The Suffocation of American Democracy

Der Trumpenführer and McConnell

Der Führer and von Hindenburg 

America stands less than a month from the midterm elections where either (i) Democrats enjoy a blue wave and retake one - and hopefully both - houses of Congress, or (ii) Republicans maintain control and the nation lurches down a road in some ways similar to what transpired in the 1920's and 1930's.  True, there will be differences, but the overall effect is that American democracy as it has known for close to 100 years will be dying.  Among the figures destroying American democracy are, of course Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer and his chief co-conspirator, Mike Pence.  Aiding and abetting the effort are Mitch McConnell - who one hopes history will treat very cruelly - Devin Nunes, and a host of Vichy Republicans.  A piece in the New York Review of Books looks at both the parallels with the 1930's dictatorships as well as modern day dictatorships which utilize democratic fictions to veil their contempt of democratic, constitutional governance.  The piece deserves a full read and will leave one feeling fearful if they are true American patriots.  Here are highlights: 

As a historian specializing in the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and Europe in the era of the world wars, I have been repeatedly asked about the degree to which the current situation in the United States resembles the interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe. I would note several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945. His preference . . . . unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states — in short, the pre-1914 international system. That “international anarchy” produced World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the fascist dictatorships, World War II, and the Holocaust, precisely the sort of disasters that the post–World War II international system has for seven decades remarkably avoided.

[Trump’s] naive and narcissistic confidence in his own powers of personal diplomacy and his faith in a handshake with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un recall the hapless Neville Chamberlain (a man in every other regard different from Trump). Fortunately the US is so embedded in the international order it created after 1945, and the Republican Party and its business supporters are sufficiently alarmed over the threat to free trade, that Trump has not yet completed his agenda of withdrawal, though he has made astounding progress in a very short time.

A second aspect of the interwar period with all too many similarities to our current situation is the waning of the Weimar Republic. Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger . . . 

Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: . . . . the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments.

Whatever secret reservations McConnell and other traditional Republican leaders have about Trump’s character, governing style, and possible criminality, they openly rejoice in the payoff they have received from their alliance with him and his base: huge tax cuts for the wealthy, financial and environmental deregulation, the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments, and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care (though not yet the total abolition of Obamacare they hope for).

Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.

But the potential impact of the Mueller report does suggest yet another eerie similarity to the interwar period—how the toxic divisions in domestic politics led to the complete inversion of previous political orientations. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left.

But the Nazi dictatorship, war, and genocide following the collapse of Weimar democracy are not proving very useful for understanding the direction in which we are moving today. I would argue that current trends reflect a significant divergence from the dictatorships of the 1930s.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian.

Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

Trump has shown unabashed admiration for these authoritarian leaders and great affinity for the major tenets of illiberal democracy. But others have paved the way in important respects. Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. . . . . fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives.

In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Trump’s personal flaws and his tactic of appealing to a narrow base while energizing Democrats and alienating independents may lead to precisely that rare wave election needed to provide a congressional check on the administration as well as the capture of enough state governorships and legislatures to begin reversing current trends in gerrymandering and voter suppression. The elections of 2018 and 2020 will be vital in testing how far the electoral system has deteriorated.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights. On these issues, often described as the guardrails of democracy against authoritarian encroachment, the Trump administration either has won or seems poised to win significant gains for illiberalism. Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers.

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. . . . A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

The very first legislation decreed by Hitler under the Enabling Act of 1933 (which suspended the legislative powers of the Reichstag) authorized the government to dismiss civil servants for suspected political unreliability and “non-Aryan” ancestry. Inequality before the law and legal discrimination were core features of the Nazi regime from the beginning. It likewise intruded into people’s private choices about sexuality and reproduction. Persecution of male homosexuality was drastically intensified, resulting in the deaths of some 10,000 gay men and the incarceration and even castration of many thousands more. Some 300,000–400,000 Germans deemed carriers of hereditary defects were forcibly sterilized; some 150,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans considered “unworthy of life” were murdered.

