Sunday, October 27th, 2024, Trump performed at Madison Square Garden to an audience of fascists and neo Nazis. While they screamed chants of “USA, USA”, the rally welcomed multiple racist jokesters, in addition to the likes of Elon Musk, JD Vance–and even–Dr. Phil. It would have been laughable if it wasn’t so dangerously evil. This was neo Nazism–“American style”, complete with outdated rock music and collective fawning over Trump so over the top–that it approached the pornographic act of ‘fluffing.’ (For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘fluffer’, the Urban Dictionary defines it as …”a person in the adult entertainment industry whose job it is to give male porno stars blowjobs in order to get them ready to perform.”
Now before the business scheduled for Madison Square Garden was under way, Trump’s political ‘fluffers’ were at work on the Sunday talk shows. One such shameless ‘fluffer’ is Senator Lindsey Graham.
Appearing on ‘This Week with George Stephanopoulus’; Graham was interviewed by Jonathan Karl about the issue of Trump’s ‘alleged’ fascism. Graham was responding to the reports by General Mark Kelly that Trump was, most certainly, a fascist in a series of recent interviews ranging from the New York Times to Le Monde. In fact, General Kelly isn’t the only former Trump aide to issue this dire warning. The New York TImes again reported that 13 additional former Trump officials concur with Kelly.
And still, Senator Lindsey Graham continued to ‘carry water’ in support of Donald Trump, invoking slander against democrats, Kamala Harris, and other dissenters in the true fashion of the fascist propagandist. Every bigotry was steadily implied, including xenophobic tropes against immigrants, the trans community and communities of color.
In fact, in terms of rabid racism, the senator truly shined. In a short interview, he managed to squeeze in multiple racist and transphobic tropes while depicting immigrants as violent criminals. To quote the senator…
“Just go back to—to what people care about the most. People are hurting. Inflation is high. The economy has turned the wrong way. IMMIGRATION is broken.”
See how LIndsey used the ‘I’ word–IMMIGRATION, but still, he managed to add yet more bigoted tropes. To quote the senator…
”Kamala Harris’ America is you basically have to mortgage your house to fill up your car. And why you go to the gas station, you’re likely to get robbed by an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT. And your daughter’s playing against some guy in—in volleyball. I mean, that’s the America that people don’t like.”
Lindsey then went into a tirade over the allegations regarding Trump’s fascist behavior. He attacked General John Kelly, a lifelong republican who served not only as Trump’s former secretary of homeland security, but also his chief of staff, who recently stated to the media that Trump “met the definition of a fascist.”
Lindsey went on the offense, venom dripping from his jowls as he proceeded to further slander the democratic ticket.
“Three weeks before the election you’re calling basically Trump “Hitler”, a fascist, is not going to resonate. What happened to joy on the Democratic side? They went from joy to now Trump is Hitler. That’s desperation.”
Later on in the interview, Lindsey attacked the free speech rights of the generals who called out Trump as unfit and a fascist. Lindsey accused the democrats of…
…”using rhetoric that’s dangerous and is off base.”
Lindsey Graham repeatedly made the false allegation that the democratic ticket called Trump “Hitler.”
Lindsey went further and slandered Kamala Harris calling her …”a fascist person running, who’s incompetent. She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist. She’s not actually a socialist. She’s gone past that. Somebody’s got to explain this woman (ph). This is a radical left, Marxist, communist, fascist.”
The senator failed to offer a single shred of evidence to document the accusations hurled during his adolescent tantrum. What the senator did provide was a textbook example of fascistic slander, the favorite tool of the propagandist.
Given Lindsey Graham’s ‘yellow’ streak, it’s time to offer a remedial course in “Fascism 101.”
So, what is fascism?
Many Americans use the terms ‘fascism’ and ‘nazism’ interchangeably. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She is also an expert on Benito Mussolini. Ben-Ghiat defined ‘fascism’ during a 2019 interview with Time magazine, first explaining the origins. “Benito Mussolini came up with the term fascism, he created the first one-party fascist state and he set the playbook and template for everything that came after.”
Ben-Ghiat elaborated further. ”Fascism is a movement that promotes the idea of a forcibly monolithic, regimented nation under the control of an autocratic ruler.” She added that …”Mussolini thought that democracy was a failed system. He thought that liberty of expression and liberty of parties was a sham, and that fascism would organize people under state power. Their idea was you would be freer because you wouldn’t have any class consciousness. You’re just supposed to worship the nation. It’s nation over class.”
It gets worse. At the first meeting of Mussolini’s ‘fascists’, he declared that being a member of this new movement, “commits all fascists to sabotaging the candidacies of the neutralists of all parties by any means necessary.”
James McDougall (Associate Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford), chimes in on fascism…
Professor McDougall described fascism in depth, in a piece titled: No, this isn’t the 1930’s—but yes, this is fascism.
