The last paragraph of this story says it all!!
"After months of talking around the obvious, the
Democrats have realized that it might be a good idea to
call a fascist a fascist.
Throughout the campaign, the Democrats have talked
around the obvious—that, in his rhetoric and in his
calls to violence against his perceived enemies, Trump
has adopted full-throated fascist messaging. And Trump
has done so without provoking even a peep of
indignation from the GOP leadership in Congress.
The Democrats have labeled him “weird” and
“authoritarian,” denounced him for being “erratic,” and
called him out for his increasingly incoherent
babbling. Butonly in the last week, as Trump’s campaign
trail message has gotten ever darker, have both
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and vice
presidential nominee Tim Walz come out and said their
opponent is a fascist.
The Democrats’ permission slip for using the F-word
came from, of all people, ex-chairman of the joint
chiefs of staff Mark Milley. You may recall the top-
ranking general walking, in full uniform, across a
riot-torn square outside of the White House with
President Donald Trump in the wake of George Floyd’s
killing. He has spent the years since apologizing for
giving his imprimatur of authority to Trump, who
militarized the response to protesters and politicized
the military in so doing.
When Milley, hardly known for his radical politics,
established a back channel to his Chinese counterparts
and promised them that there were safeguards in place
to stop Trump from launching a nuclear attack solely to
retain power, he incurred the Mar-a-Lago man’s eternal
wrath. Years later, Trump would announce on social
media that in the good old days a figure who had done
what Milley did would have been executed for treason.
In the wake of that broadside, Milley was inundated by
threats from MAGA fanatics, and had to install blast-
and bulletproof protections around his house.
Now, the general is getting his revenge. In veteran
journalist Bob Woodward’s just-released book War,
Milley is quoted as saying that Trump is a “fascist to
his core.” It’s an extraordinary statement from a man
who rose to the top military job in part by staying
studiously away from partisan politics. It also speaks
to the level of horror, and the fear of an earth-
shattering upheaval of the global order, that many
senior officials in the military and national security
agencies feel at the prospect of Trump regaining the
White House and being made king in all but name by the
Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
Trump hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to dispel
Milley’s analysis of his personality.
In recent weeks, the Republican candidate for president
has said that the military should be called on to
annihilate his political foes, the people he called
“the enemy within.” He has insisted that shoplifters
should face a “very rough hour” at the hands of the
police. He responded to a heckler at one of his rallies
by saying that she should “have the hell knocked out of
her.” He has called for media outlets he doesn’t like,
such as CBS, to lose their broadcasting licenses. He
has advocated the mass jailing of anyone involved in
“election interference,” which in his telling seems to
be anybody who stands up to his goon squads in favor of
fully counting all the votes. And he told an audience
of Jewish voters that Jews would “bear a lot of blame”
if he lost the upcoming election.
That’s not even the half of it. He has inspired attacks
on asylum seekers and on the schools their children
attend with his unforgivable spreading of rumors that
Haitians living in Ohio under Temporary Protected
Status were stealing pet cats and dogs to eat. And he
continues to refuse to say whether he will peacefully
accept the election outcome, and will urge his
supporters to do likewise, if Harris wins.
Astoundingly, despite—or maybe because of—his
increasingly demented rhetoric, Trump’s base has
solidified around him, and he is riding as high in the
polls today as at any time since Harris became the
Democrats’ nominee. This isn’t politics as normal; it’s
a vastly dangerous departure from the norms and rhythms
of democracy, and, because the GOP and the conservative
media ecosystem have so wholeheartedly bought into the
Trump cult, it’s happening without much of the public
being aware just how radical this shift is.
Belatedly, the Democrats have realized that it might be
a good idea to call a fascist a fascist. After Trump
said that the military should be used against his
enemies, Walz denounced Trump as being “un-American,”
and on a swing through Wisconsin he finally called
Trump out for being a fascist. Then, earlier this week,
Kamala Harris was asked by radio host Charlamagne tha
God whether one could say that Trump’s was a fascist
vision. Harris finally said the obvious: “Yes, we can
say that.”
They should have done this months ago, instead of
letting Trump rehabilitate himself in the political
imagination of millions of Americans. They should have
defined this terrible man, this man who, like so many
despots throughout history, revels in the language of
violence and intimidation, as what he is.
But better late than never.
With Trump’s campaign getting a vast infusion of cash
from deeply antidemocratic multibillionaires, including
the ever-more-unlikable Elon Musk, it’s past time for
the Harris team to coalesce a popular front–style
opposition to Trump’s lurch toward fascism.
Let everyone who fills in the ballot bubble for Donald
J. Trump know exactly what they are giving their
support to. Not who they are supporting—the unhinged
old man with the grotesque anecdotes and personal
stories, who stopped talking at a rally and instead
danced (badly) to his playlist for half an hour—but
what they are voting for: the kind of ghastly, bloody,
nihilistic, political movement that their grandparents
and great grandparents fought against in World War II.
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