Nothing remotely so horrific is on the illiberal agenda, but the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures.

Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.

Ivanka Trump Prototype Dies at 88

There continue to be parallels between 1930-1940's Germany and 2018 America.  One is that both Germany of that era and America today had/have their "blonde princess" who brazenly refused to admit the ugliness and evil of their fathers.  For Germany, it was Gudrun Himmler, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler (for Fox News viewers, Hitler's second in command).  For 2018 America, it is Ivanka Trump Kushner.  The Washington Post looks at the death of Himmler's daughter who remained unrepentant to the end and denied the existence of the Holocaust and helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes.  After a visit to Dachau, Himmler's daughter described the experience as :very nice."  Under the regime of her father, Ivanka looks the other way as toddlers are ripped from their parents and now are being hauled before deportation courts alone and unaccompanied by adults known to them. Here are highlights from the Post coverage of the death of Himmler's daughter:

Gudrun Burwitz, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s highest-ranking official after Adolf Hitler, died May 24 in or near Munich. She was 88.

 Mrs. Burwitz, who was sometimes called a “Nazi princess” by supporters and detractors alike, remained unrepentant and loyal to her father to the end. Although she had visited a concentration camp, she denied the existence of the Holocaust and, in later years, helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes. 

At the time of her birth in 1929, her father was consolidating power as leader of the elite Nazi paramilitary corps known as the SS. Himmler also commanded the German secret police, the Gestapo, and established the system of prison and concentration camps in which more than 6 million people — primarily Jews but also Roma (or Gypsies), homosexuals and others — would perish.The only person who outranked Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy was Hitler himself.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the bespectacled, undistinguished-looking Himmler enjoyed having Gudrun at his side, as a blond, blue-eyed symbol of Aryan youth. In a diary later seized by Allied authorities, she noted that she liked to see her reflection in her father’s polished boots. She attended Christmas parties with Hitler, who gave her dolls and chocolates. 

When she was 12, Gudrun accompanied her father to the Dachau concentration camp, which was the site of Nazi medical experiments and the execution of tens of thousands of people.Gudrun recalled the visit in her diary: “Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous.  “And afterward we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.”

Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was born Aug. 8, 1929, in Munich. Except for a brief interview in 1959, she is not known to have spoken in public about her father or her later life.

She did, however, often wear a silver brooch given to her by her father, depicting the heads of four horses arranged in the shape of a swastika. She was also known to be active in a group called “Stille Hilfe,” or silent help, which was formed in the 1940s to help Nazi fugitives flee Germany, particularly to South America, and to support their families.

The organization is “closely linked to a number of outlawed neo-Nazi movements and actively promotes revisionism — the notion that the Holocaust never happened and Jews caused their own downfall,” Andrea Roepke, a German authority on neo-Nazis, told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper in 1998.

Among followers of the group, Mrs. Burwitz was “a dazzling Nazi princess, a deity among these believers in the old times,” according to German author Oliver Schrom, who wrote a book about Stille Hilfe.

Mrs. Burwitz attended underground reunions of Nazi SS officers, often held in Austria, possibly as recently as 2014. . . . Mrs. Burwitz also provided support, through Stille Hilfe, to convicted Nazi war criminals, including Klaus Barbie, an SS officer dubbed the “Butcher of Lyon,” and Anton “Beautiful Tony” Malloth, who was convicted of killing prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Am I being too harsh on Ivanka?  I don't believe so. 

State Terror in Trump’s America

America - morally bankrupt. 