To quote professor McDougall:
“Discussion of fascism suffers from an excess of definition. That often, ironically, allows far-right groups and their apologists to disavow the label because of some tick-box characteristic which they can be said to lack. But just as we can usefully talk about socialism as a recognizable political tradition without assuming that all socialism since the 1840’s have been cut from one mold, so we can speak of a recognizably fascist style of politics in Europe, the U.S., Russia and elsewhere. It is united by its espousal of a set of core ideas.”
McDougall then speaks about the memes of fascism that remain constant.
“Fascism brings a masculinist, xenophobic nationalism that claims to “put the people first” while turning them against one another. That is complemented by anti-cosmopolitanism and anti-intellectualism. It denounces global capitalism, blaming ordinary people’s woes on an alien “plutocracy” in a language that is both implicitly anti-Semitic and explicitly anti-immigrant, while offering no real alternative economics. In the U.S., that was perfectly exemplified in Trump’s closing campaign ad.”
McDougall further explained that this …”view of the world is presented that is centered on fears of “national suicide” and civilizational decline, in which whites are demographically overwhelmed by “inferior” peoples, minorities and immigrants.
If this sounds like the “great replacement theory”, it should. So how does this definition of fascism compare to Trump’s record? The Forward publication has kept track of Trump’s many invocations of Hitler and the Nazi party, both direct and implied, as a propagandistic tool used to mobilize his MAGA lynch mob.
Great Replacement Theory …Trump v. Hitler…
Below is a short summary:
July 14, 2015—Donald Trump tweets an image of his face superimposed on stacks of money, an American flag and some conspicuous looking troops with the #MakeAmericaGreatAgain hashtag. Upon closer examination the soldiers have the Nazi SS insignia on their armbands. It was discovered that the soldiers were Nazi reenactors in a stock image. The campaign later deleted the tweet after blaming the episode on an intern.
Jan. 19, 2017—The evening before Trump’s inauguration, Trump aide Sebastian Gorka sported Nazi gear during an appearance on Fox. Gorka wore the badge, tunic and ring of the Order of Vitez. The Order was a Hungarian group reported to be “under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany” according to the U.S. State Department during WWII. The Forward conducted an investigation of Gorka which revealed his extensive ties to anti-Semitic groups in Hungary. Gorka was tapped to be deputy assistant to the president.
June 23, 2024 aka the ‘ovens joke’….
Barbara Res was the lead engineer supervising the construction of Trump Tower. She worked for Trump for nearly two decades and witnessed when Trump made ‘jokes’ about Nazi ovens in the presence of Jewish executives. Res recalled one specific incident. “We had just hired a residential manager, a German guy. And Donald [Trump] was bragging among—to us executives, there were four of us—about how great the guy was and he was a real gentleman, and he was so neat and clean. And he looked at a couple of our executives who happen to be Jewish, and he said, ‘Watch out for this guy—he sort of remembers the ovens,’ you know, and then smiled.”
The ‘Trump is no Hitler’ excuse…
Now, various republicans, (including Lindsey Graham) are presently frothing at the mouth like rabid dogs, insisting that Trump is ‘no Hitler, not even close.’ The corporate media keeps playing the false equivalence game, ridiculously asserting their dubious ‘objectivity,’ when the parallels between Trumpism, MAGA and the rise of a neo Nazi movement are too strong to ignore.
Yet, the Trump toadies are bloviating their asinine protests, claiming that comparing him to Hitler is a road too far–but is it? MAGA apologists are insisting that Trump isn’t Hitler–because he hasn’t set up death camps modeled after Auschwitz, but even Hitler didn’t begin with the camps.
Hitler first consolidated political power using the rule of law.
Hitler’s rise…
Adolph Hitler rose to power using the mechanisms of the political process to gain the legal powers of a dictator. This was accomplished with three laws passed in close succession that collectively ended any human rights or democratic rule. They were known as the Reichstag Fire Decree aka The Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State, followed by The Enabling Act aka The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich, and finally the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. All three acts were passed in 1933, exactly one month apart.
First the Reichstag Fire Decree…
Passed on February 28, 1933, this illegitimate act suspended most of the German Constitution at the time, especially those provisions safeguarding individual rights and due process. Rights to public assembly, free speech and free press (and many other rights) were restricted. Police investigations became a free for all and the regime could arrest and incarcerate any political opposition without specific charges. Political organizations opposed by the regime could be dissolved without notice and none favored publications suppressed. This act also granted the central government full power to overrule any state or local laws they opposed and overthrow said state and locally elected governments as well. This act was a…”permanent feature of the Nazi police state.”
Notice how this act mirrors Trump’s repeated desire to jail his political opponents.
The Enabling Act…
Passed a month later on March 23, 1933, the Enabling Act granted Hitler the absolute power to enact laws without the approval of the parliament or Reich President von Hindenburg. It further granted Hitler the power to violate the Weimar Constitution without consequence.
