Trump Promises Fascism
(Door Hugo Kijne te Hoboken USA)
In an unguarded moment Trump said that if order is not maintained you get fascism, a couple of days after his advisor Kellyanne Conway in an even more unguarded moment said that the president will benefit from violence and chaos in the streets. The logical conclusion is that Trump will bring fascism, and he’s already delivering on that promise. In Kenosha, Wi, a black man was shot in the back seven times by a policeman. The president called it a mistake, the result of ‘choking’ by the officer, comparable to a golfer who misses a three foot-putt. During protests that followed the shooting a 17-year old Trump-addict, who had come from out of state with an assault rifle, shot and killed two left wing demonstrators. Trump defended the murderer, saying that he ‘would probably have been killed’ if he had not defended himself, possibly because the president had been told that one of the victims was armed with a skateboard. Similarly, Trump defended the ‘Great Patriots’ who drove around Portland in pickup trucks shooting paintballs at demonstrators. ‘Paintballs are not bullets but are defensive weapons,’ the president pontificated.
Trump’s statements since the Trump Cult Convention, where speakers tried to paint the president as a champion of women’s and black causes, and that ended with an illegal superspreader event on the White House South Lawn last Thursday, have made abundantly clear what his election strategy is: foment and focus on violence in ‘Democrat’ cities, hoping that Americans will forget about his mismanagement of the corona pandemic and the economic recession resulting from it. A crucial element of that strategy is painting Joe Biden as a crypto-radical who endorses left-wing violence or at least refuses to condemn it. It requires solid faith in Trump’s superpowers to think that that might work. On multiple occasions Joe Biden has already strongly condemned violence on all sides, while the president is publicly promoting violence from right wing militias. Moreover, over 6 million Americans have been infected with COVID-19 and 183,000 have died, and in spite of parts of the economy re-opening the official unemployment rate is around 10%, which means that real unemployment is over 15%, and millions have lost their extra monthly benefits.
Trump realizes that encouraging violence is not enough, so he is adding a dimension that would take the US straight back to the Jim Crow era: Biden will bring ‘low income housing’ to the suburbs, Trump-speak for black men, who will threaten the white women who live there. The nakedness of the president’s racism is on full display here but a large majority of the population has moved on since the 1870s, where Trump evidently got stuck in US history. Less than a week after the convention that suggested the opposite it is once more clear that he is running a blatantly racist campaign.
Yesterday Trump visited Kenosha, although the mayor and the governor asked him not to come. It was a campaign stop in the most conservative part of Wisconsin, where he absolutely has to win ‘bigly’ to carry the state. The president started by calling the mayor a fool, for not asking him to send federal agents to his city, which would undoubtedly generate more violence, and ended with an event with law enforcement officers that included one black couple, of which the man was not allowed to talk, only to say a prayer.
Afraid to lose any part of his base Trump refuses to distance himself from Klansmen and anti-Semites, nazis and white nationalists, QAnon maniacs and vigilantes. He’ll have to continue showing his support for all those miscreants while trying to hide it from the ‘suburban housewives’ he is courting, which would be an impossible assignment even for a brilliant actor, let alone for a former reality TV star who is well beyond his prime.
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