Don't Look Away
Donald Trump is a wannabe fascist, and he is the pre-WWII Hitler of our era
The US media always has a problem covering Donald Trump, it still has, and it’s not going anywhere. But for the Washington Post and Forbes, they did something correct. There are no both sides, there are no bad people on both sides, no he-said-she-said, it’s a simple but horrifying headline.
From the Washington Post article:
Former president Donald Trump denigrated his domestic opponents and critics during a Veterans Day speech Saturday, calling those on the other side of the aisle “vermin” and suggesting that they pose a greater threat to the United States than countries such as Russia, China or North Korea. That language is drawing rebuke from historians, who compared it to that of authoritarian leaders.
“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 that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump said toward the end of his speech, repeating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. “They’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American Dream.”
Trump went on further to state: “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within. Because if you have a capable, competent, smart, tough leader, Russia, China, North Korea, they’re not going to want to play with us.”
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“The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” said Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University, said in an email to The Washington Post that “calling people 'vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”
“Trump is also using projection: note that he mentions all kinds of authoritarians ‘communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left’ to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom,” Ben-Ghiat said. “Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”
Adding on with the Forbes article:
Trump’s populist appeal and incendiary rhetoric are often compared to Hilter’s cult of personality and authoritarian rule. Trump sparked widespread outrage last month when he accused undocumented immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” in an interview with the right-wing website, The National Pulse. “Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists,” Trump said, adding “It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt warned the statement “echoes nativist talking points and has the potential to cause real danger and violence,” he told multiple outlets, while the New York Times pointed out that several passages in Hilter’s “Mein Kampf” describe the “influx of foreign blood” as “poison.”
Trump has reportedly studied Hilter and expressed admiration toward the Nazi dictator to people close to him. “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” he allegedly told former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in 2018, according to New York Times reporter Michael C. Bender’s 2021 book, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.” Trump has denied making the statement. His first wife, Ivana Trump, also told her lawyer that Trump kept a book of Hilter’s speeches by his bedside, according to a 1990 Vanity Fair piece published amid their split.
People do not want to use the f-word or the h-word. It is completely understandable, comparing what we are seeing now to Nazi Germany can be extreme to some and unnerving to others. Trump is our Hitler, you just read the history, and the incendiary language that channels the past. It was what led to the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, Donald Trump might not be the Adolf Hitler in the 1940s, he is more of the Hitler from the 1930s, not powerful enough now to wreak havoc, but he will do so when he gets back into power.
What is even scarier is the group of people preparing for a second Trump term. It is called Project 2025, and the people working behind it are preparing to maximize the power of the presidency to do whatever Donald Trump wants, and it all sounds like science fiction for fascist wannabes.
From The Economist, here is what the groups planning for Trump’s return are doing.
What would prove disqualifying? “If you kind of have shown yourself to have fought against the Trump administration, or there are issues where you’ve actually been counter to it,” says Mr Dans. “You know where people stand by where they sit, so to speak. Their postings and social media, their allegiances over time can give people a pretty good picture.” Blaming Mr Trump for the ransacking of the Capitol in 2021, or supporting his impeachment in the days that followed, for example, would be enough to keep someone off the list.
Thanks to these efforts, the next Trump administration, if there is one, will have fleshed-out plans and the know-how to advance them. That would make it very different from Mr Trump’s first term. “We didn’t have the people because nobody thought we would win,” says Steve Bannon, who managed Mr Trump’s campaign and was an influential figure at the beginning of his presidency. (Mr Trump fired Mr Bannon, but later stopped him being tried for misuse of funds from a non-profit group he headed by pardoning him.)
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The initial objective for this invading force is to capture the civil service. One lesson that Mr Trump’s backers drew from his first term is that no policy matters more than control of the bureaucracy, because no policies can be implemented without it.
