There simply is no doubt that Donald Trump is an American fascist and that he is working to impost his fascism on the rest of us Americans so he can rule as an unquestioned dictator. It may be worth reviewing the ways is the Trump administration fascist. After all, to oppose a foe you need first of all to understand the foe.
Donald Trump and his government are fascist in at least these ways:
They reject the rule of law at every level including refusing
to be bound by the limitations the constitution puts on presidential power.
Trump thinks of the US Department of Justice as his personal attorneys as he orders them to
investigate bogus claims against his political opponents.
They attempt to suppress freedom of the press. They call
correct news reporting fake news; and now they are threatening broadcasters’
licenses if they don’t fall in line with Trumpist propaganda about the Iran
war.
They send armed thugs called ICE to attack and even kill
peaceful Americans who are not American terrorists though it calls them that until it is proven that they are not.
They think they have every right to attack militarily any country in the world that it wants to. Trump has used military force against
more nations than any other US president.
The Trump administration lies nearly every time any of its people says anything in
public. It lies so often and so obviously that it is not so much trying to get people to believe its lies as getting people to believe either that they cannot know what is true or even that there is no such thing as truth, a classic fascist tactic.
Trump has put in his administration only people who are
loyal to him personally. All employees of the federal government are supposed
to be public servants who are loyal to the constitution not to any individual,
not even the president. Trump fires countless numbers of people like that so he
can staff the entire federal government with people who will bow the knee to
him every time, something on which fascist dictators always insist.
Because he has only bootlicking loyalists around him, there is
no one in the administration who will tell Trump any truth Trump does not want
to hear. Under Stalin, everyone was so terrified of him that no one would tell
him the truth. Indeed, people were so afraid of him that no one wanted to be
the first to stop applauding when he appeared in public. We aren’t there yet,
but Trump sure would love it if that were true of us Americans and him.
They kowtow to the country’s ultrarich by giving them tax cut
after tax cut and stopping the federal
government from regulating any industry they don’t want it to regulate.
They keep enormous portions of the population so poor that
they pay attention only to how they’re going to put food on the table and get
any kind of health care. They slash benefits for people in need as it bows and scrapes to its wealthy supporters.
They make us a pariah nation on the world stage. They do it
by attacking our traditional allies, thank God so far only verbally though
Trump has threatened to use military force to take Greenland from NATO ally
Denmark. They do it by imposing tariffs on goods from foreign nations that disrupt the
world economy. They do it by throwing American military might around in a manner not
entirely dislike the way Nazi Germany and the USSR used to do. And they do it by Trump
simply being an idiotic clown in the presence of other world leaders.
Perhaps you can come up with other ways in which Trump and his administration are fascist, but these are the one that occur to me today. I find it all so discouraging. Indeed, it feels so overwhelming that despair seems to be the only response available to me. I wish it were otherwise. I hope and pray that one day it will be, but, for now, fascism is what we have and what we have to deal with.
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