The international world order is not the only thing that Donald Trump, a/k/a Trumpenführer, is destroying.  He and his foul regime are destroying America's decency and basic morality.  True, America has some ugly history - e.g., slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the Japanese internment camps during WWII - but one would have hoped that as a nation we would have moved past such inhumanity.  Not so under the Trump/Pence regime and its evangelical Christian base which is showing itself to be no better than the majority of German Christians who supported Hitler's rise to power.  When a nation has as official policy the mistreatment of children, some as young as infants and toddlers, national moral bankruptcy is complete. Yet this is what is happening along America's southern border where children are being forceably ripped from their parents and being warehoused like animals.  Even U.S. Senators have been barred from seeing the inside of these detention centers which certainly suggests that Trump/Pence/Sessions do not want images of the horrors being disseminated. Frighteningly, Trump's base sees nothing wrong with this.  They see brown skin and, thus, the victims of the policy are not deemed even human.  Disgusting!! Andrew Sullivan has a column that laments this violation of human rights and basic decency.  Here are excerpts:

Keep a list, they tell you. Notice the little landmarks that tell you that authoritarianism is making headway.

It’s worth making a note, then, when a president goes out of his way to declare he has an “absolute right” to pardon himself, and anyone else, if he so wants, for any reason, including protecting himself and others from possible charges of conspiracy against the United States.

And it’s also worth taking a note when a near-universal norm of human decency is thrown out of the window, with a sudden change in procedure. I’m talking about the idea of a government that reserves the right to separate children from their parents forcibly — and not for interests of rescuing the child from abuse. I’m talking about the 658 children taken from their parents at the border in the two weeks since a new policy was introduced, with the aim of prosecuting everyone who enters the U.S. illegally immediately. In May alone, hundreds of children were subjected to this trauma, now counted alongside 11,000 children in government shelters across the U.S. Most are kept in huge detention centers, without their mothers or fathers, and outsiders are barred from entering. Hewitt is not a softy, he’s a hard-line Republican, reliably partisan, often ludicrously so. But even Hewitt was aghast at the sheer cruelty of this and the banality of [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions’s response to it. [T]he children are separated from their parents in order to send a message to future illegal immigrants. Come here, and we’ll take your kids away. This was not a panicked measure, taken quickly, to avert a crisis. It was months under due consideration, with plenty in the Trump administration balking at the inhumanity of it all. These children are being traumatized to send a message. They are being used as a form of deterrence for others.

When the government threatens to tear families apart in this way, it is inflicting what can only be called state terror. Masha Gessen notes how this tactic is deployed by Putin against the children of demonstrators, as a form of intimidation, and is straight out of the totalitarian playbook: “Putin and the system he has created have consistently, if not necessarily with conscious intent, restored key mechanisms of Soviet control. The spectacle of children being arrested sends a stronger message than any amount of police violence against adults could do.”

As for the facilities in which these kids are held, Sessions told Hewitt he has never been to one. Senator Merkley of Oregon tried to gain access recently to one in Brownsville, Texas. He was not allowed in, and the windows in the massive building holding the children are darkened. Why, one wonders? Senator Menendez was also barred from inspecting another holding center.

The Trump administration argues that if they are going to immediately detain all illegal immigrants, and they can’t house children in adult jails, they have no choice. Really? It seems perfectly possible to find a way to ensure that at least mothers and children are detained together, to ensure that some decency is possible in an otherwise callous process. If the resources are not there, right now, then it should be a matter of extreme urgency for the Congress to find them. Being detained in a foreign country, separated from family, unable to understand the language being spoken to them, is what can only be called profound trauma. . . . This is simply something the United States should never do.

I’m fine with tough enforcement, open to E-verify, lower future immigration levels, and even Trump’s fricking wall. But there are some core humane lines no civilized country should cross, some red lines, such as torture, or mistreatment of prisoners, or the wrenching of children from loving parents by agents of the state. This isn’t a completely isolated instance either. The ICE arrests that are happening every day just as mothers and fathers drop their kids off at school are particularly horrifying. They violate official policy, which is supposed to restrict arrests at “sensitive locations,” but the loopholes in this provision are legion. Children see their mom or dad suddenly subjected to force, shoved out of cars, handcuffed and then simply spirited away. No child should ever be subjected to this, period. The sheer trauma it will generate can last a lifetime. Yes, these are noncitizens. Yes, many have broken the law. But they are also children. Every day we numb ourselves to these core violations of decency, America dies a little. When challenged on this, of course, Trump simply lied and insisted that the Democrats came up with this “horrible law.” He has nothing to do with what his own ICE is doing, he tells us. Nothing.  The thing about this despicable man is that he doesn’t even have the courage of his own cruelty.

