Trump And The End Of American Democracy

The authors of new books about Trump's degradation of American democracy appeared on Morning Joe today.

The Steel Dossier allegations are being corroborated making it clearer all the time that Putin had his hooks into Donald Trump from the beginning. That Donald Trump has been and continues to be a Putin puppet.

What does Putin want? Besides overturning the sanctions the US imposed on his oligarchs after the invasion of Crimea, Putin wants to create chaos in the U.S.

Where have we heard that before?

Chaos is Steve Bannon's brand

Steve Bannon has compared himself to Lenin, which is odd enough for a right wing operator. His overarching theory or goal is to create chaos. He has said this repeatedly in his safari jacket TED style talks. He sees this moment as his “Fourth Wave” where the whole system is overturned. He thinks of himself as a Robespierre figure, a Lenin, an agent of mass destruction tearing down democratic institutions he doesn’t like. His goal, apparently, is to create a new American dictatorship with himself at the top, securely fastened there by his connections to shadowy billionaires whose fortunes came from disruption.

We see the damage he’s doing in every government department where Trump has appointed disruptors to top positions. The nominees may just as well have been sent from Moscow. The Dept of Energy, which safeguards our nuclear stockpile, is run by a doofus who wanted to shut down the department. His Health chief was a pawn of big Pharma. His Environmental Protection chief built his career on defending and lobbying for polluters. Their mission is focused on destruction and dysfunction.

Putin whispers in Trump’s ear and Trump insults our allies, undermines our alliances, rubbishes our treaties, exits global agreements American leadership crafted, seeks to pit one ally against the others. And then Trump gives big warm kisses to the worst dictators and kleptocrats around the world. He admires and envies the skill with which democracies have been destroyed and coups have been accomplished. He envies the mass murders of Duterte in the Philippines. He does nothing when Turkish dictator Erdogan brings his dark-suited thugs into the heart of Washington to attack and brutally beat peaceful protesters. This is the style Trump admires and envies. This is how Trump has disgraced the American brand and degraded American leadership in the world.

The Trump junta has had a plan from the start: destroy American democracy and the American way of life, create an angry mob, and ride that angry mob into dictatorial power.

The Dark Holes Fascism and Racism Crawl Out From

Many sides? That's how Trump tried to defend his followers in the white supremacist fringe.*

There are two distinct sides in this, just as there were in 1941, when one side attacked peaceful neighbors and exterminated millions, and the other side (the Allies) opposed fascism and defeated it.

There were two clear sides in 1861; one defended slavery and bigotry, the other side opposed these evils. This film from the 40s states what our values were after we fought and won WW2, when we knew the difference between good and evil.

The WW2 era film explaining why we fought fascism can be seen via The Atlantic

But the Nazi flags are back, carried by people who think they are great patriots upholding a better America, a pure white America. Seeing the Nazi and Confederate flags together carried by armed mobs shouting bigotry and hate down the public street is disturbing, especially because these people believe themselves to be patriotic––while telling us that the United States should have been defeated in WW2 and the Civil War. They believe American values of democracy and tolerance should not prevail. They believe that the men and women who died for those values died for nothing, or, worse, that they died for false values. They may carry the U.S. flag along with their enemy flags but they are not patriots.

Here’s another video making the rounds, from the NRA. This is the organization that arms the Right and inflames their dreams of “purifying" this country the way Germany “purified” itself in the 1940s, by force of arms. The NRA urges “real Americans" to arm themselves against “the other”, the person who looks or thinks or worships differently. Note that it was the Nazis and Confederates who came to Charlottesville armed.

You can watch the virulent NRA hate propaganda spot here at ThinkProgress

It appears that the NRA gets considerable support and aid from Russia, America’s longtime global foe and Trump’s greatest ally.

The NRA's coziness with Russia is discussed here, at Medium

Fascism, bigotry, authoritarianism, violent suppression of people's rights. These strains crawl out of the same hole. It turns out the Nazis got many of their ideas from the American South.

Business Insider goes into how the founders of Nazism looked to the American South and its race laws to devise the Nuremberg Laws that looted and repressed and finally exterminated the Jews of Europe

*It's being argued that Trump derived the points his more aggressive statement yesterday from the predominant right wing propaganda machine in America today, FoxNews. This is laid out in a video comparison from MediaMatters.

How Conservatives Have Turned Out The Light

Post 2016 Election, it's as if we woke up in a pre-Enlightenment world. Trump and his genie Steve Bannon are medieval in their instincts and their sense of what people should be told by their master and what they should believe (always the same thing).

“It wasn’t Christianity, or religious faith itself in general, that helped make Republican voters more likely to be duped by fake news than their Democratic compatriots. (There were, and continue to be, lots of progressive or liberal people of faith.) Instead, susceptibility to fake news has its particular historical origin in Christian fundamentalism’s rejection of expert elites.” ~Christopher Douglas, The Annenberg Center, USC This article is worth the read. It goes into why conservative Christians are more easily conned than more progressive ones. At least in areas other than the usefulness of yoga for treating skin conditions.

Here's how the Right has rigged the internet, our knowledge marketplace, to steer the public to the Right. Do you hate when people finish your sentences for you? Google does this. When you type in search criteria it has a strong tendency to complete your thought in an angry racist or sexist way. From The Guardian

Why is it so hard to unlearn wrong information and false ideas and distorted feelings like hatred? Because they're written on our brains like tattoos. There are people who know this and exploit it. The New Yorker writes about this problem.

After carrying water for the anti-enlightenment side for decades, David Brooks muses about why the Enlightenment is losing out in the Age Of Trump.

Three reasons I can think of. 1. Stupid people are easier to cheat. 2. Gullible people are more obedient. 3. The rich Republicans who dominate our country prefer dumb, obedient people.

At Esquire.com Charles Pierce refuses to feel sorry for all the Trump voters who got tricked into voting for him and now realize Trump plans to hurt them.

Trump refuses to believe facts and expert analysis that contradicts what he knows in his gut. When he doesn’t like what he hears he demands reality be reconfigured to please him.

So instead of being guided by expert professionals American policy is being guided by the intestines of a man whose emotional disorders date back to his early bathroom training. Steve Benen of the Rachel Maddow Show writes about this.

We've Seen This Before

The New York Review of Books reminds about the sequence of power grabs following the Reichstag fire in 1933.

"On February 27, 1933 the German Parliament building burned, Adolf Hitler rejoiced, and the Nazi era began. Hitler, who had just been named head of a government that was legally formed after the democratic elections of the previous November, seized the opportunity to change the system. “There will be no mercy now,” he exulted. “Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.”

"The next day, at Hitler’s advice and urging, the German president issued a decree “for the protection of the people and the state.” It deprived all German citizens of basic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly and made them subject to “preventative detention” by the police. A week later, the Nazi party, having claimed that the fire was then beginning of a major terror campaign by the Left, won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections. Nazi paramilitaries and the police then began to arrest political enemies and place them in concentration camps. Shortly thereafter, the new parliament passed an “enabling act” that allowed Hitler to rule by decree."


SLATE discusses the strategy by the Trump/Bannon regime to strip our democracy of powers and vest all power in the White House.

"The rage felt by the president’s critics is real, and understandable, but it also plays into Trump’s broader agenda. His chief strategist Steve Bannon outlined that strategy this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, describing it as nothing less than the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon’s comments this week suggest a darker, more nefarious purpose to the nascent Trump administration’s dysfunction. It may be the case that the Trump team is deliberately failing to staff, manage, and provide resources for federal agencies so as to sabotage and slowly dismantle them. To make matters worse, the Trump team might be leveraging the controversies regarding its disastrous national security moves to obscure and conceal that slow and steady demolition of the bureaucracy.”

The Guardian discusses the Cheney power grab that followed 9/11.

"When he took office as vice-president, Cheney's career in government had been that of the dutiful fixer. He had played by the rules for decades, from the Ford administration on, carrying out others' orders in the bureaucratic shadows, making compromises he must have found objectionable. After 9/11, he finally had his opportunity to put his own stamp on things.

"The new way of doing business was the perfect expression of the "do anything" rationale: the concentration of unheard-of powers in the presidency (and vice-presidency) and the application of raw force against all enemies, real and perceived – to intimidate, to obtain information and to punish."

Trump's Goal Is The End Of Our Democracy

What does President Bannon want? He wants to destroy our system of government. He wants to fulfill what Grover Norquist wished for some years ago, to degrade and weaken and diminish government to the point where he can drown it in the bathtub. That’s what he outlined in his speech to CPAC the other day. He sees Trump as his vehicle for destroying our democratic form of government, our government by the people and for the people, as Lincoln described it.

Bannon sees structure and rules and systems and fair play and good government as evil. The only government he wants is government by him or someone he can manipulate. This is why there's so much admiring talk about Putin. We may learn, if the Republican Congress doesn't manage to cover it up, that Putin is operating Bannon and Trump. Like puppets, as Hillary pointed out and Trump lamely disputed.

Bannon's speech reported in the Washington Post

Many of these antidemocratic and unAmerican ideas have been there for years, spoken out loud by Republicans. Take the famous 1980 speech by Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the Reagan Revolution rubbishing the idea of letting all Americans vote and deriding “good government” as a kind of evil delusion, what he called “GooGoo.” They thought and still think democracy is a nuisance, democracy is childish, democracy is foolish and evil. They are now closer than ever to achieving their dream of making America a white Christian (sic) authoritarian state.

Video of the infamous Paul Weyrich speech is on YouTube and it is chillingly prescient.

Masha Gessen wrote an article for the New York Review of Books shortly after the election in which she warned about the ways an autocrat degrades democratic norms. She’d seen it in Russia under Putin. The playbook looks very much like the playbook of the Trump/Bannon White House.

Ron Rosenbaum, one of the best analysts we have of the psychology of the Nazi regime, wrote an equally sharp warning about Trump in the LA Review of Books. I urge you to read and share both articles.

Both these articles warn that what a determined tyrant does first is discredit and destroy the news media, beginning with the journalists who don’t take dictation but actually analyze and criticize what he is doing. Which is what journalists are supposed to do. Without journalists reporting the truth we are powerless.