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.

Fascists And Republicans Have Colluded Before––Are They The Same?

I keep asking: when are the stories about the Russian attack on our election and infiltration of our politics going to make the necessary comparison with the German American Bund, a fascist infiltration run by and from a foreign enemy, designed to turn America into a lesser power unlikely to challenge the Nazis' global ambitions?

The Nazis organized the Bund to neutralize America’s traditional friendship with Britain and other European democracies, to make America neutral and isolationist. Russia used Trump to neutralize and isolate American power in the world, to split up the western alliance, NATO, and similar alliances we had around the world, to bust up trade agreements, to sow discord within the United States itself. They achieved this goal far beyond any rational expectation. Trump, by his appointments to key posts and non-appointments, has also achieved a overall degradation of our democratic institutions and systems of government: the State Department, the EPA, the FCC (the agency that is supposed to keep foreign bots and trolls from dominating our public communications), the various bureaus and departments tasked with making our systems function properly and fairly. The Trump/Putin win in this election has also turned the Department of Justice from a department focused on protecting Americans’ rights into a tool for white supremacy and white minority rule, a deportation machine, a device for making America less attractive and less admired in the world.

The German goals with the Bund dovetailed neatly with Republican goals in the 1930s, so there were two machines working to derail FDR’s New Deal and America’s alliance with Europe’s democracies. As this short BBC documentary describes, in 1933 and 34, just after FDR began his first term, groups funded by Wall Street began organizing a coup. The coup failed, but the movement continued, calling itself The Liberty League, championing corporate power and opposing workers’ rights and efforts to rebuild our infrastructure by putting Americans back to work with government spending. So this neat alliance between foreign fascists and American Republicans is not new.

The new Russian strategy sold via bots and trolls and agent provocateurs fits neatly with decades-old Republican strategies of divide and rule. Divide white workers from black and Latino workers. Divide men from women. Divide by religious belief. Divide the religious from the non-religious. Divide regions against each other (note how Republicans opposed relief after Hurricane Sandy…of course they now demand relief for their own disasters.) The motives and sentiments expressed by the Russians in their global mischief probably appeared very familiar to Republicans who were targeted. So familiar it didn’t seem foreign or wrong. It fit previous Republican instructions. Ingredients in the Russian playbook include race resentment, global grievances and feelings of unjust decline in status, hatred of more successful and prosperous countries and groups, fierce religious prejudices, and overall an almost medieval tribalism. So it may be hard to sort the con game from a free choice made by Republicans and independents susceptible to the Russian/Republican pitches.

Bill Moyers has this helpful, factual, timeline of the Trump/Putin relationship and how the Republicans were cool with it.

This reporting from McClatchy and the New York Times explores how the Russians did it and might help explain why Republicans were so comfortable going along with it.

The Steele Dossier, which is being proven out in many of its concerns and suspicions, reminds us of how the Russians also used political blackmail to enforce Trump's compliance with their plan.

If a majority chooses fascism in an election is it still democracy? Remember: Hitler was elected in a democracy, which enabled him to close it down and install a fascist autocracy.

Were Republicans duped or were they willing collaborators? You might point out that the Russians were spreading lies and fake news. It was a trick. The Trump answer to that is to say the news networks were fake news too. When it’s all lies the public tends to choose sides, revert to tribal loyalties.

There has been another Republican defense that says “All politicians lie.” This is a vast expansion of the fact that no politician is ever able to fulfill all of his or her promises. And political oppositions force compromises to achieve anything. Are compromises a lie? This is another familiar totalitarian smear against democracies, but Republicans have run on it for decades. The goal among antidemocratic politicians has been to degrade confidence in our system and our democratic norms, to degrade our institutions to make Americans frustrated and distrustful of them, to make Americans long for a strong man, a dictator. Dictators are so much more efficient because they order something and it gets done. The problem is totalitarians make decisions that benefit themselves, letting lesser benefits trickle down… and that pathetic promise is also familiar. It counts on Americans being so busy fighting amongst themselves for the diminished benefits that they don’t organize against the power that has diminished, actually stolen, those benefits.

In our recent fight over “entitlements” and prosperity the Republican strategy has been to say “some other group” has stolen your prosperity or feels falsely entitled to what you are legitimately entitled to, while the Republican machinery has actually been taking that prosperity and redistributing it upward. They’ve also distributed the tax burden downward, off of the wealthy classes and onto the working class. The enemy isn’t taxes, which pay for roads and schools and hospitals, it’s their redistribution. The dysfunction this unfair redistribution has caused has dried up the revenue that keeps our infrastructure functioning. There is another similarity here between Russia (a kleptocracy) and the Republican juggernaut. In Russia wealthy tax evaders have been laundering their stolen wealth abroad, apparently through people like Donald Trump and Paul Manafort and others, impoverishing their country, hollowing it out, lowering its GDP disastrously and lowering life expectancy dramatically. Will similar kleptocratic behaviors by the Republicans and their clients do the same here?

When the news becomes bad nobody wants to believe it. People tend to blame it on others. When systems fail we blame the people who have tried to keep those systems working, we don’t tend to blame the political party that degraded the tax revenue that kept the systems operative, that updated safeguards and installed backups. For three decades, if you listen to the Republican rhetoric, you can see how much they agree with the Russians: they want to hollow out America the same way Russia’s leadership and oligarchy has hollowed out Russia. The Republicans want a lower paid, obedient, servile working class, which is a basic fascist goal. They know this is unattractive, but they know that when things stop functioning that Americans will long for a strongman to make it run again, doing so by good old corporate dictatorial powers.

Strong men get into power by promising what they have no intention of delivering. Democrats, both small-d and capital-D, actually mean to deliver on their promises, sometimes they fail or succeed only partially. An unfulfilled promise is not a lie when the politician persists in trying to achieve what he or she promised. In a democracy, compromises are not lies, they are how democracy works. I suppose you could also say Trump was telling the truth when he promised to do harm to millions of Americans; he meant to do these things and will still try to do them if he can. He promised to shut down whole departments of government. Not a lie: he has installed department heads dedicated to making poisons flow into our water and air again, to re-accelerate climate change, to put the internet firmly into the hands of corporations and restrict its use by the rest of us, to keep poverty wages below the poverty line, to re-accelerate health insurance rate hikes and make it harder for sick people to get care. He’s honest about the things he plans to do, but he lies about how those things will affect us. He promises we will get tired of winning when he intends to restrict the winning to himself and his class of rich people, powerful people, the kinds of people his prosperity gospel preachers say are blessed by God because they are rich. Is that a lie? Most con games are lies sold with partial truths. The way the Nazis “persuaded" the German people. The way Putin manipulated his way into dictatorship. It’s a con game and one political party in America seems very adept at it and very comfortable with it. It’s exactly what the Republicans want. It's a con game. This is why they nominated a con man to run it for them.

No political party or movement or figure has lied so massively and so constantly as this Republican president and this Republican Party. It’s as if the Russians had grafted their fascist DNA onto the Republican Party, along with their aggressive use of lies and wholehearted willingness to believe lies and rationalize them. As Republican Duncan Hunter said about Trump: “He’s an asshole but he’s our asshole.” This is tribalism. This is an absence of values. This is what Orwell wrote about in 1984, a system turned upside down and inside out. This is what Sinclair Lewis wrote about in It Can’t Happen Here. It didn’t happen in the 1930s, but it appears to have succeeded in this decade.

The Divine Right of Kings––The Trump Version

Trump seems to fancy himself an absolute monarch on the old European model. Which means he doesn’t know what the American Revolution was about.

Jonathan Chait compares Trump to the French monarchs who were deposed by the French Revolution.

Millions of Americans voted for the Trump they saw on television. Trump the tyrant. Trump the bully. Trump the tough guy. Trump the “nobody’s fool.” Trump the guy who nobody pushes around, the guy who will not take orders from anyone.

It has become clear Trump is what Hillary said he was: an obedient and craven puppet of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. (We need a list of the major policies he has refashioned to please the Russians. The latest being his reversals on Syria.)

Vanity Fair examines how Trump has been played by a better con-man than himself.

If we lacked evidence before (we didn’t) the NYTimes interview proves President Trump is astonishingly ignorant, foolish, petulant, self-centered, vindictive, paranoid, and mentally deranged. With nuclear missiles.

Slate's Will Saletan parses the bizarre NYTimes Trump interview.

VOX does its own analysis of the interview.

Trump believes the presidency he won became his personal tool, his power to use and abuse as he saw fit. And with Trump all power is there to benefit Trump and only Trump. All power is also there to punish his opponents, critics and enemies, a list that now includes everyone who doesn’t share his concept of presidential power, who doesn’t believe we live in a dictatorship.

The New Republic looks at the authoritarian potential of the Trump juggernaut.


This is nothing like Watergate, it’s far worse. There were things Nixon would not do, like pardoning his aides and himself. Also Nixon hired his burglars in America, he didn’t bring in the Russian spy agencies. Nixon let his major donors buy his California spread for him but he wasn’t bailed out of bankruptcy by Russian mobsters. Key differences. Nixon was on the hook to entrenched powers here in America but he also resented and opposed those entrenched powers, the Eastern Establishment. Trump hates the same Establishment for not admiring and accepting him so he outsourced his power base to a foreign dictatorship and its powerful criminal allies.

Comparisons are also being made with Clinton and Whitewater. No comparison. Clinton did not interfere or threaten or obstruct that investigation. The first Whitewater special counsel, a lifelong Republican, was fired for not being sufficiently ideological. They fired him for failing to find evidence of guilt and appointed a super-ideologue in Ken Starr who promised to find Clinton guilty of something. Eventually he had to rely on stories from the anti-Clinton Mellon-Scaiffe nexus to devise a trap, which eventually got the president to dissemble about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, which the inquisitors already knew about and had rigged testimony to turn any Clinton denial into perjury. The offhand total of dissembles/lies/perjuries by the current president runs into four digits and his deputies multiply that.

Michael Tomasky reminds us of how partisan the Clinton prosecution was. The Mueller investigation is one of the most urgent and necessary investigations our nation has ever seen. It's not trivial. Just as Trump is less trivial and amusing than he seems.

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 is our first Caudillo

I learned a new word today. Revolutionary periods breed lots of new words. Actually this is an old word from a bad old time. Most of Trump's ideas are bad old ideas.

The word is Caudillo.

In the Spanish colonies of South and Central America the caudillo was a militarized landowner who exercised authoritarian power in his locality. A tinpot tyrant. A strong-man.

"The root of caudillismo lies in Spanish colonial policy of supplementing small cadres of professional, full-time soldiers with large militia forces recruited from local populations to maintain public order. Militiamen held civilian occupations but assembled at regular times for drill and inspection. Their salary from the Crown was a token; their reward was in prestige, primarily because of the fuero militar ("military privilege"), that exempted them from certain taxes and obligatory community work assignments, and more significantly, exempted them from criminal or civil prosecution. Away from colonial capitals, the militias were at the service of the criollo (white, European) landowners." ~Wikipedia

A caudillo is a petty dictator, but often one of them would rise to the top in a country becoming a tinpot dictator. This was usually accomplished through force, always through threat of force, often with the kind of violent reprisal and butchery we saw in the newspapers. Note the caudillo was always white, whiter certainly than the peasants he butchered. When this brand of politics prevailed we used to refer to South American countries as 33 or 45 or 78 r.p.m. (revolutions per minute).

Political instability is something the U.S. has never been familiar with. We may need to get used to it now. The tinpot/caudillo/brownshirt/mafioso-style leader has never risen this far in the U.S.

I thank James Fallows of the Atlantic for enriching my vocabulary and improving my understanding of what is happening. His Atlantic article can be read here.

The title of his Atlantic article refers to Trump’s habit of treating people in any way he pleases because his power allows him to. “With Such People You Can Then Do What You Please,” i.e. grab them by their genitals. This is how Trump referred to women in his notorious conversation with Billy Bush. Treating women as things he can abuse by a kind of divine right, as if they are possessions or domestic pets. This also echoes the caudillo tradition in various places (not just in former Spanish colonies) where the strong-man had access to any woman who struck his fancy. Sometimes this extended to the prior right to every young bride, prior to her husband. Saddam Hussein exercised this kind of power. Putin’s harem is joked about in bars and now, no doubt, in the White House. Dictators have behaved in this way for as long as there have been dictators. The tales of the Arabian Nights are full of this, as are the tales from the Brothers Grimm. It is a medieval throwback.

Fallows explains how leaders of this type demonize and attack all critics and opponents using all the powers they hold. The president we elect has many powers, but those powers are checked by our system. Trump and his apparatchiks have stated loud and clear that Trump will not accept any checks on his powers. Judges who stop him are illegitimate. Reporters who "ask hard questions" are mean and unfair and "enemies of the people." That is the talk of a strong-man, a tinpot dictator, a mobster, a caudillo with an armed militia behind him. Those who oppose him are put on notice. They are told to expect armed men might come for them in the night. We don't take this seriously because we have never experienced it.

This is a reversion to an earlier time, a less evolved time, a tribal society before there was democracy. Fallows says that the threats against journalists are especially troubling. It sounds like his hero, Putin, who routinely liquidates reporters and editors who disagree with him.

"...what Trump has said about the press and all other institutional buffers on his power reflects a simpler calculus, not institutional but tribal. These other centers of power are either for him, or they are against him. If they are for him, they are good—from foreign leaders who congratulate him...to polls that show results to his liking, to "very honorable" news shows like Fox and Friends. Or they are against him, and if the latter they are “so-called,” “phony,” “failing,” “cheating,” “crooked,” or otherwise to be discredited."

The news media, especially long-form journalism, print journalism, are the guardians of our democracy. They will be the first to go when we are hustled into a dictatorship.

Which Americans Prefer Dictatorship?

One thing I’ve been addressing, or trying to address, is this sudden popularity of fascism, of the idea of dictatorship. Why are Americans attracted to something they’ve never experienced? Why do Americans assume that a dictator would take dictation from them personally? Because that is the assumption Trump’s millions of admirers make.

It isn’t a misunderstanding of dictatorship. Dictators have total power but they are products of a machinery which is the source of that power. If Americans think this is a foreign idea or an obsolete idea they are wrong. It’s existed in America for centuries and it’s still here. As most of America has modernized and urbanized there are parts of America that have remained feudal and antebellum.

The regions where Trump is especially popular are actually very familiar with dictatorship.

The only seat of dictatorial power in America (since the decline of the big city machines anyway) is in rural areas where sheriffs run things. Every powerful office in America has a check on its power, a rival power center in the same district–––except small town sheriffs, whose only check is the electorate, an electorate which is more easily cowed and controlled in rural areas.

Rural sheriffs were the enforcers of Jim Crow. But these same sheriffs have also been the enforcers of male rule. Where the sheriff and his posse of good old boys is the only police force you will probably also find that crimes against women are seldom taken seriously. Unless the “violation of sacred womanhood” serves as a useful bludgeon against persons outside the powerful circles surrounding the sheriff.

Former (perhaps not so former) Jim Crow country is also Trump Country and Good Old Boy Country and Women-Do-As-They’re-Told Country. It's familiar from the rural South, but it persists in all corners of the country.

It would be worthwhile to examine and report on what I suspect is a significant difference in how women are protected by the law in these areas compared with the rest of the country, and how women in these areas are coerced into thinking like their menfolk and acting, thinking and voting as they are instructed.

There is an important difference between democratic power––the power of a democratic government––and police power. Certainly, these rural sheriffs are elected, but the actual power exists in the office, which is not subject to vote––these regions do not vote to invalidate the sheriff’s power, they simply rotate the occupants of the office, and the occupants exercise the traditional white male rule, enforcing laws that protect that rule and dismissing complaints that challenge it.

These are the areas where you hear serious discussions of "Obama seizing power", as reported in this MotherJones article. Any exercise of lawful Constitutional powers they dislike or disagree with is considered dictatorial, but their own dictatorial rule is entirely proper because it is local. These areas resent federal laws and judicial rulings and regulations because these are the alternate powers that protect and empower women and minorities.

(This bias against federal law was called Nullification when slave states refused to respect any federal law restricting slaveowners' rights. The strategy of Nullification re-emerged in 2009 as all Republicans vowed to disrespect everything the new black president proposed. This excerpt from a Frontline documentary describes this modern Nullification.)

This article from RightWingWatch describes another example of how rural dictators resent the dictatorial powers of the first black president. They cry out against imaginary dictators while they enjoy their own absolute power. They accuse Washington of dictatorship yet they admire a very real tyrant in Russia, whose spies are working hard to put their man Trump into the White House. (This idea of a local tyrant calling on a foreign tyrant to overthrow the national government is not new. It has roots in the Jacobite rebellions against the British parliament, the discontent that sent floods of emigrants to America, whose descendants still populate America's backwoods South.)

The idea of a local police force answerable to no one outside the community is sacred in the parts of America that gravitate toward Trump. Because how things have always been done in these areas is the only right way to do things. It was that way when Eisenhower tried to “interfere" with their Jim Crow law enforcement. It’s that way now when they scream about Obama’s planned dictatorship. Regulation by a fairer national law is anathema to them. What they call "liberty" we could just as well call defiance. They are defying the Constitution they claim to worship. In areas where women and people of color and newcomers who are simply “not from here" are not protected by the law, the system isn’t a democratic one, it’s a kind of dictatorship. These are the areas which want dictatorship on a national scale.

Some Americans Long For A Dictator

Trump continues to talk like a dictator. Jailing his opponent? Who does that? Tin pot dictators do. Putin does that and worse. Journalists and political opponents and garden variety critics in Russia are disappeared fairly routinely.

There are a lot of Americans who want a dictator and they seem to have the weird idea that this dictator would take dictation from them personally.

Maine's embarrassing bigoted governor said this week that America needs Trump to assert some "authoritarian power." Find the story here, via USAToday. Governor LePage longs for a bully boss, a mob-enforcer-in-chief, a dictator. The same people who shout the loudest about enforcing the Constitution shout even louder demanding we tear it up.

Americans are unfamiliar with what dictators do, because we’ve never had one here.

Actually, we have. I think the people (white, male, angry, Southern and rural predominantly) who long for a dictator may base their longing upon the experience of local dictatorships, local sheriffs for instance, who they’ve never felt the hard, sharp edge of, never suffered from, because they’re white and they’ve been chummy with these little rural dictators. These weren't the sweet, gentle Southern sheriffs played by Andy Griffith.

There may be some in urban areas who miss the old city bosses in once corrupt cities like KC and Chicago and points east. You can bet that Trump's supporters in those places are nostalgic for the days when their political boss meted out vengeance on the other party's followers when he won.

Trump's most rabid supporters don't mind the idea of dictatorship here because they were never the ones who suffered when it occurred. They were the ones favored by these corrupt bosses and tinpot sheriffs. They received the benefit of harm done and confiscations targeted at various minority groups.

If it sounds familiar in another way, this was the way Nazi Germany financed its economy during the thirties, by confiscating the property and businesses and land owned by the Jews. In the Jim Crow South sheriffs routinely swept up black laborers returning home from work, charged them with loitering, and sent them as unpaid laborers to the timber and mining operators; they also financed their county budgets out of the fees these industries paid them for the slave labor, and out of the fines the laborers were charged for "loitering." An excellent and disturbing film was recently made about this and broadcast on PBS.

This tin-pot caricature is a familiar one from movies and novels about the South and Jim Crow. African Americans remember its ugly side even if most Americans have never learned about this sorry legacy. Women suffered too. Abused women who tried to get justice over sexual assault know this good ol’ boy clubbishness and how it invalidated their full citizenship. The authorities dismissed any complaint a woman might make the same way Senator Jeff Sessions dismissed the outrage over Trump's sexual assault boasting.

The dictator figure has been very real and a problem in the parts of America where Trump’s fan base lives.

Your Daily Trump-The Alt Right Explained

Trump has embraced that oddball fringe of the right wing called “Alt Right”. What is it? The Alt Right wishes George Washington would have declared himself king. The Alt Right believes democracy is a joke and our country should be run like a corporation, from the top down. The Alt Right believes people are expendable and discardable… everybody but them of course.

Explained succinctly and well by VOX

The horrible history of campaigns like Trumps that suggest people take up arms against each other

From The Nation

The "Make America Great Again" meme dates back to the days of Jim Crow and lynching.

From BuzzFeed

The old Trump campaign manager summarized at SLATE

The new guy's open bigotry and extremism explained by Alternet.

One of Breitbart’s bright boys is a lot like Donald, bragging about big charitable giving and pocketing the money instead.

So explain again why we are crucifying Hillary and Bill for running one of the most ethical and effective charitable organizations in the world...

How America became a nation that worships selfishness and greed, conned by the high priestess of greed and hate, Ayn Rand. From Raw Story

A mild satire on Trump’s potemkin fantasy which might result in the satirists imprisonment if Trump is elected

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?