I am ashamed to be an American.  No doubt when we travel to Europe in September, the husband and I will have to repeatedly explain that we oppose such inhumanity and that we worked hard to stop Trump's election.  

Taking Down Trump for His Lies and Misogyny

I am not fan of George W. Bush.  A search of this blog will reveal more posts than I can recall off hand taking Bush - who I referred to as the Chimperator - and Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  And yes, Bush's evil minion Karl Rove set the blue print for the general ugliness, homophobia and racism that Donald Trump with the apparent aid of Russians posing as Americans on social media took to  horrific new levels.  Yet despite all of this, Bush seems to have lacked the total lack of even a shred of empathy for others that is the norm for Der Trumpenführer.  Similarly, although in my view in way over his head and far too deferential to Cheney, Bush seems to have lacked the viciousness and cruelty that are also the norm for Trump.  A piece in the Washington Post (and numerous other legitimate news outlets) looks at Bush's denunciation of Trumpism and the hate and white supremacy that define the Trump/Pence regime and its base.  Here are excerpts:

For the past nine years, George W. Bush has largely stayed out of presidential politics; he declined to criticize his successor, Barack Obama, and he chose not to endorse but largely ignored President Trump. While Mitt Romney and others spoke out publicly against Trump, Bush stayed above the fray.

That changed in a big way Thursday.

Speaking at a George W. Bush Institute event in New York, Bush didn't use Trump's name, but his target became clearer as the speech progressed. Here's a sampling:

• “Bigotry seems emboldened. Our politics seems more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and outright fabrication.”

• “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism.”

• “We’ve seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty. . . . Argument turns too easily into animosity.”

• “It means that bigotry and white supremacy in any form is blasphemy against the American creed, and it means the very identity of our nation depends on passing along civic ideals.”

• “Bullying and prejudice in our public life … provides permission for cruelty and bigotry.”

• “The only way to pass along civic values is to live up to them.

[A]lmost each of these quotes has some connection to Trump. “Conspiracy theories and fabrications?” Check and check. “Nationalism and nativism?” Check. A “degraded discourse?” Big check. “Bigotry and white supremacy?” Trump was criticized for not calling them out strongly enough in Charlottesville. “Bullying?” Huge check. Not “living up to civic values?”

On Thursday, Bush clearly decided that silence was no longer tenable.

Meanwhile, another column in the Post looks at Trump's lying and ties the pattern to one of the biggest liars, propagandists and sociopaths in history: Adolph Hitler.  Trump may not be another Hitler, but his pattern of lying and attacking the free press do bear frightening similarities to what Hitler did in the late 1920's and early 1930's via a campaign of lies.  Here are column excerpts:

It is a commonly accepted rule among those who are in the business of argument, especially online, that he or she who invokes Adolf Hitler, either in oratory or essays, automatically forfeits the argument.

The reference is deemed far too extreme, too explosive, too far beyond rational correlation. No matter how bad a present-day politician, not one of them has charted or is charting a course to exterminate millions of innocent people as an act of ethnic cleansing.
Hitler stands alone in this regard, without rival, a warning to the world about how evil and lethal human beings can be, a warning that what he did can never be allowed again.

That said, there are strategies that Hitler used to secure power and rise — things that allowed his murderous reign — that can teach us about political theory and practice. And very reasonable and sage comparisons can be drawn between Hitler’s strategies and those of others.

One of those lessons is about how purposeful lying can be effectively used as propaganda. The forthcoming comparison isn’t to Hitler the murderer, but to Hitler the liar.

According to James Murphy’s translation of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”:

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”

The text continues:

“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

This demonstrates a precise understanding of human psychology, but also the dangerously manipulative nature that operates in the mind of a demon.

