Facing a conviction in the porn star hush money election interference trial has made Donald Trump even more desperate and frantic than usual. He’s known for his extreme claims, but desperation is making him even more extreme.
At a recent Mar-a-Doorn fundraiser, the Kaiser of Chaos told donors:
“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Trump told GOP donors, according to the newspaper. “It’s the only way they’re going to win.”
In a word: projection. Why the Indicted Impeached Insult Comedian thinks this is a winning message is beyond me. It wasn’t in 1945 when Winston Churchill said this about the Labour Party:
No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk — the common people, as they like to call them in America — where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?
Americans like to think of the good Churchill: the wartime Prime Minister who gave defiantly rousing speeches. The Gestapo speech was the hyper-partisan Churchill attacking his opponents. It was particularly despicable because it was a lie. Labour had served in a wartime coalition with the Tories. Labour leader Clement Atlee was deputy Prime Minister in that government. Nobody doubted the mild-mannered Atlee’s patriotism or devotion to democracy, except Winston Churchill who knew it was a lie.
Churchill also knew that the British people blamed his party for the war and that he was likely to lose if he didn’t go low. It was too low. The Tories were swept out of office. Instead of “some form of Gestapo” the Atlee government established the National Health Service and began winding down the British Empire; two great accomplishments that were not undone by Churchill when he returned as Prime Minister in 1951.
The lesson of the story is obvious: Don’t compare your opponents to the Nazis unless you have the receipts. Churchill was making shit up when he gave the Gestapo speech. It was unusual for him but typical for former President* Pennywise. Projection, thy name is Donald.
Finally, the featured image comes from a 2017 post by our much missed colleague Michael F.
The last word goes to The Kinks: