DONALD TRUMP GOES FULL HITLER ON CAMPAIGN TRAIL

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

Much has been written about Trump’s election to the presidency in 2016; his ignorant, incompetent, criminal administration between 2016 and 2020; his Big Lie about a perfectly fair election being “stolen” from him; his fraudulent, criminal and seditious behavior since his defeat that has seen him convicted on fraud and rape, arrested and on bail on four indictments and 91 felony charges.

More has been written about the debasement of the Republican Party, once the Party of Family Values and the Rule of Law, into the authoritarian Party of Trump, with complete disregard for truth, decency, justice, the constitution and the Rule of Law. It is a party which has amazingly all but nominated a twice-impeached former president and a convicted criminal as its candidate for the 2024 presidency.

The Chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), Ronna McDaniel, said that the RNC will back Trump for the 2024 presidency even as a convicted felon! Interestingly, Ronna McDaniel is a niece of Utah Senator and 2012 Republican nominee for the presidency, Mitt Romney. At a recent speech announcing his retirement from the Senate in 2025, Romney condemned Trump as a “Demagogue”, saying, “It is pretty clear that the Party is inclined to a populist demagogue message”. Previous Trump lawyer, Ty Cobb said last Tuesday at an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, “Trump’s behavior diminishes not only himself but also the United States of America”.

What is emerging of the plans of Trump and his allies if he is elected president in 2024 (he is currently leading President Biden 49% to 45% in recent national polls) are truly terrifying. And these plans are not based on reports from the “fake news media”; they are openly, loudly and proudly ranted by Trump himself during his recent campaign tirades, cheered on by his supporters. These plans include:

Revenge against political opponents, with the weaponization of the FBI, the Department of Justice and Law Enforcement. Trump went full Hitler during a Veteran’s Day campaign speech last Monday:

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, Fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and the American Dream.” He added: “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”.

The particular use of the word “vermin” is most significant. Historian, John Meacham said that “Trump is lifting rhetoric from Hitler and the Third Reich. Because to call your opponents vermin, to dehumanize them, is to not only open the door, but to walk through the door towards the most ghastly kinds of crimes”. And we all saw where that door led to at the Nazi concentration camps.

In his last will and testament, signed shortly before his suicide, Hitler wrote that the true meaning of his prophecy of 1939 was to “exterminate the vermin throughout Europe”.

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, responded, “Those who try to make these assertions are clearly snowflakes suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House”.

“Entire existence of vermin” crushed, exterminated, baked, gassed – distinctions without a difference. At least they are honest about their intentions.

President Biden assailed Trump’s disgusting rhetoric. “It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the 1930s”. He also recalled a past comment when Trump said that immigrants “were poisoning the blood of our country”.

Our “Country of Immigrants” has always been proudly awash with the blood, pure and impure, of immigrants. Never forget the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”. Those huddled masses, that wretched refuse, they were all immigrants, not vermin. As are the teeming masses huddled on our southern border, yearning to breathe free. They are not, as Trump has often derided them, rapists and murderers. They are human beings, immigrants, certainly not vermin.

So when Trump calls immigrants and leftists vermin, he doesn’t mean “them”, he means “you”. When people tell you who they are and what they are going to do, believe them.

White House Staff of a second Trump administration.

Another terrifying prospect of a second Trump term from 2025 would be the fawning devotion, the unquestioning loyalty of the people he will employ in the highest and lowest posts in his administration.

In 2016, most of his top officials were “yes men”, loyalists who were happy to obey his every command, however unconstitutional, even criminal. But there were a few who did push against Trump’s worst instincts. People like former Defense Secretary James Mattis, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Chief of Staff John Kelly, to name just three, who were summarily fired because “they were not loyal enough”, or resigned because they were sick of working for a treasonous criminal. Or as former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, also fired by Trump, said, “a f…ing moron”.

In 2025, however, with the guard-rails removed, the entirety of the Trump administration, including his cabinet and senior diplomats, will be composed of 110% Trump loyalists. A bunch of white supremacist rabble drawn from the radical red, QAnon, Christian, white supremacist politicians of the Party of Trump, backed by the domestic terrorist cults of the KKK, the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers.

Trump has already stated that he plans to purge the government of at least 50,000 employees, “with a particular focus on corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus”. He would institute a massive overhaul of federal workers, replacing them with an installation of loyalists. “With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the political class that hates our country”.

Demolish, expel, exterminate – again, distinctions without a difference.

Immigration

Trump has pledged to “immediately stop the invasion of our southern border” and end illegal immigration.

