Your Daily Trump––Torches and Pitchforks and Burning Crosses

Trump urges his angriest followers to intimidate voters in black and hispanic neighborhoods

Reported by SLATE

And those communities are preparing to face that

Reported by Reuters

We may have a defining moment of Trump the politician.

A revealing and chilling few seconds from debate 3 reported by SLATE

Not since Nixon have we seen a paranoid this close to power.

From SLATE, the paranoid style in Republican politics

Trump’s anger is less political than it is personal. It’s always been about him. He’s addicted to the attention. He enjoys having people afraid of him. The great primatologist says it reminds her of dominance behavior among chimps.

Reported by Alternet

Donald Trump’s lewd and offensively sexist talk has given new life to a bad old habit among men of keeping women down through fear and intimidation.

Reported by SLATE

This stoking of fear is a central theme of his campaign. Trump has been intimidating women, people of color, immigrants, employees, and every group that has experienced repression in the past. He seeks vulnerabilities he can exploit. Any group that can be conveniently and quickly marginalized and excluded is quickly targeted and instructions go out to his millions of supporters, who are mostly white men or people who see an advantage siding with the supremacy of white men.

Trump's voter intimidation strategy reported by VOX

And by the Boston Globe

And the news media has been complicit. They see a commercial advantage in stoking the ugliness. Fearful audiences watch cable news. Angry audiences are bigger than happy and contented ones.

Reported by Bill Moyers

“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take. . . . I would do whatever I can for my country.”

Once again we find sheriffs among the leaders of this pitchfork mob

The Milwaukee sheriff and his pitchfork posse, covered by the Guardian

Is Trump campaign a cult?

Question asked by the New Republic

Beyond the talk of armed revolt, there is the sheer profanity and ugliness of Trump’s revolution.

Reported by the reliably conservative Wall Street Journal

Trump's post election plans may include 24/7 rhetoric on his own news network

Reported by the Christian Science Monitor

In the last debate Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the election. It is growing clearer he will lose and he hates losing. When he loses he needs to say he was cheated.

This is how Republicans and Democrats used to congratulate the winner.

The LATimes looks back on the more gracious politics of George H. W. Bush.

(Of course Bush first won the White House using the Willie Horton ad.)

In an even more disputed election in 2000 Al Gore, who had seen the presidency decided by a split Supreme Court, gave one of the most gracious and dignified speeches of his political life.

Al Gore's speech via CNN. What a different and better and safer world we might have had if Gore hadn't been barred from the presidency by the prejudices of five justices.

One Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice warned of the wave of ignorance and anger we are experiencing today.

Via MSNBC and the Rachel Maddow Show.

Your Daily Trump––The Lynch Mob Mentality Is Alive And Well

A perceptive filmmaker has created a video that has gone viral. It plays Trump's hateful violent words over some ugly racist episodes in our past. It's upsetting because it's true. (Please watch this video.)

The old ugliness and hate has crawled out from under its rock.

Trump has validated it and given it a leader. He has given it a voice, his voice.

He has put these bullyboys in action, jackbooted them and encouraged them to bring their guns.

He’s encouraged these thugs to beat up the people who disagree with him. To beat up the people whose skin is a different color, whose religion is different, whose nation of birth is different.

He’s reaped enthusiastic approval from the KKK and American Nazis and he returns their love with a wink.

Hitler had Mein Kampf, in which he explained how brutal he planned to be and who he planned to exterminate.

Trump had his TV programs, which were built around ritual humiliation of people who desperately wanted to get ahead.

Trump’s TV programs brought the ugly brutality and degradation of frat rituals to a mass audience. It was sold as fun, as a joke, as make believe, but it was what he sincerely was after, ritual humiliation of those he could gain power over.

And the TV audience ate it up. They loved watching Trump humiliate people––while they were safe at home and out of his reach.

Well they’re not out of his reach now. The new targets for Trump’s organized beatings and humiliations are American voters, the non-Aryan voters, the non-Republican voters, the voters not born here. And women, especially women. Trump has been rubbishing women for decades from his comfortable position on talk show couches.

We used to call this kind of behavior monstrous and wrong, but Trump has ridden in on a wave of reaction, leading millions of people who hate political correctness because it inhibits their right as Americans to verbally abuse and insult and degrade large groups of Americans they see as different from them. Trump is the champion of those people who think abusiveness is a great cause. His loud presence on television has brought this ugly behavior back into public again, proud and defiant. They have a deep hatred and they want to parade it publicly, the way the ugliness paraded in its brown shirts in Germany in the 30s, the way similar bigots marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in their white hoods in the 20s.

Trump has made this kind of hate popular again. In the early 1960s it was popular to beat up African Americans who sat at whites-only lunch counters across the South. We chose which side we were on then. We must reassert that now.