In 1923 Hitler led his mob of insurgents to try to overthrow the Bavarian state government. They were stopped after an exchange of gunfire with the police at Odeonsplatz, Munich. After a short time in a comfortable jail (where he wrote his book Mein Kampf), Hitler resumed his Nazi rallies, now including tributes to the ‘martyrs’ who died during his attempted Munich ‘Putsch’, and when he ultimately gained power, he had a plaque erected on Odeonsplatz with an SS guard standing at attention and passers-by required to give the Nazi salute.
Now, a hundred years later, we see a near-identical scenario playing out, with Trump rallies featuring long tributes to his January 6 ‘hostages’, and his empty-headed hordes eating up every word. We are only one election away from a potentially disastrous election, after which ‘plaques’ will undoubtedly be placed outside the Capitol to honor the creeps who desecrated one of our most sacred buildings and threatened our democracy by trying to overturn a fair election.
I’m not suggesting Trump could come to power in a fair fight. Hitler got to the top with only 33% of the vote, but that can be a decisively large number in a complex parliamentary government. We have our own complexity called the Electoral College, and the billionaires behind Trump recognize it as their best route to victory. That’s why they are backing various third-party candidates, suckers with huge egos who are too self-centered to grasp they are being used.
Of course, in addition to the third party attack, they have pushed their voter suppression into overdrive. Expect long, long lines at polling places in big cities, armies of Republican dunces challenging votes, disappearance of polling places and voting machines in Dem strongholds, purging and ‘unexplained loss’ of Dem voter registrations, and of course the usual attacks on mail-in voting. We can’t forget that DeJoy is still running the Post Office.
And don’t be lulled into complacency by the scores of Republicans who are claiming to have ‘seen the light’, and now reject Trump. We remember that, for a while after January 6, members of the conservative intelligentsia - that is, the handful of old-time Republicans who can read and write - claimed they were finally through with Trump, but craven as they are, once they grasped that rightwing media and ‘the base’ were digging in their heels, they crawled one by one down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and swear fealty.
Whenever I hear Republicans saying they’re done with Trump, I think back to the ‘never-trumpers’ in 2016, whose only ‘never’ was never showing up to vote for Democrats.