimg]https://d1jn4vzj53eli5.cloudfront.net/mc/ngillespie/2015_12/hillaryanddonald.png[/qimg]

It makes her Hitlery Clinton.

 

[Darth Rotor]

And Hillary was happy to hang out with him before he became a competitor. So what does that say about her?

It says ... she wore a pearl necklace (Credit to ZZ Top)

Trump a Fascist? Hmm, not sure, but he is for sure a Trumpist.

I've seen the following question asked elsewhere, so I'll ask it here:

Who would he get to work for him in the cabinet? He does not seem to be in the habit of listening to anyone. With that in mind, what talented people would have any motivation to be his cabinet officers? Follow that thought. He could put any number of chumps up for "advise and consent" in front of Congress. The real question is "is there anyone who he'll listen to, and who is that?" That person, or set of persons, are not likely to want to serve in a public office. Those folks represent, most likely, a very small club: people The Donald will listen to, seriously.
Find out who they are.

 

[Ladewig]

Trump is totally Hitler. Sure, whatever.

And Hillary was happy to hang out with him before he became a competitor. So what does that say about her?

I really don't know what you are getting at. Would you tell us what that says about her?

 

[dudalb]

I think the fascists are the people trying to disrupt his events so that he can't be heard. Trying to silence an opposing viewpoint is fascist. All these dummies need to take a good long look in the mirror. If your message is that good then why worry about Trump?

Funny thing is that Trump has dominated the headlines for about a week now because of this. I don't see that it has hurt him one bit. I'm sure he'll be thanking all of his haters on his way to the general election.

I am really concerned about this whole thing. I've long hated the idea of the career politician - but Trump? Why did it have to be Trump? Why not someone people actually like?

I think someone is talking themselves into supporting Trump...

You know, it is not smart to burn down the house just to get rid of a few mice.

 

[Puppycow]

Robert Kagan in the Washington Post:

This is how fascism comes to America

Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Post.

The Republican Party’s attempt to treat Donald Trump as a normal political candidate would be laughable were it not so perilous to the republic. If only he would mouth the party’s “conservative” principles, all would be well.

But of course the entire Trump phenomenon has nothing to do with policy or ideology. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party, either, except in its historic role as incubator of this singular threat to our democracy. Trump has transcended the party that produced him. His growing army of supporters no longer cares about the party. Because it did not immediately and fully embrace Trump, because a dwindling number of its political and intellectual leaders still resist him, the party is regarded with suspicion and even hostility by his followers. Their allegiance is to him and him alone.

And the source of allegiance? 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.

That this tough-guy, get-mad-and-get-even approach has gained him an increasingly large and enthusiastic following has probably surprised Trump as much as it has everyone else. Trump himself is simply and quite literally an egomaniac. But the phenomenon he has created and now leads has become something larger than him, and something far more dangerous.

His appeal is basically the same as Putin's appeal to Russians: he is seen as a tough guy.
Putin took a country, a former superpower that was on the decline, and "made it great again", i.e., relevant in a military way.
America still is a superpower, but we feel impotent in the face of the chaos in the Middle East and the rise of ISIS, and the insolent little dictator in North Korea. People are tired of the wimpy approach. They want a strongman, a dictator. This is incidentally why Trump is immune to the usual "gaffes" that would destroy other campaigns, and why he can get away with telling glaring, demonstrable lies and no-one bats an eye.

Worth a read, IMO. Even if you think it's overblown.

 

[Puppycow]

The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump

One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper name—who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control him.’

No, you can’t. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.

And Trump announces his enmity in the choice of his companions. The Murdoch media conglomerate has been ordered to acquiesce; it’s no surprise that it has. But Trump’s other fellow-travellers include Roger Stone, the Republican political operative and dirty-tricks maven, while his venues have included the broadcasts of Alex Jones, a ranting conspiracy theorist who believes in a Globalist plot wherein “an alien force not of this world is attacking humanity”—not to mention Jones’s marketing of the theory that Michelle Obama is a transvestite who murdered Joan Rivers. These are not harmless oddballs Trump is flirting with. This is not the lunatic fringe. These are the lunatics.

