Back in another time, all the way back to 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager James Carville posted a statement on the walls of Clinton’s campaign offices to keep the campaign focused.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
In the spate of all the issues that arise during a presidential campaign, Carville wanted to ensure that focus remained on the one driving issue of the campaign – the economy.
Here we are in 2024, light years from 1992, and the electorate is bombarded with myriad issues relevant to our time along with no shortage of distractions. But channeling my inner Carville, I have my own statement to direct our focus on what’s truly at stake in this election:
It’s The Fascism!
In February 20,1939, just under eight months before the Nazi’s attacked Poland, kicking off World War II, the Madison Square Garden was the venue for a rally organized by the German American Bund. Ostensibly organized to celebrate George Washington’s birthday, complete with a huge portrait of Washington on their stage, this was an American Nazi hatefest.
The attendees wore their Nazi uniforms, snapped off the Nazi salute, the swastikas on full display, and thousands were in attendance.
Speakers claimed that if Washington were alive, he’d be friends with Hitler. Speakers warned against Jewish world domination. Claims were made that Jews dominated the entertainment industry and news organizations. Franklin Roosevelt was called a Jew.
It was a true hate festival. It lasted three hours and then the attendees, hiding their uniforms and faces, disbursed into the night.
On October 27, 2024, the fascists returned to the “world’s most famous arena,” Madison Square Garden. And it, too, was a hatefest.
Joe Rogan’s favorite “comedian,” whose name I will not repeat in the hopes that he returns to well deserved obscurity, opened the rally and cracked a few “jokes:” “These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.”
He went on: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” He finished by cracking a joke about him and a black guy carving a watermelon for Halloween.
If you’re cringing, know that thousands of our fellow citizens laughed.
David Rem, a friend of Mr. Trump, called the vice president "the Antichrist.” He also announced that he was going to run for New York City mayor in the next mayoral election. To those in New York, you are warned and you’re welcome.
Radio host Sid Rosenberg called second gentleman Doug Emhoff "a crappy Jew" and called Democrats "a bunch of degenerates, lowlifes and Jew-haters.” Remember, Doug Emhoff is a Democrat.
Former Trump Administration official and current full on fascist Stephen Miller cried, “America is for Americans and Americans only!”
Elon Musk spoke and said….something, “I'm not just MAGA, I'm dark, gothic MAGA." Then he jumped around, laughing.
This is from a guy who’s already plowed $118 million and counting into his Trump supporting America PAC. At least he didn’t extend the greetings of his new bestie Vladimir Putin.
And while we’re on Musk, on the Friday before the rally, Musk’s PAC released an ad with the tag line, “Kamala Harris Is A C Word.” To be clear, the “C” didn’t stand for “communist.”
Businessman Grant Cardone appeared before Trump and described Harris as a prostitute. Cardone said that Harris "and her pimp handlers will destroy this country."
There was the not-so-subtle Jew bashing from commentator Tucker Carlson who warned about the “Great Replacement” theory. Ever one to equally spew his hatred and bigotry, he proceeded to denigrate Kamala Harris for her race, gender, and her alleged low IQ.
Throughout, Carlson cackled like a little bird who couldn’t fly over his personal cuckoo’s nest.
Alina Habba, Trump’s attorney in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, danced her way to the stage. Given the audience reaction, she was a hit. After losing Trump $83.3 million, Habba went all Billy Flynn and gave the crowd, and no doubt Trump, the “ole razzle dazzle.”
The Trump kids came to the stage and mumbled something about electing their father to the presidency. In the midst of this hate fueled racist and xenophobic hatefest came Melania Trump, an immigrant woman but at least white, to introduce the not-so-great man himself, Donald J. Trump.
It wasn’t long after Trump began his remarks when he addressed the immigration issue by saying “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” Melania stopped smiling and I can’t help wondering if Musk bolted for the doors.
He went on to say, “I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail and then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible."
Trump once again warned about the "enemy from within," called the United States an "occupied country," and said Election Day would be known as "Liberation Day.” He also banged on about the “stolen” 2020 election.
To be clear, the “enemy from within” are not the undocumented aliens that he intends to deport. The “enemy” is anyone who opposes Trump and all he stands for.
It is tempting if not easy to characterize the rally as nothing more than a rally of a cosplaying fascist and his minions, all playing on the grievances of his supporters to win an election. It might be easy, but it would also be wrong.
All the words in all the speeches delivered at this rally were vetted by the Trump campaign and loaded into the teleprompter. These were not speakers who went off script or went rogue. These were words intended to inflame those in attendance at the expense of people throughout the country.
