Deconstructing Trump the Fascist

1,680 words

Whenever the self-proclaimed “progressives” lose a power play they suddenly experience a collective sphincter muscle collapse and react as if they’re teetering on the brink of an apocalypse, as was in stark evidence after Donald Trump derailed Hillary Clinton’s “The Corruption Express” headed for the White House Station. The Hollywood idiots, of course, were apoplectic. The outpouring and duration of mass hysteria in the aftermath of the 2016 election were unprecedented.

We’re still feeling the aftershock in the form of team round heels Bonnie and Clyde the Corpse, I mean Biden-Harris, stripping away the little law and order that’s left in what was once America.This malignant couple is what Trump derangement syndrome (TDS) has thrust upon us. TDS descended like Durchfall on vacationers in Mexico, its victims, simpletons and sophisticates alike reduced to shrieking chicken little-like, “Trump is a fascist” – sophisticates like Madeleine Albright, for example, and the New Yorker scribblers.

Albright’s book, Fascism: A Warning, was reviewed by Robin Wright in the New Yorker. Wright’s article bears the title, “Madeleine Albright Warns of a New Fascism – and Trump” – a “new fascism” because the old one, perhaps, was losing a bit of its mojo. Albright wrote her warning “with” a guy identified as Bill Woodward. The book, said Wright, is “both provocative and scary.” Provocative? I give up. Scary, though, is that someone of Albright’s supposed stature, a Georgetown University professor and a career diplomat who has toiled in the highest regions of world politics, would write something so embarrassingly juvenile and feeble-minded as the following.

He [Trump] won the Presidency because he convinced enough voters in the right states that he was a teller of blunt truths, a masterful negotiator, and an effective champion of American interests. That he is none of those things should disturb our sleep, but there is a larger cause for unease. Trump is the first antidemocratic president in modern U.S. history.

Bill Clinton’s UN Ambassador apparently slept soundly while presiding over the bombing of Serbia to smithereens, including civilians and the U.S.-sanctioned starving of half a million Iraqi children, but then along came this WWE wrestling impresario who spoiled the coronation of her former boss’s wife, and she was up counting sheep.

It is, of course, unprecedented that a politician would run for office, brag about how terrific he is at doing what he thinks the voters want him to do, and then it is discovered that he is not quite up to it all. We know that pre-Trump, the guys who got themselves elected President were all straight arrows who did what they promised to do. At least Trump, unlike his immediate predecessor, confined himself to boasting about how great he would make America and did not promise to “heal the planet.” And, what is one to make of the howling non-sequitur, “Trump is the first antidemocratic president in modern U.S history”? Actually, I think there is a flood of competition for that distinction. FDR would be a top contender. When he ran for reelection in 1940 he promised the electorate, the voters that he knew wanted no part of the slaughter going on in Europe, to keep U.S. troops out of it, while secretly conniving with Churchill and British intelligence services to get America into the war – “democracy” as FDR practiced it. When the war was over Harry and Winston gift-wrapped a big chunk of Europe for their Waffenbruder, “Uncle Joe,” who we all know was a very “democratic” sort of fellow.

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Here was the best part of Albright’s penetrating analysis: “He [Mussolini] used the term ‘drenare la palude,’ or ‘drain the swamp.’” Never mind that Mussolini was talking about draining actual swamps, it’s settled: Trump was not only a Fascist but a shameless plagiarist as well. Plagiarism, as I recall, seemed to be more Joe Biden’s forte. I don’t know how much of this drivel poured directly out of the 80-year-old Mrs. Albright. Perhaps she should be evaluated for dementia. Her ghost-writer, Bill Woodward, however, should have been dispatched to do what he seemed better equipped for – churning out term papers for lazy college kids.

But in 2016 Trump brought fascism to America, and now we have Antifa to combat it, so on to the burning question: What kind of a Fascist, besides a new one, was/is Trump?

Consider: Trump never claimed to be a fascist and most likely resented, and still resents, being called one. Remember that Mussolini (fascism’s founder), Hitler (the German version), Oswald Mosley (the British version) – the original fascists, the gold standard to which Trump is constantly compared – proudly announced themselves to the world as fascists. They strutted around in black and brown uniforms, staged massive parades with banners, made the stiff-armed Roman salute every ten minutes, and bragged about how superior fascists were to everyone else.

