With yet another campaign ad, Individual-1 gaslights an entire planet, because he’s all about the adoration. He could even be from Uranus.
"The love, the respect for the office of the presidency, it was -- I wish you could be there to see it."
Widespread condemnation of Trump's racist and authoritarian behavior and beliefs is essential if America is to remain a democracy in the near present and future. But Trump's racist attacks on the "Squad," as well as on Cummings, Sharpton and Lemon, must also be understood not in isolation but instead as part of a much larger authoritarian project.
In his 2017 book "Aspirational Fascism," political theorist William E. Connolly writes that Trump is a would-be dictator who "pursues crowd adulation, hyperaggressive nationalism, white triumphalism, a law-and-order regime giving unaccountable power to the police, a militarist, and a practitioner of a rhetorical style that regularly creates fake news and smears opponents to mobilize support for the Big Lies he advances." Here, Connolly locates Trump's racist attacks as tactics in service of a larger strategy.
Central to Trump and the Republican Party's fascist agenda are beliefs about love of country, the meaning of community and how national belonging is defined — and the walls erected around all of these ideas. Trump attacked the Squad's members by writing: "I don’t believe the four Congresswomen are capable of loving our Country. They should apologize to America (and Israel) for the horrible (hateful) things they have said. They are destroying the Democrat Party, but are weak & insecure people who can never destroy our great Nation!"
For Donald Trump, "love" means submission to him. More broadly, Donald Trump's "love" of country is channeled through racial authoritarianism, where nonwhites are to be submissive and silent, surrendering to white power and white dominance over every area of American life. In this deranged worldview, to be an "American" means to be "white" first of all. And the most "authentic" kind of American is not merely "white" but also a "Christian" and "conservative" Trump cultist. (I use the scare-quotes to emphasize that none of those words have clear or obvious meanings.)
www.salon.com/...
Washington (CNN)
President Donald Trump, his press secretary and his director of social media accused Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley, both of whom are Democrats, of misrepresenting the reception Trump received from shooting victims during his visit to a Dayton hospital.
Facts First:
This is false. While both Brown and Whaley criticized Trump's past rhetoric, they were only complimentary about his visit to the hospital.