If there is a blogger I quote often, it's Rude Pundit (not entirely sure the real name, just that he's from Louisiana or hails from there). And what he wrote today is worth your time (go visit and come back), of which these are the highlights:
To be a loyal redcap stormtrooper, you gotta go along with Trump no matter which way his insistent madness drives his rhetoric. And, truly, you don't disagree with him when says, "They’re coming from all over the world. People all over the world, we have no idea. They could be healthy. They could be very unhealthy. They could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country, but they do bring in crime, but they have them coming from all over the world and they're destroying the blood of our country." But what you're agreeing with is Nazi shit. It's flat out Nazi shit. Trump can say, as he told Hewitt, that it's not the same as what Hitler said, but it is the same as what Hitler said, except Hitler was talking about Jews and Trump's talking about undocumented migrants. And Trump wants to round them up and put them in camps before deporting them by the millions. And he wants laws passed that would allow authorities to check the papers of anyone they "suspect" of not being American. It's absolute insanity that would fundamentally alter the fabric of the country. It will cause upheaval and violence and economic ruin. But Nazis don't give a shit about that kind of thing because purity matters above all. The rest will take care of itself once the blood is purified. Or, you know, un-poisoned...
Sure, sure, some Trump supporters, desperately hoping to rationalize away the stink of Nazi, will try to say that they know the "rhetoric" Trump uses is over the top and even problematic, but they just think what he did for the country was so awesome that they have to support him and, hey, he can't do all those bad things. You know what you call someone who tries to justify what a Nazi says? You call them a "Nazi..."
So, yeah, I'll call these sick motherfuckers "Nazis." If you're gonna follow someone whose language lines up with Hitler, who has praised dictators and who wants to bring their methods to the United States, who promises to round up millions of people just trying to live their lives, who threatens to attack our neighbors and break our alliances, who sees non-white people as invaders or criminals who must be dealt with harshly, who wants to "cleanse" the country of people who don't believe the same shit he does, fuck, yeah, you're a Nazi. I don't wanna wait around until gas chambers are built to finally sound an alarm.
Nothing Rude Pundit notes is in the wrong. trump is now openly threatening - after what I feared he's do when he was previously in office - to quit NATO. trump is threatening to attack our border allies Canada and Mexico, and not just with more tariff wars. trump is threatening at home to "weaponize" the Department of Justice to attack everyone who's been involved in his ongoing civil and criminal trials. As part of his revenge tour, he's also threatening to fire most of the federal civil service so he can refill all the jobs with people directly loyal to himself.
trump is bragging he will be a dictator on Day One, and although he couches that by saying "it'll be for one day only" that one day is all he needs to become Dictator For Life.
trump has been spending this third round of campaigning going further into extremist and violent rhetoric as though he's got nothing left to lose.
Because in all respects he's got everything to lose.
trump is facing up to four different criminal trials, any one of which could find him in a jail cell halfway through the 2024 campaign cycle. Granted, trump and his lawyers are doing everything they can to delay every trial until 2025, with the hope that he will "win" (most likely steal through another broken Electoral College) re-election and have legal immunity as President, during which he'll wreak havoc on the legal system both federal and state to ensure he never dies in prison. However, most of the trials are already set in the calendar, with the likelihood that if he delays one trial - say, the Mar-A-Lago documents trial set for May getting moved back to 2025 - the prosecutors in the other trials could move up to fill that vacuum. The Georgia conspiracy trial, for example, doesn't have a date set yet but DA Willis claims she can have it going within 30 days, and there's every sign the judges will let her.
And that's just the trials. If the Colorado ballot disqualification holds up in the Supreme Court, there is every likelihood the 34 other states considering that matter will use the 14th Amendment clause - to ban insurrectionists from elective office - to keep trump from either the primary ballot (denying him the Republican ticket) or the general ballot in November (denying him Electoral votes). trump may be blocked from Presidential immunity altogether.
So trump is going for broke. he is going to the most extreme, most reprehensible language he can use to rile up a Far Right voting base that's hungry for the hatred and fear that trump feeds them. It's already stirring them up to attack the Colorado judges and plotting to attack any other state officials down the road.
This is all trump knows: Angering up his base to get them to do the dirty work of scaring the rest of America into letting him get his way. Even at the expense of constitutional norms (and literal constitutional law).
A lot of this depends on what the courts will do to rein in trump's increasingly desperate violence towards everything America should stand for. If they delay his trials, they risk the possibility of trump stealing away the Electoral College by hook and crook. If they ignore the 14th Amendment, they risk the reality that trump will happily trash the rest of the Constitution when he regains the Presidency and fulfills his vow of dictatorship.
If they hold trump accountable - either by sticking to the trials he's likely to lose, or sticking to the 14th Amendment that denies him any chance of being on the ballot - they like the rest of the nation runs the risk of trump's violent rhetoric turning into MAGA's violent actions.
But that risk of violence is unavoidable. One way or another, trump will have blood shed and lives lost.
Better to hold trump accountable to the law, in spite of his bullying words. Let justice be done.
1 comment:
I read your piece in Balloon Juice.
The Rude Pundit's name is Lee Papa. I've been reading him for years and years. My online writing voice is a mix of him, Driftglass, and a biker I used to know named Buckets who was a door gunner in Vietnam. And me, of course.
What the MAGA folks haven't thought through is that their extremism is like a ratchet; it only clicks one way, to even more extreme views and rhetoric. You can't climb down from it, and it all eventually leads to the same place.
They try to make us look like hysterical alarmists for pointing out that place, but we keep on being right about them.
It seems like the supremes are going to help Fergus delay his trials until after the election, so now our job is to beat him anyway. It can be done. Then we get to watch him die in prison.
How's that for Christmas eve optimism?
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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