And yet, as many have noted, no person of sound reason or even cursory political awareness can read this and not be immediately struck by how similar this strategy of lying is to Donald Trump’s seeming strategy of lying: Tell a lie bigger than people think a lie can be, thereby forcing their brains to seek truth in it, or vest some faith in it, even after no proof can be found.

Trump is no Hitler, but the way he has manipulated the American people with outrageous lies, stacked one on top of the other, has an eerie historical resonance. Demagogy has a fixed design.

Just this week, Trump told the colossal lie that “President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls” to the families of fallen soldiers.

When called out about this lie, he quickly retreated to one of his shield phrases: “That’s what I was told.”

This is not a simple fear of the truth; it is a weaponizing of untruth. It is the use of the lie to assault and subdue. It is Trump doing to political ends what Hitler did to more brutal ends: using mass deception as masterful propaganda.

Maybe I have crossed the ink-stained line of the essay writer, where Hitler is always beyond it. But I don’t think so. Ignoring what one of history’s greatest examples of lying has to teach us about current examples of lying, particularly lying by the “president” of the most powerful country in the world, seems to me an act of timidity in a time of terror. It is an intentional self-blinding to avoid offending frail sensibilities. 

I do not believe the column author crossed the line. History has many lessons to offer if we are but willing to see the truth and ignores the calls of  sycophants of evil doers that one has gone to far or is being overly dramatic.  As one who has read a great deal about the rise of Hitler, one lesson is to never believe that evil cannot happen.  All it needs is a complacent and non-engaged populous. 

Is Trumpcare Designed to be a Quiet Form of Euthanasia?

Before Hitler's Nazi regime moved on to murder over six million European Jews, it aimed its sights on the disabled and "incurably ill" through a campaign of murder of the disabled.  Here's a brief excerpt from the Holocaust Museum webpage:

Wartime, Adolf Hitler suggested, "was the best time for the elimination of the incurably ill." Many Germans did not want to be reminded of individuals who did not measure up to their concept of a "master race." The physically and mentally handicapped were viewed as "useless" to society, a threat to Aryan genetic purity, and, ultimately, unworthy of life. At the beginning of World War II, individuals who were mentally retarded, physically handicapped, or mentally ill were targeted for murder in what the Nazis called the "T-4," or "euthanasia," program. The "euthanasia" program required the cooperation of many German doctors, who reviewed the medical files of patients in institutions to determine which handicapped or mentally ill individuals should be killed. The doctors also supervised the actual killings. Doomed patients were transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where they were killed in specially constructed gas chambers. Handicapped infants and small children were also killed by injection with a deadly dose of drugs or by starvation. . . . . . the Nazi leadership continued this program in secret throughout the war. About 200,000 handicapped people were murdered between 1940 and 1945.

Admittedly, even today's morally bankrupt Republican leaders like Der Trumpenführer, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell aren't brazen enough to make the outright proposal that the disabled and severely infirm be murdered.  However, there are other means to accomplish the elimination of those deemed "useless" by the GOP leadership and some of the more vile members of the GOP base: simply cut off the funding for critical services that allow the disabled to live and function.  This is precisely what the proposed huge cuts in Medicaid spending would accomplish - while also giving massive tax cuts to the wealthy.  Yes, it is sick and sinister, but totally in keeping with Paul Ryan's Ayn Rand world view. A piece in the New York Times looks at what Trumpcare could do to the disabled.  Here are disturbing excerpts that include individuals who might suffer under Trumpcare:

Frances Isbell has spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that has left her unable to walk or even roll over in bed. But Ms. Isbell has a personal care assistant through Medicaid . . . . The care she gets is an optional benefit under federal Medicaid law, which means each state can decide whether to offer it and how much to spend. Optional services that she and millions of other Medicaid beneficiaries receive would be particularly at risk under Republican proposals to scale back Medicaid as part of legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Those services include dental care for adults, long-term care for disabled and elderly people living at home, certain therapies that children with disabilities receive in school, prosthetic limbs and even prescription drugs. The battle over replacing the Affordable Care Act has focused intensely on the future of Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor and vulnerable created more than 50 years ago as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Much of the debate has centered on Republican proposals to roll back the recent expansion of the program to millions of low-income adults without disabilities.

