Before Donald Trump was considered nothing more than a circus sideshow, some of us noted during the 2015 GOP presidential primaries that his rhetoric and agenda bore all the hallmarks of the "f" word: fascism. Historian Rick Perlstein wrestled with it as early as September of that year. I wrote about it just a couple of months later. At the time, Trump was extolling the virtues of torture, talking about a massive surveillance program to be used against American Muslims and promising to send Syrian refugees, including children, back to their war-torn country. He hadn't yet declared his intention to ban all Muslims from coming to the U.S. but it was easy to see the writing on the wall. It was also very easy to see that fascism was on the menu in the United States of America if Trump won the election
He may not have been fully able to accomplish his true desires in his first term since he was so unfamiliar with even the rudimentary levers of power, but he's no longer afraid to go for it.
That was nine years ago and a zillions of words have since been written about Trump's dishonesty, corruption, unfitness and authoritarian philosophy. We've learned over the years, through many reports, memoirs and tell-all books that Trump tried to govern in a dictatorial fashion at every turn but was either too mentally undisciplined to follow through or was held back by people around him who kept him from acting on his worst impulses.
Trump's 2024 run includes a ratcheting up the fascist rhetoric to previously unseen heights. The former president repeatedly says that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" and calls his political opponents "vermin" and "enemies within" who must be purged.
Lately, he's even suggested that he would call out the military against "the enemy from within.:
Yet Trump has very little respect for the military either. The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg chronicled Trump's odd antipathy toward the military during his first term, the details of which were further confirmed by Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and Peter Baker of the New York Times in their book "The Divider: Trump in the White House," as well as the New York Times' Michael Schmidt's book "Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President." They all relied on former US Army general and Trump chief of staff John Kelly as a primary source for such anecdotes as Trump's contemptuous references to service members as "suckers and losers" and his frequent demands to use the military unconstitutionally.
Goldberg published a piece in The Atlantic on Tuesday with some new revelations about Trump's disdain for the military, quoting from witnesses and contemporaneous notes about an episode in which Trump exploded over the cost of a funeral for a service member which he'd promised to help pay for:
"It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off."
The lawyer for the family suggested to the Atlantic that Trump never paid but members of the family defended him after the story was published. His loyal henchman Meadows naturally denies that he ever said those things. Nobody can say that it doesn't sound like something he would say.
Goldberg also recapitulates the stories about Trump's fascination with Adolf Hitler as told to him and the other authors by John Kelly. Trump had said to Kelly at one point, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?" and Kelly explained that those German generals had tried to assassinate Hitler three times and almost succeeded. Trump didn't believe him, insisting that they were totally loyal. Kelly went on the record about that conversation this week:
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Trump also asked at one point who the "good guys" were in WWI. Apparently, he missed that semester in military school.
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Michael Schmidt also got Kelly on the record for the Times on Tuesday and published voice recordings of Kelly's comments. Schmidt asked him if he thinks Trump is a fascist:
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.
Mr. Kelly said that definition accurately described Mr. Trump.
“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Mr. Kelly said. He added: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Mr. Kelly said. Mr. Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Mr. Kelly said.
Kelly isn't the only former general saying this. Just a week or so ago, Bob Woodward reported in his new book "War" that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, described Donald Trump as "fascist to the core" calling him “the most dangerous person to this country." Woodward told The Bulwark podcast that former Defense Secretary and Retired Gen. James Mattis agreed with this assessment.
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It's good that these former high-ranking military leaders are saying all this. But they really need to go on CBS News' "60 Minutes" or cut an ad so that people who aren't reading the Atlantic and the New York Times (or Salon, for that matter) will know about it. There's no reason for them not to do it at this point. If they fear retribution from Trump, I'm afraid that ship sailed. You can bet they are already on his list. If they simply don't want to be in the line of fire, it's a sad comment on the military ethos for which they claim to be speaking.
Donald Trump is a fascist. He's an ignorant fascist, but there's really no requirement for education to be one. It's driven by an authoritarian, nationalist, racist instinct and that he has in spades. He may not have been fully able to accomplish his true desires in his first term since he was so unfamiliar with even the rudimentary levers of power but he's no longer afraid to go for it. Here's Trump on the campaign trail just yesterday:
“As president, you have tremendous — it’s called extreme power. You have extreme power. You can, just by the fact, you say, ‘Close the border,’ and the border’s closed. That’s it. Very, very simple. You don’t need all of this nonsense that they talk about.”
If he wins there will be no John Kellys or Mark Milleys to stand in the way. He'll only be served by accomplices who agree with him.
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