If it’s Tuesday, it must be the twenty-second installment in the recurring series inspired by the 1991 Duke-Edwards Gret Stet governor’s race. It was the most intense electoral experience of my life; formative too, it gave me an intense dislike of all forms of extremism.
A reminder of the unofficial slogan of the race from hell:
In 2024, we’re flipping that on its head and voting AGAINST the crook. It’s even more important.
The latest reason to vote against the crook is the increasingly fascistic tone of his rhetoric. I was a history major in college and remain an avid reader of books about the interwar period of 1918-1939. I know what fascism and Nazism were, so I’ve been reluctant to apply those labels to Trump because it’s hard to tell if he believes his own rhetoric, always a problem with liars. I try not to use words loosely, especially inflammatory ones like fascist and Nazi. My reticence is over because of this quote from former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley:
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country.
“A fascist to the core.”
General Milley is a learned man; a scholar-soldier. If he thinks Trump is an outright fascist, who am I to argue? Where is that other scholar-soldier, General James Mattis in all this? He knows who and what Trump is. It’s time for the Mad Dog to bite.
The policies advocated by Trump are undistilled fascism with Nazi overtones. He wants to use the military to round up immigrants and place them in detention camps before throwing them out of the country. The Nazis had a term for such facilities: Concentration camps. That’s where they put their political enemies before the madness of the Final Solution turned some concentration camps into death camps. Trump has already threatened many of his enemies with death. Who will stop him if he returns to the White House?
Trump is also threatening retribution against retired military brass who have criticized him:
Trump’s wish to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who criticized him in print has been reported before, including by Mark Esper, Trump’s second secretary of defense. In Woodward’s telling, in a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and Esper, Trump “yelled” and “shouted” about William McRaven, a former admiral who led the 2011 raid in Pakistan in which US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, and Stanley McChrystal, the retired special forces general whose men killed another al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq in 2006.”
Trump has threatened to execute General Milley a man whose boots he’s not fit to lick. The danger is McChrystal clear. You didn’t think I could write a pun free post, did you? Here’s another one: The McRaven said nevermore to the Kaiser of Chaos.
The featured image is of the day that Trump dragged Milley and then Defense Secretary Mark Esper into politics of the most sordid kind:
Ten days after leaving the White House with President Trump and walking with him across a park that had been forcibly cleared of protesters, the nation’s most senior military officer is calling that excursion “a mistake.”
“I should not have been there,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared Thursday in a video message to graduating officers at the National Defense University. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.”
A rare apology from a General officer who should have never been placed in that position. It wouldn’t have happened under ANY previous president; all of whom had respect for the line drawn by George Washington separating the military from politics:
Decades ago, the scholar S. E. Finer asked a question that shadows every civilian government: “Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we ought surely ask why they ever do otherwise.” The answer, at least in the United States, lies in the traditions instituted by Washington. Because of his choices during and after the Revolution, the United States has had the luxury of regarding military interference in its politics as almost unthinkable. If Trump returns to office with even a handful of praetorians around him, Americans may realize only too late what a rare privilege they have enjoyed.”
That was a quote from my countryman Tom Nichols’ brilliant Atlantic cover story, The Moment Of Truth. If you haven’t read it, please do so: Read the article against the crook, it’s important.
Trump believes that civilian control of the armed forces means that they should do his bidding. That, my friends, is fascist to the core. What’s next? Will he oblige the military to swear personal allegiance to him? It’s what Hitler did. We whipped the fascists and Nazis 79 years ago. We can do it again on November 5. Vote as if your life depended on it. General Milley should be applauded for standing up to the wannabe dictator, not punished.
Repeat after me: Vote against the crook, it’s important. A fascist to the core.
The musical last word goes to Sunnyland Slim:
The countdown last word goes to Cary Grant and Eva St. Marie’s head in North By Northwest:
