Your Daily Trump

Dana Milbank repeats what he wrote six months ago: Trump is a bigot and a racist. He is, always has been, and will be a racist and a bigot if elected. Worth reading.

Josh Marshall explains the Trump grift, which is the aggressive use of his bigger wealth against those with less. He uses his wealth to intimidate those he has cheated and to hypnotize those he looks forward to cheating. The art of the deal is breaking it and threatening anyone who thinks there was a contract. Trump’s counterparties are expected to abide by contracts but Trump, never.

I also read George Will’s Olympian sneer at Trump and at Paul Ryan for having endorsed him. George Will helped create the party that vomited up this nominee. He’s one of Trump’s many creators in the GOP brain trust. Trump is the natural result of what George Will has spent the past decades selling. If you demand a government that can’t and won’t do what the people expect it to do you naturally will nominate a vandal-in-chief to supervise the implosion. I won’t link to Will until he apologizes.

Fascism: Can It Happen Here?

It happened before in another educated industrialized country. Books were written about it. Milton Mayer's book was one of the best. He interviewed ten ordinary Germans in depth to discover how they'd been led down that path.

An excerpt from Milton Mayer’s THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE: THE GERMANS 1933-45

How did it happen then? Is it happening again now? The resemblances are disturbing: people who aren’t paying attention, people who are uninterested in the truth and more interested in what is popular, people who want a complete change from what we have and are eager to have an authoritarian government.

The German magazine Der Spiegel is calling Donald Trump the most dangerous man in the world.

How did this happen here?

Was it the well documented Deception Industry which urges people to disbelieve science and the advice of experts?

Was it FoxNews, which pumped us full of disinformation?

Are people eager for a dictator because they’ve been so skillfully confused––just so they don’t have to make decisions themselves?

George Will, who helped build this Republican Party, has finally grown alarmed by what he made.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi describes what has happened and how it happened.

VOX explains Trump's particular brand of authoritarianism.

Hand-wringing from the conservative middle-American beacon, The Chicago Tribune.

In the 1930s Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel, IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, about a fascist demagogue who is elected to the presidency and quickly makes of this country what Hitler made of Germany. Can it happen here?

Letter to George Will

(George Will gave some advice to Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker about the stupidity of science denial. Which prompted me to write this letter.)

Mr. Will,

I sympathize with your situation, having to advise a Republican frontrunner to acknowledge science and reality. It must be embarrassing.

John McCain corrected a woman in the crowd during his campaign who said Obama was a Muslim. Then it seemed the only rational thing to do.

The problem is the Republican Party has spent the years since then catering to this same ignorant prejudice. Actually they’ve been doing it longer, if you consider Lee Atwater's and Roger Ailes' and Pat Buchanan’s not so subtle dog whistle bigotry. This past week we also have Giuliani’s ugly, ignorant remarks.

Why cater to ignorance? Because it’s worked for you. It’s elected right wing Republicans, each one further right than the last, each one more out of touch with reality. Each one more cynical and dishonest and nutty.

And this has made your party the cynical dishonest nutty bigoted party. It wins elections for you.

Well (and I realize it’s totally wrong to use this analogy) this kind of nutty cynical dishonest bigotry also helped Hitler win elections.

If it works it becomes compulsory? That seems to be the rationale Republicans have imported from the business world. It’s wrong and dangerous in both places. It’s endangering the climate our food supply is based on, it’s endangering our democracy, it’s endangering our economy, it’s endangering our future.

You have a lot of work to do unwinding this.

Of course, if you think it’s more important to carry water for the Republicans in next year’s election… if that’s more important to you and the other commentators on the right, God help us.