Such a move required a two-thirds majority vote which was assumed to provide some ‘guardrails’ against this obscene power grab, but Hitler was ready for any opposition. Using his SA and SS stormtroopers, Hitler ‘detained’ his political opponents, (including members of Parliament), in Nazi controlled camps. Hitler also positioned fully armed SA and SS troops in the legislative chamber to further guarantee compliance. The Enabling Act made Hitler a legislative dictator.
It should be noted that the Enabling Act is far too similar to the Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Trump, where the court granted the presidency near absolute immunity from any criminal charges, creating a presidential monarch. Such immunity removes any ‘guardrails’ intended to prevent…’another Hitler.’
The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service…
Passed April 7, 1933, this act was the last of an unholy triad. Engineered to discriminate against non-Aryans, this law allowed the Fuhrer to fire any civil employees without cause.
(It should be noted that Trump’s proposed Schedule F for the U.S. Civil Service, as heralded by Project 2025, resembles this Nazi law.) To quote directly from the Reich’s law…
“The Reich Government has enacted the following Law, promulgated herewith:
§ 1
1) “To restore a national professional civil service and to simplify administration, civil servants may be dismissed from office in accordance with the following regulations, even where there would be no grounds for such action under the prevailing Law.”
2) “For the purposes of this Law the following are to be considered civil servants: direct and indirect officials of the Reich, direct and indirect officials of the Laender, officials of Local Councils, and of Federations of Local Councils, officials of Public Corporations as well as of Institutions and Enterprises of equivalent status…The provisions will apply also to officials of Social Insurance organizations having the status of civil servants”
§ 2
1)” Civil servants who have entered the service since November 9, 1918, without possessing the required or customary educational background or other qualifications are to be dismissed from the service. Their previous salaries will continue to be paid for a period of three months following their dismissal.”
2) “They will have no claim to temporary pensions, full pensions or survivors’ benefits, nor to retain designation of rank or titles, or to wear uniforms or emblems”….
§ 3
1) “Civil servants who are not of Aryan descent are to be retired (§ 8 ff.); if they are honorary officials, they are to be dismissed from their official status.”
2) “Section 1 does not apply to civil servants in office from August 1, 1914, who fought at the Front for the German Reich or its Allies in the World War, or whose fathers or sons fell in the World War. Other exceptions may be permitted by the Reich Minister of the Interior in coordination with the Minister concerned or with the highest authorities with respect to civil servants working abroad.”
§ 4
1)” Civil servants whose previous political activities afford no assurance that they will at all times give their fullest support to the national State, can be dismissed from the service”….
Reich Chancellor
Adolf Hitler
Trump’s Schedule F & Project 2025 both mirror–Hitler’s–Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service…
Project 2025 has set as one of the first goals a demand to implement Schedule F, the Trump sponsored executive order issued in October of 2020 designed to strip civil employees of any protections from partisan discrimination based on their politics. Schedule F would grant the president the power to fire any civil servant without any cause other than political retaliation or his childish whim. While Project 2025 does not explicitly state an order to implement Schedule F, it does provide a plant to install some 50,000 conservative political activists to replace civil servants.
The entire Trumpist movement has pushed white Christian male supremacy under the rubric of a dictator-prince, Donald Trump. Their contempt for democracy has been only surpassed by Trump’s enablers, namely a host of GOP attorneys and political office holders.
Conclusion:
So, while Trump and his GOP cronies cry ‘foul’ over those daring to suggest any parallel between Trump’s open bigotry and demands for the absolute power of a dictator–or a ‘Fuhrer’, the evidence appears incontrovertibly similar to Hitler and the Nazi party. Aside from Trump’s vicious tweets and public appearances featuring the symbols and rhetoric borrowed straight from Hitler’s speeches; lies the treachery of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and the complicity of Trump allegiant republicans. Their public tantrums are a childish attempt to intimidate dissent. The hate-fest at Madison Square Garden this past Sunday only further supported comparisons between Trump and the Nazi fascists of WWII. Though the symbolism and sick ‘jokes’ were appalling, the true danger lies with the attorneys, elected republicans, and Supreme Court justices who are enabling Trump in his goal to become an ‘American Fuhrer.’
No president should be granted absolute power or absolute immunity from prosecution. No president should be ‘above the law.’ No court, (including the Supreme Court), has the legitimate right to grant such immunity. It’s an attack on the very ‘rule of law’ the justices have sworn to protect. The omission of such obvious points does not grant license to the justices to undermine the concept known as ‘equal protection under the law.’
And no member of Congress or US Senator should be ‘throwing shade’ on an open coup specifically engineered to establish a neo Nazi regime determined to end democratic rule. No exceptions.
And this applies to you Lindsey, so I suggest you confine your talents as a ‘fluffer’ to the porn industry–where they belong.
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