To that end Mr Trump’s commandos will “deconstruct” the administrative state—the 300 or more federal offices that issue and interpret regulations. The philosophical version of this idea is that, over time, as the role of the federal government has grown from fighting wars and running the postal service into the Leviathan it is today, unelected bureaucrats have assumed powers that should belong to Congress. The Twitter version is that the deep-state liberals who thwarted Mr Trump when he was in office and have persecuted him since he left must be vanquished. Either way, Mr Trump’s shock troops will try to wrest power back from the bureaucracy.
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The would-be Trump appointees plan to subdue the bureaucracy using Schedule f, shorthand for an executive order issued by Mr Trump in 2020 and rescinded by Joe Biden when he became president. It reflects a view that the federal bureaucracy, whatever its size, should not have any entrenched authority. For the first century of its existence, civil servants were appointed to jobs by the government of the day based on an algorithm of personal contacts and favours owed known as the spoils system. Then in 1881 a deranged office-seeker assassinated the president, spurring the passage of the Pendleton Act, which created a class of professional bureaucrats who stayed in their posts even as the presidency changed hands. Since the 1940s, when Franklin Roosevelt was expanding the government, it has been hard to fire federal bureaucrats, afpi complains.
That’s just for starters, now let’s get you to the main courses. From the New York Times, this is what Trump will do in a second term.
If he wins another term, Mr. Trump has said he would use the Justice Department to have his adversaries investigated and charged with crimes, including saying in June that he would appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after” President Biden and his family. He later declared in an interview with Univision that he could, if someone challenged him politically, have that person indicted.
Allies of Mr. Trump have also been developing an intellectual blueprint to cast aside the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigatory independence from White House political direction.
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Mr. Trump is planning an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.
Bolstered by agents reassigned from other federal law enforcement agencies and state police and the National Guard, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement would carry out sweeping raids aimed at deporting millions of people each year. Military funds would be used to erect sprawling camps to hold undocumented detainees. A public-health emergency law would be invoked to shut down asylum requests by people arriving at the border. And the government would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents.
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While in office, Mr. Trump mused about using the military to attack drug cartels in Mexico, an idea that would violate international law unless Mexico consented. That idea has since taken on broader Republican backing, and Mr. Trump intends to make the idea a reality if he returns to the Oval Office.
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Mr. Trump and his backers want to increase presidential power over federal agencies, centralizing greater control over the entire machinery of government in the White House.
They have adopted a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory, which says the president can directly command the entire federal bureaucracy and that it is unconstitutional for Congress to create pockets of independent decision-making authority.
As part of that plan, Mr. Trump also intends to revive an effort from the end of his presidency to alter civil-service rules that protect career government professionals, enabling him to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and replace them with loyalists. After Congress failed to enact legislation to block such a change, the Biden administration is developing a regulation to essentially Trump-proof the federal work force. However, since that is merely an executive action, the next Republican president could simply undo it the same way.
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Politically appointed lawyers sometimes frustrated Mr. Trump’s desires by raising legal objections to his and his top advisers’ ideas. This dynamic has led to a quiet split on the right, as Trump loyalists have come to view the typical Federalist Society lawyer — essentially a mainstream Republican conservative — with disdain.
In a potential new term, Mr. Trump’s allies are planning to systematically install more aggressive and ideologically aligned legal gatekeepers who will be more likely to bless contentious actions. Mr. Trump and his 2024 campaign declined to answer a series of detailed questions about what limits, if any, he would recognize on his powers across a range of war, secrecy and law enforcement matters — many raised by his first term — in a New York Times 2024 presidential candidate survey.
The Washington Post also added how Trump and his allies are plotting their revenge by politicizing the Justice Department, which they accused baselessly that the Democrats are now doing to him.
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
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Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
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The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president’s agenda in his first term, and they are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in the West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s demands.
Just to add the icing on the top of the cake, the Guardian reported how Project 2025 will derail US climate policy and send the planet to hell.
The nearly 1,000-page transition guide was written by more than 350 rightwingers and is full of sweeping recommendations to deconstruct all sectors of the federal government– – including environmental policy.
“Heritage is convening the conservative movement behind the policies to ensure that the next president has the right policy and personnel necessary to dismantle the administrative state and restore self-governance to the American people,” the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said in an April statement.
The guide’s chapter on the US Department of Energy proposes eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition, and also calls to slash funding to the agency’s grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable energy deployment, E&E News reported this week.
The plan, which would hugely expand gas infrastructure, was authored by Bernard McNamee, a former official at the agency. McNamee was also a Trump appointee to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He previously led the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation, which fights environmental regulation, and served as a senior adviser to the Republican senator Ted Cruz.
Another chapter focuses on gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and moving it away from its focus on the climate crisis. It proposes cutting the agency’s environmental justice and public engagement functions, while shrinking it as a whole by terminating new hires in “low-value programs”, E&E News reported. The proposal was written Mandy Gunasekara, who was the former chief of staff at the EPA under Trump.
The guide also features a chapter on the Department of the Interior written by William Perry Pendley, who controversially led the Bureau of Land Management under President Trump and worked to eliminate drilling regulations.
For dessert, Axios reported on how Trump allies are pre-screening loyalists who will work in the second term.
Why it matters: Hundreds of people are spending tens of millions of dollars to install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists across government to rip off the restraints imposed on the previous 46 presidents.
The screening for ready-to-serve loyalists has already begun, driven in part by artificial intelligence from tech giant Oracle, contracted for the project.
Social media histories are already being plumbed.
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If Trump were to win, thousands of Trump-first loyalists would be ready for legal, judicial, defense, regulatory and domestic policy jobs. His inner circle plans to purge anyone viewed as hostile to the hard-edged, authoritarian-sounding plans he calls "Agenda 47."
The people leading these efforts aren't figures like Rudy Giuliani. They're smart, experienced people, many with very unconventional and elastic views of presidential power and traditional rule of law.
Behind the scenes: The government-in-waiting is being orchestrated by the Heritage Foundation's well-funded Project 2025, which already has published a 920-page policy book from 400+ contributors. Think of it as a transition team set in motion years in advance.
Heritage president Kevin Roberts tells us his apparatus is "orders of magnitude" bigger than anything ever assembled for a party out of power.
The policy series, "Mandate for Leadership," dates back to the 1980s. But Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, told us: "Never before has the entire movement ... banded together to construct a comprehensive plan to deconstruct the out-of-touch and weaponized administrative state."
Project 2025 gets muscle from 80 partners, including Turning Point USA, led by MAGA star Charlie Kirk; the Center for Renewing America, headed by former Trump budget director Russ Vought; and American Moment, focused on young believers for junior positions.
A separate group of former Trump officials — the America First Policy Institute, led by Brooke Rollins — has a Pathway to 2025 laying groundwork for what it calls "the next America First administration."
Trump insiders relish rebuilding the team with purists. But the truth is, they have no choice: Many more-traditional Republicans quit the first administration in frustration or were fired by tweet. And some former advisers are talking to prosecutors or are charged with crimes.
The Trump campaign tells us no outside group speaks for him: "The campaign's Agenda47 is the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House. ... While the campaign is appreciative of any effort to provide suggestions about a second term, the campaign is not collaborating with them."
How it works: The most elaborate part of the pre-transition machine is a résumé-collection project that drills down more on political philosophy than on experience, education or other credentials.
Applicants are asked to "name one person, past or present, who has most influenced the development of your political philosophy" — and to do the same with a book.
Another query: "Name one living public policy figure whom you greatly admire and why."
Details: Heritage's "Presidential Personnel Database" already has 4,000+ entries, we're told.
We're told immense, intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs. Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump's power will get flagged and rejected.
The massive headhunting quest aims to recruit 20,000 people to serve in the next administration, as a down payment on 4,000 presidential appointments + potential replacements for as many as 50,000 federal workers who are "policy-adjacent," as Trumpers put it.
This is what is going on behind the scenes, do you want it to be shown in real life? In 2020, many say it is the last election in the world. Next year, we are getting a repeat, but with even higher stakes. Be afraid, be very afraid.