Travel Bans

“In my second term, we’re going to expand each and every one of those bans because we have no choice. We aren’t bringing anyone in from Gaza, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, or Libya or anywhere else that threatens our security”.

Tests for anyone trying to enter the United States

“I will implement (the) strong idea of logical screening of all immigrants. If you sympathize with Jihadists, you are not getting in. We don’t want you. You’re fired”. In the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, he will put in place “ideological screening”, for immigrants to identify those “dangerous lunatics, haters, bigots and maniacs and those who empathize with radical Islamic terrorists and extremists”.

In addition to banning many from entering, Trump is vowing a historic removal of immigrants. “We will begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”, vowing to implement a “massive deportation blitz”, including rounding up undocumented and legal immigrants and “concentrating” on detaining them in sprawling “camps” while they wait to be “expelled”.

Concentrating, camps, expel – doesn’t take much imagination to work out the meanings of those words, does it?

Family Separations.

Trump is threatening to restart his policy of family separations at the border, taking children away by force from the arms of their parents. Some of the families so separated during Trump’s first term have never been reunited. “When you say to a family that if you come, we’re going to break you up, they don’t come. We did family separations (during his first term), a lot of people didn’t come. It stopped people coming by the hundreds of thousands because when they hear family separation, they say, well, we better not”. Boasting about the benefits of separating children from their parents – that is the epitome of cruelty.

Foreign Policy.

Trump continues to threaten the withdrawal of the United States from NATO, the longest peacetime military alliance in history, unless they pay their fair share for their collective defense.

Trump claims that “even before I am inaugurated, (in January 2025), I will have settled the war between Russia and Ukraine”, including the “endless flow of American treasure to Ukraine”.

Sure, he will. He will simply end the war by encouraging his mentor, Putin, to illegally annex Ukraine, a sovereign, independent nation. And he will support Putin in his future invasions of the old Soviet Union countries, now sovereign nations under the aegis of NATO.

There are many other changes for the worse which can be expected if Trump wins a second term. These changes, basically culture wars, have little to do with issues that affect the American people. Issues like the economy, jobs and income inequality, inflation, healthcare and the social safety net, gun violence, voting rights, LGBTQ and transgender rights, women’s reproductive freedom, climate change and pollution, etc.

Instead, Trump and the Republican Party are more concerned about delaying the cases of 91 felony charges against Trump till after the November 2024 election; pardons for the rioters convicted of federal offenses for their participation in the January 6, 2021 insurrection; self-pardons of Trump, his family and cronies in all past, present and future crimes.

Trump plans to dismantle the Department of Education, with the federal government exerting more power on public schools and colleges, where the main thrust of educational policies would be an emphasis on Christianity, denial of history, banning of “restricted” books and “schools that will teach students to love their country, not to hate their country as they are taught right now”.

Trump’s policy to combat endemic gun violence in schools would be to encourage schools employing veterans, retired police officers and trained gun owners as armed guards, and permit teachers to carry concealed weapons.

According to him, “as everyone knows, having more guns is the only certain answer to reduce gun violence.”

Just last Tuesday, a Republican Senator challenged a witness, during a hearing, for a fist fight on the Senate floor. On the same day, former Speaker McCarthy elbowed a fellow Republican Senator who had voted against him in the election for the Speakership weeks ago, with a clean blow to the kidneys on the hallowed hallways of the Capitol. Encounters inappropriate even in Junior High School yards rather than in the “highest deliberative body in the world”.

The Republican Party, from Trump downwards (or is it upwards?) is out of control, having shed their collective sense of shame faster and with less embarrassment than a stripper sheds her bikini.

Trump would also encourage police officers to use violence to deter crime. In a recent speech, he said he would authorize police officers to shoot suspected shoplifters caught in the act. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store”. Especially if you are black, you will be shot solely on suspicion, no arrest, no trial, just capital punishment for stealing a pack of cigarettes. On the other hand, you can make $2 billion on an illegal real estate deal with the Saudis with impunity. Especially if you are white, and the president’s son-in-law.

Trump Justice, in a nutshell

These are a few reasons that will gladden the hearts of Trump supporters and Make America Great Again, AGAIN. There are more, too lengthy to add to this already prolix essay.

Fortunately, I’ll be long dead, having shuffled off this mortal coil, grieving the tragedy that, for the first time in the history of the greatest democracy in the world, we will be leaving our children and our grandchildren with a future fraught with danger: If Trump wins the White House in 2024.