But the House and Senate bills would also make profound changes to the very nature of Medicaid, shifting it from an open-ended entitlement to a program with strict federal funding limits. . . . . The threat to optional services may be especially acute in states, like Alabama, that already spend far less than the national average on Medicaid and are averse to raising more revenue through taxes. . . . . “There’s a fundamental antipathy to spending the public purse on health care services for poor people, and that would only get worse if the resources become capped and more limited.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that Medicaid spending would be 26 percent lower under the Senate plan than it would be under current law in 2026 — and 35 percent lower in 2036. The office predicted that states would be forced to “eliminate optional services, restrict eligibility for enrollment or adopt some combination of those approaches.”

Under the Senate plan, states would receive a fixed annual amount for each Medicaid beneficiary, with each category of beneficiaries, like children and the disabled, getting a different base amount based on recent costs. The amount would increase every year by a formula that is expected to grow more slowly than average medical costs after 2025.

Eric Harkins will never be able to have a job. With cerebral palsy, intellectual disability and a seizure disorder, he cannot speak or move other than scooting across the floor on his knees and elbows. But Medicaid has allowed his sister, Kimberlee, to pursue a career as a vocational rehabilitation counselor instead of caring for him full time. It pays for aides to care for Mr. Harkins for 125 hours a week, an amount that was increased after his mother had a debilitating heart attack and underwent surgery several times over the last few years.

“He requires help with every aspect of daily living,” Ms. Harkins said, stroking her brother’s arm as he watched a cartoon in their living room one recent afternoon in Vestavia Hills, outside Birmingham. “If our caregivers went away tomorrow, I’d have to quit my job and take care of Eric.”

Mr. Harkins, 33, likes playing with toys meant for toddlers, watching shows on his iPad and going on outings to Target and restaurants, though it usually takes his sister and an aide to get him there. Because he can be physically aggressive, a day program is out of the question, Ms. Harkins said.

Every weekday, Medicaid allows Matthew Foster to spend a few hours pursuing one cherished activity after the next: working out at the gym, taking an art class, shopping for groceries, visiting his elderly aunt. The program pays for an aide to spend 20 hours a week with Mr. Foster, 34, who has Down syndrome and cannot read well or drive. . . . . Since has was 17, he has worked on weekends at Chuck E. Cheese’s, dressing in costume and entertaining children at birthday parties. His father drives him back and forth now, but in the future he may rely on Medicaid for help getting to work.

I guess in the world of Congressional Republicans, the blame for what happens to these individuals and many, many others (not to mention the poor) would fall to the states if they chose to drop optional services and not raise taxes.  That type of excuse didn't work well for Pontius Pilate. It should not be allowed to work for Trump, Ryan and McConnell. 

One last irony:  The GOP and its evangelical Christian supporters claim to be "the party of pro-life" and oppose abortion, yet once individuals are born they immediately become disposable garbage. The hypocrisy is breath taking. 

Will Ordinary Americans Carry out Inhumane Acts for Trump/Pence?

One of the most frightening things about the atrocities perpetrated by Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime were the horrors done to people by seemingly otherwise ordinary Germans.  Brutality and inhuman acts that one would never expect in a civilized society were done without flinching. Meanwhile, other Germans claimed to know nothing about the horrors that were being done daily.  A piece from the Baltimore Sun looks at the phenomenon and then looks at some of the inhuman things done by Americans during the first days of Der Trumpenführer - I saw the name on another bog and loved it -  Muslim ban and ask the question that should be haunting decent Americans everywhere: would our friends and neighbors willingly abuse others if they were merely "following orders"?  Add to this the studies that have shown individuals raised in deeply religious fundamentalist homes show far less empathy towards others and we could be facing a nightmare given the ascendancy of the Christofascists and alt-right extremists under Der Trumpenführer.  Here are article highlights:

A week ago, men and women went to work at airports around the United States as they always do. They showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, perhaps dropped off their kids at school. Then they reported to their jobs as federal government employees, where, according to news reports, one of them handcuffed a 5-year-old child, separated him from his mother and detained him alone for several hours at Dulles airport.