The rally was only the tip of a very deep iceberg. The MAGA show horses danced and pranced (you must see the YouTube video of Habba’s entrance on the stage), while the plough horses stayed away. They had important work to do.
One person absent from this rally was Russell Vought. You may be wondering “who the hell is Russell Vought?”
Vought was Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget. This is an important job. The OMB develops the government’s annual budget, has oversight duties, along with a variety of related functions. This Office has a government-wide scope to conduct these varied duties.
One duty was to begin implementing Trump’s “Schedule F” Executive Order to do away with the civil service as we know it. Under Schedule F there would be no need of subject matter expertise or experience. All that would be required of the applicants in order to obtain and keep their jobs is slavish obedience to the fuhrer, I mean president.
Fortunately, Schedule F was ready for implementation at the very end of Trump’s term. Even more fortunately, Biden, upon taking office, immediately rescinded that order.
But if Trump is returned to the presidency, it’s coming back. It will be the return of the spoils system on steroids.
Now out of office, Vought has a new gig – he is devising legal justifications to prevent the military leaders or government lawyers from thwarting Trump’s executive orders. He claims that this is necessary to prevent a “Marxist takeover” of America.
He is in sync with Trump’s plans to turn the military against the citizenry. He openly opposes transgender rights and thinks we should be on a war footing on the southern border.
Oh, and as if this comes as a surprise, he is the architect of Project 2025. This “project” is not limited to publishing 922 pages of complete fascist drivel. It is recruiting, vetting, and training thousands of people ready to occupy government positions on “Day One” of a Trump presidency.
Like I said, the spoils system.
Vought recently said, “We have detailed agency plans,” he said. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.” He is working on how to invoke the Insurrection Act to allow the United States military to act against United States citizens on United States soil.
Say goodbye to Posse Comitatus.
Vought wants to develop a “shadow” Office of Legal Counsel to counteract the legal advice given the president by the independent Department of Justice.
And there’s more. Vought wants to defund government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency in order to curtail regulations on fossil fuel energy companies. Obviously, global warming is a hoax.
Oh yeah, he has likened the 2024 election to our historic seminal historical moments when we faced a threat of war. Think the 1860 election, the results of which set in motion the events that resulted in our Civil War. He said, “We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could] — and I believe it will — rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us,”
He’s an avowed Christian Nationalist, believing that God put him and others here “at times such as this.” This is not Dylan’s With God On Our Side. This is a messianic vision carrying the imprimatur of the deity to commit any act in the name of God.
Think the Midaevil crusades.
Look, if you’re unsettled by what I’ve written, Good! You should be unsettled by all this. While the MSG clown show was directed toward the rubes, guys like Vought are the true threat. And I fear he’s just a tip of a very large fascist iceberg.
A couple of days ago, I thought when I posted The Enemy From Within, it would be my last post through the election. But last Sunday night’s hatefest at the Garden incentivized me to post some more.
In that post I asked you to consider acting in your own interests. I said this election is about one thing – democracy. We can look for an issue hook to bring us to one candidate or another, but that’s not what this campaign is about.
This campaign leading up to the 2024 presidential election is a binary choice, democracy versus fascism. Two hundred and forty-eight years of our history hangs in the balance.
No pressure.
“Fascist” and “Fascism” are hot button words. Too often, they are freely used to describe or label political opponents and governmental officials for actions they take or for the positions they espouse.
It’s sort of the equivalent of giving someone the finger.
However, more than an epithet, it’s a real thing. Fascism is not a mere derogatory word, it is a system by which government and society are organized.
Most scholars agree on the elements of fascism. Broadly speaking, there are four.
First, undermining facts. This the easiest element. We saw this by Trump’s response to the crowd size that attended the 2017 Inauguration. Trump forced his new press secretary, Sean Spicer, to argue, despite empirical evidence to the contrary, that the crowd was the largest to attend an inauguration – ever. And we saw this when Special Advisor Kellyanne Conway tried to clean up the lie when she said that Spicer presented “alternative facts.”
The Washington Post found that Trump lied over 30,000 times while President. When Fact Checked or contradicted by the media, he cried “Fake News.”
In 2018, Trump lied about “caravans of migrants” coming north to our southwestern border.
Recall the effort of Trump denying the existence of the COVID virus. He ignored and undermined the best medical advice that would have prevented the community spread of the virus. Because he feared the adverse political ramifications of a spreading pandemic on his watch, Trump consigned millions to illness and hundreds of thousands to their deaths.
