Time to take Donald Trump seriously. Trump is winning the Republican nomination. Jeb! isn't even close. The most recent PPP New Hampshire poll puts Trump at 35%, three times what the next man gets. The next man happens to be John Kasich at 11%. The next woman – the only woman – is Carly Fiorina with 10%. Support for Jeb Bush and Scott Walker has collapsed, their respective 7% barely beating Ben Carson. Outside the Granite State, the newest national poll from Quinnipiac has Trump at 28%, Ben Carson at 12%, and Cruz, Bush and Rubio at 7%. Scott Walker places sixth with 6%.
Trump is doing better in match-ups against Democrats as well. A recent CNN poll has him only six points behind Hillary Clinton. Imagine another Lehman style crash. Imagine a split in the Democratic Party. With either scenario, President Trump is no longer a far-fetched nightmare.
Trump doesn't just have growing support in the polls, it's also real and deep according to
fresh reporting by the New York Times:
A review of public polling, extensive interviews with a host of his supporters in two states and a new private survey that tracks voting records all point to the conclusion that Mr. Trump has built a broad, demographically and ideologically diverse coalition, constructed around personality, not substance, that bridges demographic and political divides. In doing so, he has effectively insulated himself from the consequences of startling statements that might instantly doom rival candidates.
The left is focused on how stupid, clownish or divisive Trump is. That misses the point because his constant attacks on minorities and women, his “political incorrectness” is the reason he leads the field. His outrageous strategy seems to work in today's America. It's worth noting what Trump's political mentor,
Roger Stone, once said:
Remember. Politics is not about uniting people. It’s about dividing people. And getting your fifty-one per cent.
Donald Trump may look like he's running a clueless campaign that only accidentally caught fire. But he's actually riffing on Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign, the one that beat Humphrey. Nixon ran on one key issue: crime. He used it to foment fear and exploit America's racial divide. He promised to fix things, to make America safe again. No explanation about how, he just kept saying over and over that he alone had the intelligence, good sense and experience needed for the job. He promised peace with honor in Vietnam. He promised that America would be respected again.
Trump has taken that Nixon campaign playbook and made it rawer and rougher, more in tune with Tea Party America. Nixon only dabbled with fascism. Trump embraces it.
With that thought in mind, look at the bottom of the Trump poster he tweeted, promising “real leadership” and “results” to “put the U.S. back into business”. Perhaps you missed the story about how the soldiers used by the Trump campaign were WWII German SS reenactors.
Hint: the Nazis are the four guys moving on the White House.
The campaign said a young staffer grabbed a stock photo with Waffen-SS troopers by mistake. But don't think mistake, don't joke about it. Think Freudian slip. It's the perfect image for America's emerging political movement: Trumpism.
I thought long and hard about using the “F word” in connection with Trump, because it's so often thrown about as an insult and I don't mean it that way. I mean it for real. Follow me below the fold to hear why I call Trump a fascist.
I started following Trump seriously after his numbers failed to tank when he said this about John McCain:
He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, OK? I hate to tell you. He is a war hero because he was captured. OK, you can have -- I believe perhaps he is a war hero.
Pundits and campaign experts predicted the end of his race but it was only the beginning. Outrage followed outrage and Trump kept gaining followers. He even took on Fox News with a
nasty misogynous attack on reporter Megan Kelly. Nate Silver ran a headline on FiveThirtyEight predicting
“Donald Trump Won’t Win A War Against Fox News”. Silver
said Trump's campaign “is eventually doomed”. Perhaps Silver is right about where it will end. But it's not reassuring that he missed so badly on the Trump-Fox News War. Within days Fox News president Roger Ailes surrendered and promised Trump
“fairness & balance” going forward.
For the record, I hope Silver is right and I'm wrong. But the numbers and intensity Trump is generating make betting against him risky. In a three to five person race, Silver's logic is sound. But it's a seventeen person race financed by a bunch of billionaires. Seven to ten of the candidates already have enough money to go the distance.
The more I looked at Trump, the more puzzled I was by it. Trumpmania was starting to make me feel like the man in the Bob Dylan song: “Something is happening here but you don't know what it is. Do you – Mr. Jones?”
It was a bunch of nazis that helped clue me in to his appeal. During the first debate I decided to check out what the white supremacists were saying about Trump on one of their commonly frequented websites, Stormfront. For the record they call themselves “White Nationalists”, but they are Nazis – and I refuse to link to the site – if you want to know more about them I recommend this 2005 Southern Poverty Law Center intelligence report. Stormfront is vile and filthy; it has a level of racism and Antisemitism that still makes me shudder.
To my surprise, the nazis loved Donald Trump. Not all of them. But a sizable number do. David Duke is the former Klansman & Nazi who almost became Governor of Louisiana in 1991. He warns his fellow white nationalists not to expect too much, that Trump's a phony who will eventually be brought to heel by his “Jewish supremacist masters”. But Duke still thinks his Mexican focused attack is a good thing:
So use all the controversy to wake up more people, to extend the debate on immigration, but know what Trump really is.
David Duke by the way, is a “Sustaining Member” of Stormfront and his postings push the Anti-Semitic meter to 9 plus on the Richter Scale, if we had such a thing for hate speech. On his
radio show Duke dials it way back and says
things like this:
[Trump] realizes that his path to popularity toward power in the Republican Party is talking about the immigration issue. And he has really said some incredibly great things recently. So whatever his motivation, I don’t give a damn. I really like the fact that he’s speaking out on this greatest immediate threat to the American people.
I’ve said from the beginning I think his campaign is good in the sense that it’s bringing these issues to a discussion which we have to have in America. And he’s continuing to move the envelope further and I think he understands the real sentiment of America.
But a lot of nazis really love Trump without reservation. They see him as an American fuhrer in the making. One of them writing as “vikaryan” headlined his post: “Donald Trump Is Just The Opening Act. Yes, we will live to see a Fourth Reich”. The nazis also post a lot of pictures of Trump, such as this nazi-created image of Trump as President, looking like he just walked off the set of a Leni Riefenstahl reality show.
Bizarrely enough, the nazis also post lots of celebrity magazine pictures of Trump and his large extended family, especially the Czech branch with all the blonds, bit of a 4th Reich version of
People Magazine. I guess they wanted to show how very white and Aryan the Trumps are.
Mark Potok is a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has this to say about the linkage between Trump and white nationalists:
There is no question we have not seen anything like this since Pat Buchanan. Those two have a lot in common. I am not sure if Trump views himself as a white nationalist, but he has white nationalist positions. When he calls Mexicans rapists and murderers, he is dog-whistling in a very clear way to this far-right constituency . . . In some ways Trump has taken an even more extreme position than many white nationalists. I have never heard of white nationalists call for the deportation of the U.S. citizens born to people who came here illegally . . . Whether or not he is a white nationalist through and through is irrelevant. He is an actor, a TV star like Glenn Beck who is willing to say things that are incredibly poisonous and incredibly damaging to the country.
By the way if you don't know
about the Southern Poverty Law Center, I recommend clicking the link. They've been monitoring hate groups since the 1980s and their law-suits have shut down a number of nasty groups and caused others – such as Stormfront – to avoid language that directly urges violence. They've been the target of bombs and death threats and are some of the bravest and best people in this country.
What it comes down to is that Trump is selling hate and rudeness and a lot of Republicans are buying. Not a majority yet, but 35% is a lot of people. It's the hate and rudeness that makes him bulletproof – or as the New York Times so quaintly phrased it, “effectively insulated himself from the consequences of startling statements”. He is loved because he will build a wall to save us from them. And then he will deport them. And on the way to doing that, he's not the least bit afraid of being “politically incorrect”. And this makes him a strong leader. Someone to follow.
Conservative George Will doesn't get quoted much on Daily Kos, but I'm going to make an exception because he has a particularly on-target description of Trump (ignore the Obama dig and focus on Trump):
Trump, who uses the first-person singular pronoun even more than the previous world-record holder (Obama), promises that constitutional arrangements need be no impediment to the leader’s savvy, “management” brilliance and iron will. Trump supporters consider the presidency today an entry-level job because he is available to turn government into a triumph of the leader’s will.
George Will didn't use the “F word” to describe Trump. But he might as well have.
And I will: Donald Trump is an American fascist. He attacks Mexican-Americans and Latinos to boost his support among racist whites. He glorifies an idealized version of the nation that doesn't include those who disagree with him. He refuses to answer questions he doesn't like and has contempt for the press. He ridicules democratic processes and shows a complete contempt for democratic government. He believes complicated problems are easily solved by a "strong" leader. The kind of government he would need to build that wall and deport 11 million people would be extremely fascist.
The only way to NOT consider Trump a fascist is to think he's a liar, to believe he doesn't really contemplate doing the things he says he will do.
There's a lot more to say about this – about Trump and Nixon and Roger Stone who worked for them both. About other threads of American fascism that are also important to understanding what is happening. About Trump's non-nazi followers, which of course make up the great majority of his support. Also what to do. As much schadenfreude as I feel for the damage Trump is causing the Republicans, having one of our major parties trapped in a hostile take-over by Trumpism is a very bad thing. (I know they brought it on themselves, there's more to say about that as well.)
But until someone pays me to write this stuff I have to go back to my day job.
Expect Part 2 in a week. Maybe two or more. Of course by then Trump will have created enough material for part 3 - 5. That's part of his game too, moving on to create the next controversy while the pundits and experts are still oohing and awing over the last one. It keeps "the establishment" busy while freeing Trump to go about collecting his own little army of voters.