Buoyed by his party and the press, a raging Trump goes full Hitler

As these last weeks before the election tick by, I feel I've run completely dry of ways to express just how much a menace the seditionist felon Donald Trump is and how fully Republicanism has now embraced not just authoritarian, and not just fascism, but the full-throated rhetoric of extermination that lifted Adolf Hitler and the genocidal Nazi Party into power.

Whether out of desperation or compulsion, Trump's closing campaign message is one of sweeping extermination the nation's immigrants. Why? According to him, it is because America four years after kicking his ass to the curb is once again a hellscape, entire cities allegedly captured by roving bands of Not Whites whose very presence is "illegal" no matter what their citizenship status or other paperwork says. In practice, though, it's just another iteration of the Fox News "migrant caravan" hoaxes; the Republican Party has turned to demonizing refugees in each of the last half-dozen elections, and has now piled on top of that similar hoaxes targeting trans Americans, who have been declared to be similarly sub-human and dangerous.

What Trump brings to the Fox News and Republican Party staples is simple; he brings violence. He promises it. He revels in it. And the audiences of people still willing to go to his rallies and pledge fealty to a criminal seditionist love it.

This is not the Trump of 2016. This is the rhetoric of Radio Rwanda and of Hitler. It is a movement now premised on hate and nothing but.

Echoing Nazi Germany's eugenics theories while promising violent raids to expel the "other" in our midst would have been unthinkable a few decades back; I will personally note again that Naziism largely came back into style among American chuds only after the death of the generation of Americans who personally helped destroy Naziism bullet by bullet, and I do not think that is coincidence.

But this is what Republicanism is now. As malignant narcissist, Trump is forever obsessed with repeating whatever his crowds most reward him for saying; he chooses the hits and discards yesterday's rhetoric and "beliefs" immediately, if his audiences no longer find them pleasing. He is embracing the full language of genocide because his sedition-backing audiences want such genocide, and hoot and holler when he promises it. This is the party Fox News built through careful repetition of useful hoaxes and demonizations, and the party Mitch McConnell built as he maneuvered to prioritize Republican power over even the most basic of decencies, and this is what Republicanism is left with after their servile purges of any and every Republican who would not abide criminality and outright insurrection in order to retain power no matter what the American people might have to say about it.

The behavior of the press, as they watch all of this unfold from their front row seats, remains contemptible. Utterly contemptible. Trump's delve into eugenics nonsense was met with headlines about his "long-held fascination with genes and genetics"; his shouting lies claiming Aurora, Colorado to be "conquered" by criminal immigrants merited, from The New York Times, the tortured and misleading headline "Trump Rally in Aurora Is Marked by Nativist Attacks."

"Fascination with genes," says the headline. "Is marked by," says the headline. Trump is promising a Holocaust—there is no way to deport "20 million" people anywhere, as no country will take them, and so Trump's camp is promising the massive "infrastructure" project of building mass detention camps to house them all, a move that will also fail because there is no method of putting "20 million" people into camps without mass deaths quickly following—and the most our flaccid and fully compliant press can utter is vague grumbling about the Nativism that has popped up, somehow, in the general vicinity of wherever Donald Trump is currently speaking.

If you cannot bear to listen to Pumpkin Dementia Hitler's voice in the clips above, Trump has also thumb-typed it all out. And no, I'm not transcribing this screed, so my apologies for the lack of alt text.

There is so much to say about that; every line will be quoted in a history book somewhere, twenty years from now. We are not "OCCUPIED AMERICA," and the man is a weird, dementia-addled freak for saying so.

"LIBERATION DAY" is straight-up Nazi rhetoric—a substanceless assertion that Dear Leader will vanquish the invisible enemy within, the enemy that you, a normal person, never even considered before the group was singled out as the genetic cause of the nation's ills.

Was Aurora, Colorado "invaded?" Has it been "conquered?" No and no—again, Trump has taken the usual Fox News anti-immigration disinformation and turned it fully delusional and existential.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 will be invoked in order to carry out this purge?

"No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become President of the United States!"?

Hang on, let's break out the bold font for my reply to this one:

WHAT THE HELL DOES KAMALA HARRIS HAVE TO DO WITH ANY OF THIS, YOU PUDDING-BRAINED FREAK? YOU BARELY EVEN KNEW HER NAME A FEW MONTHS AGO, NOW SHE'S THE SPECIFIC CAUSE OF ALL AMERICAN POLICY AND ILLS? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? DO WE NEED TO CALL IVANKA AND HAVE HER DRIVE YOU HOME?

Jeebus. And the only thing worse than this is the knowledge that yes, actually, most of the Republican base, a group of voters so mired in televised delusions that they could not successfully pick their own noses without a campaign-branded Official Trump Nosepicking Stick, is perfectly willing to believe that the Vice President of the United States is in charge of all laws and regulations and is more to blame for them than anyone else in the country, more than the president or Congress or anyone else.

Because they are stupid, and they are mean, and they are so viciously racist that they will abide any lie you tell them so long as you promise alongside it that you will hurt people who aren't them.

Again, I am not as optimistic about the election as many, many other left-of-center pundits assert themselves to be. Harris is where Hillary Clinton was, eight years ago; the polling looks good, but the press and the political donor class are aggressively in the tank for the fascist and we know, from experience, that Trump's support may be a few ticks higher than the polls are showing because there are still many Americans who avidly support his plans for ethic pogrom but still have the self-awareness to know that that's not something they should be saying out loud. The number of Americans who crave violence as a non-solution to their own problems is very, very large; we are about to get its full measure.

But nobody, at this point, can claim to be unaware of what the Republican Party stands for. They are saying it out loud. They are not being evasive. Their entire plan for government consists of purging government offices from anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of Dear Leader, skirting whatever laws need to be skirted in order to claim Dear Leader has dictatorial powers to round up not just "illegal" migrants, but legal migrants, their U.S. born children, and whoever else they decide to target. They intend to dismantle large portions of government; Project 2025 boasts that they will criminalize speech that opposes their own ideological views, claiming such speech to be "pornographic" in nature.

We once mocked the absurdity of North Korean indoctrination efforts. Now the same delusions are plastered over our own television screens.

We could have thrown Trump in prison for his act of sedition, but instead our courts have given him deference at every turn. Republicans could have backed his impeachment and shunned him, after Trump intentionally stoked an insurrectionist riot that led to deaths in the U.S. Capitol—they did not. The press could have stood up; instead they cower. The wealthy Americans who all but own politics could have decided that violent coup was a greater sin than whatever petty regulatory fights they would rather think about instead; on the contrary, many have enthusiastically backed the sedition-attempting fascist and have shoveled cash into his campaign in order to prop his genocidal rhetoric up and broaden its reach.

We can hope the man loses, and is thrown in prison to rot. But that will not fix Mike Johnson, or make him a better person than he is. It will not fix the press, or cause the Republicans who continue to back Trump to regain their sense of shame. It will not stop wealthy fascists like Elon Musk from attempting to remake all of society into their own drug-addled, white nationalist visions. And Trump's most lasting legacy will, with absolute certainty, be a new era of far-right domestic terrorism that will attempt to do with violence what Trump could not do himself.

That is the best case scenario. If any group on that list wishes for any outcome better than that, they need to find fifty years of their own missing courage—and they need to do it quick.