Ted Cruz called Trump a pathological liar, the kind who does not know the difference between lies and truth. Whatever the clinical diagnosis, we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place. It wasn’t his voice on that tape of pitiful self-promotion. O.K., it was—but he never mocked the handicapped reporter, he was merely imitating an obsequious one. The media eventually moves on, shrugging helplessly, to the next lie. Then the next lie, and the next. If the lies are bizarre enough and frequent enough, they provoke little more than a nervous giggle and a cry of “Well, guess he’s changed the rules!”

 

[Belz...]

If he does become president I just hope the American system of checks and balances is robust enough to keep him in check and make sure he leaves office without doing too much permanent damage.

My 'fear' in case he gets the oval office would be that he would bully congress into siding with him, possibly with veiled threats of violence from his supporters. In that scenario the checks and balances not only wouldn't stop him, they could actually be torn down.

 

[Belz...]

I wonder what Mr. Orwell would make of today's times...

It's almost worth developing time travel just to answer that.

 

[theprestige]

I have noticed that people are going mental on Facebook saying that Trump is a Fascist, or even the next Hitler. Of course many of them are also saying that those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it, but it seems to me that only those who don't remember history can think Trump is Hitler.

Now, I think he's a demagogue who makes crass comments about Mexicans and Muslims, but that he's not a fascist. In fact, I think that's ridiculous. If Trump devises a 25-point plan for a racially pure Amerikan Reich and forms a paramilitary organization who beat up political opponents then I will change my mind. But not until then.

What do you fine people think?

I shall start a poll to definitively decide this urgent matter.

Here's something ironic:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0252...s-turn-violent-outside-trump-rally-new-mexico

One of the tactics used by the National Socialist party to gain political power in Germany was violence targeted at the political rallies of the other parties.

People talk about how Trump is a fascist, but then we see things like this. A peaceful Trump rally, and violent protestors attacking it.

 

[angrysoba]

Here's something ironic:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0252...s-turn-violent-outside-trump-rally-new-mexico

One of the tactics used by the National Socialist party to gain political power in Germany was violence targeted at the political rallies of the other parties.

People talk about how Trump is a fascist, but then we see things like this. A peaceful Trump rally, and violent protestors attacking it.

Incidentally, Sanders gives the same excuse that Trump gives: "people are angry".

I don't think either one is a fascist though.

 

[applecorped]

Trump protesters are fascists.

 

[theprestige]

Incidentally, Sanders gives the same excuse that Trump gives: "people are angry".

I don't think either one is a fascist though.

I think you may have misread the article I linked. The people being violent at the Trump event were protesting against Trump. The meme is that Trump is a fascist, but sometimes it's the anti-Trump folks who take on the role of the Brownshirts, bringing violence to their opponent's political rallies.

But these violent anti-Trump protestors aren't really fascist either. If they were, they'd be organized, and they'd wear uniforms, and they'd get the job done.

My prediction: If these violent anti-Trump protests continue, some of his supporters will organize additional security for the event. And they'll wear uniforms. And the media will immediately make the connection to NSDAP Brownshirts, and completely ignore the violent protests which prompted that reaction.

 

[Axiom_Blade]

My prediction: If these violent anti-Trump protests continue, some of his supporters will organize additional security for the event. And they'll wear uniforms. And the media will immediately make the connection to NSDAP Brownshirts, and completely ignore the violent protests which prompted that reaction.

At first I thought "Wouldn't it be easier and safer (from both a physical and a legal standpoint) to just hire more security?" And then I remembered how much Trump loves to troll people, and I thought "Yeah, this'll probably happen."

 

[uke2se]

At first I thought "Wouldn't it be easier and safer (from both a physical and a legal standpoint) to just hire more security?" And then I remembered how much Trump loves to troll people, and I thought "Yeah, this'll probably happen."

So now it has been predicted that Trump will form his own version of the SA, and in the same post, this has been excused as a reaction to the violence of his adversaries, or even as a 'troll'.

It's amazing how history repeats itself.

 

[applecorped]

swoooosh!