While claiming superiority, mainly for himself, Trump has never called himself a fascist and never dressed like one. For a while he called himself a Democrat, rubbing shoulders with the Clintons. For a period, he claimed to be an independent. This was before he became a Republican and comically wiped the floor with the pre-selected doofuses like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in the 2016 Presidential primaries. Watching video montages from the Republican primary debates and the look on hapless Jeb’s face, as Trump in his inimitable carnival show hawker style heaped deserved scorn upon him, is priceless entertainment. The MSM talking heads were incredulous and reduced to mocking him. Up until election night and when his predicted landslide defeat proved false, he was a joke – after which he became a fascist.

Consider this question: Why in the world would Trump, who worships success, “winners,” identify in any possible way with three colossal losers, guys whose careers terminated with suicide, a firing squad, and prison? Look how things turned out for George Lincoln Rockwell.

Perhaps Trump was, and remains, a secret fascist. Times have changed. These days brandishing your fascist bona fides is not a good career enhancement strategy, will not move you into many useful or sophisticated social circles and, not to mention, for guys a turnoff for most women. This doesn’t seem plausible either. One could not be a serious fascist over a long period of time, even secretly, without giving some indications. When he jumped into politics, Trump was 71 years old, and until he ran for President in 2015, no one seemed to have the slightest clue or fear that he was Mussolini redux, plotting the destruction of “our democracy.” And, that was after decades of being a high profile, New York City, media celebrity, a serial monogamist with a decadent playboy lifestyle that invited national attention, attention that he greatly relished.

That raises what seems to be an obvious question: after so many years with no indication, just when did Trump become the whatever-sort-of fascist he is supposed to be? People don’t typically, all of a sudden, become fascists in their late 60s. Fascism is, or was, a young man’s sort of thing. Mussolini, Hitler, and Mosley were all coherent thinkers: no one accused or accuses Trump of being coherent, much less a thinker. All three men were also combat veterans from the WWI trenches, deeply disillusioned with the outcome and radicalized at relatively early ages in the aftermath. They were openly hostile to and alienated from their countries’ political establishment. Trump was an ambitious rich kid who skipped Viet Nam, became a workaholic hedonist, got even richer, then got bored and turned to politics later in life. He was never alienated from American society, rather one of its more colorful jet-setters.

Another possibility is that Trump is a Fascist but doesn’t know that he is one. So, whatever it is that Trump might think he is, he’s is confused, clueless or deluded and must really be a Fascist without realizing it.

Donald Trump never stuck me be as a particularly introspective or self-reflective man, but I happen to opine that being a fascist, psychologically speaking, is a lot like being a communist, a socialist or a feminist and requires serious introspection. You think, reflect, then put into play a tightly (fanatically?) embraced set of priorities because you firmly believe the world is not currently the way it should be, and you are determined to fix it. Many unflattering things can be said about Donald Trump, but “fanatic” is not one of them.

So, whatever Donald Trump was and is, be rest assured, he is not, never was, and never will be a fascist – not a swashbuckling one, not a secret one, not an unaware one.

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Rather, Trump turned out to be a remarkably clever, ambitious outsider who caught the smart set napping, the “professional” knowers who choreograph the political fashion shows they call “elections,” the insiders who set the protocols and decide who get to be the star performers and the honored guests. They are cultural snobs, professional moralists, and virtue mongers whose favorite word is “democracy” but who actively despise the demos, the “irredeemables.” This diet Coke-drinking, meatloaf-loving philistine crashed their insider party and spoiled the arranged outcome. The voters unexpectedly defied their betters which is what made them “deplorable.”

That’s the “new fascism”: voters exercising their preference for a candidate who has not been “pre-approved.” “Fascist” is what you get called when you upset the oligarchs and question their wisdom. It’s the worst the sophisticates can think of to call those who get in their way and upset their plans to make you into an imperfect imitation of them. It’s a word with tried and true imagery connected to long-dead men who now live timelessly as ontologized evil, ghosts who, when summoned, appear and assist with those ceremonies and liturgies performed to make progressivism and progressives appear to be … progressive.

There are many people to blame for getting us into this mess. At the top of my list are the Frankfurt boys instrumental in inventing “theory”-laden victimology and launching “anti-racism.” They helped mightily to wreck the universities beginning in the 1960s: Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, et al. Many of their disciples are now running the show.

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ook by Stephen Paul Foster