And six months prior to the 2020 election he claimed that the only way he could lose was if the election were stolen. We know what and his minions did post election that fed into that lie and served to incite the mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6.
Trump would continuously repeat his lies so that increasing numbers of citizens concluded that they must be true. With the aid of cable television and an internet echo chamber, more people came to accept fiction as fact.
Trump is a practitioner of the “Big Lie,” a lie so big that people would never think it false. This not only undermined people’s regard for their government, but as we saw with COVID, it undermined people’s regard for science, thus placing the nation’s health at risk.
In the Trump era, we have seen MAGAlike politicians at the state and local levels ban books from libraries, and take specific historical, scientific subject matter out of their public school curricula. Instead of lies by commission, these are lies by omission.
More recently, Trump and his vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance repeatedly lied about Haitians in Springfield Ohio eating neighbors’s pets and Venezuelan street gangs taking over Aurora Colorado.
If this torrent of lies continues unabated and without challenge, we’ll all be through the Looking Glass having tea with the Mad Hatter.
Second, demonizing the “other.” Sadly, this too is easy. Anyone non-white is the “other.” From the time he descended on his golden escalator in 2015 to his recent lies about immigrants in Ohio and Colorado, Trump has depicted the “other” as criminals, drug dealers and junkies, convicts, gang members, and mentally disabled.
Trump questioned the place of birth of our first black president. He tries to marginalize his current opponent, a woman of black-south Asian descent, as low IQ, a “communist” and a “fascist.”
He calls our country “a garbage can,” or a “trash can.” Like all fascists before him, he paints a dystopian picture of the country he seeks to lead and portrays himself as the nation’s savior.
He attacks the “other,” with an able assist from his media sycophants, to stoke people’s fears that feed on their not-so-long dormant racism.
Third, undermining government acts and policies, and the rule of law. We know he has no respect for and less interest in the operation of government. He tried to not merely create a unitary executive branch (gratefully he didn’t quite get there), but if he gets the chance, he will bend the legislature and the courts to his will.
In a unitary government there is only one person with all the power.
He lies about the economy, the labor market, and the cost of living. Some aspects are good, some aspects need more work, but in no way, shape, or form are they as bad as Trump would have you believe.
After the horrific fires in the northwest in 2020, Trump ignored Washington State’s governor, a democrat, thus withholding vital relief aid from those who suffered severe losses in those fires. As it turned, one of the areas was one of the three congressional districts in the state in which a majority of voters cast ballots for Trump.
He views laws as applying to other people, not him. Any judge presiding over any matter concerning Trump is subject to being called unfair, corrupt, stupid, and biased. Trump believes that because he was once president, he is immune from any action he took as president and thereafter. And thanks to a packed Supreme Court he may be right.
Fourth, the control of the election outcomes. This is TBD. In 2020, Trump conspired with people in and out of government to overturn an election he lost. He failed, but just barely.
And with a week to go, Trump’s already claiming that the Democrats are cheating.
In this election we’ve seen state officials impose restrictive voting procedures. We’ve seen purges of voting lists, many for specious reasons. We’ve seen increased litigation designed to question the fairness of elections under patina of legal “reasoning.”
Six days before Election Day, Trump filed a complaint asserting that three of “his” voters were denied ballots in one county. This claim has little if any merit but may have the goal of ginning up the base.
Today, a Pennsylvania court extended the deadline for people to drop off their completed ballots. It was a legal much ado about nothing, an administrative decision easily addressed and corrected, but the damage was done – this incredibly minor issue fed into the stolen election narrative.
In five days, we’ll see more. Any litigation will have one and only one purpose: to place Donald Trump in the presidency. And after that all bets on democracy’s survival are off.
Over the next five days, many of us will either vote early or vote next Tuesday. Some voters are undecided. Each of us tries to vote our interests as we see them. We worry about a menu of policies and interests. On some we can come to easy agreement; others stir our passions.
But I’ve said it before, and I say it again. The 2024 presidential candidates are not alike, they are as different as day and night. Policies are important but, in this election, not vital.
There is only one overarching issue in this election, whether on January 20, 2024, when the 47th President takes the oath of office we are still a functioning democracy, or whether we’re on a path to something worse.
To those who are either undecided or remain moveable from one candidate to the other, or to those thinking either to vote for an obscure third party or skip the election all together, I say this: you have a chance in this election to ensure our present and secure our children’s future. You have a chance to ensure that after this election we will have a renewed chance to work together for our common good.
So, to that I say, if you’re uncertain about which issue should be the most important in this election,
IT’S THE FASCISM!
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