At least one other federal employee at Dulles reportedly detained a woman who was traveling with her two children, both U.S. citizens, for 20 hours without food. A relative says the mother was handcuffed (even when she went to the bathroom) and threatened with deportation to Somalia.

At Kennedy Airport, still other federal employees detained and handcuffed a 65-year-old woman traveling from Qatar to visit her son, who is a U.S. citizen and serviceman stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. The woman was held for more than 33 hours, according to the New York Times, and denied use of a wheelchair.

The men and women who work for the federal government completed these and other tasks and then returned to their families, where perhaps they had dinner and read stories to their children before bedtime.

[N]o would-be autocrat can act alone. As a practical matter, he needs subordinates willing to carry out orders. Of course, neither Donald Trump nor Steve Bannon personally detained any of the more than 100 people held at airports over the weekend pursuant to the administration's executive order on immigration, visitation and travel to the United States. They relied on assistance.

What I mean by that, is that these are, in normal circumstances, people who likely treat their neighbors and co-workers with kindness and do not intentionally seek to harm others. That is chilling, as it is a reminder that authoritarians have no trouble finding the people they need to carry out their acts of cruelty. They do not need special monsters; they can issue orders to otherwise unexceptional people who will carry them out dutifully.

The famous Milgram experiment and subsequent studies suggest that many people will obey instructions from an authority figure, even if it means harming another person. It is also perfectly understandable (which does not mean it is justifiable). How many of us would refuse to follow an instruction from a superior at work? It is natural to want to keep one's job, even if at the price of inflicting cruelty on another human being, even perhaps a child.

It is far easier to do nothing, to trust that, somehow, America's dangerous course will be set right. But this is a dangerous gamble, and in fact an abdication of our responsibility as Americans and indeed as human beings. If we do nothing, that is a choice. It means we accept a government that has demonstrated it is capable of inflicting cruelty on the innocent and defenseless.  What will we do?

The Lethal Personality Disorder Of Donald Trump

If you do some reading of various mental health journals and pieces, one will find some common traits among some of history's worse tyrants.  Here are a few snapshots:

It is argued that it is highly probable Adolf Hitler suffered from a multitude of severe psychological disorders including paranoid schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder.

Historically, this particular combination of 3 personality disorders was seen in all of history's worst tyrants (e.g., Hitler, Stalin etc.). These tyrants lust for wealth, fame and power, and callously destroy everyone that they suspect opposes them. As they gain more power, they become more grandiose, power-hungry, and paranoid. If unopposed, these tyrants initiate wars, which result in the mass slaughter of innocent civilians. The tragedy is that the public is easily seduced by these tyrant's grandiose fantasies of national "greatness", and their paranoid hatred of some scapegoated minority (e.g., Jews, Muslims, immigrants, or refugees). These tyrants know that is easier to mobilize people by teaching them hatred and paranoia, than by teaching them love and forgiveness. 

So what are the traits of someone with Narcissistic personality disorder?  Here's a brief description:

They show an exaggerated sense of self-importance, insensitivity towards the feelings and needs of others, and callous exploitation of others. They alienate others with their arrogance, self-centeredness, greed, and lack of kindness. They have feelings of entitlement; they often expect to be catered to and are furious when this does not happen. They are attention-seeking and admiration seeking. Their manipulativeness, deceitfulness, and callousness is identical to the selfish, callous and remorseless use of others that is seen in psychopaths.

Sound familiar?   It should since it summarizes Donald Trump.  Sadly, too many in the public know little or no history and are refusing to see the warning signs that Donald Trump in the White House would be a catastrophe.  Whether or not you like Hillary Clinton, she doesn't have the traits as some of history's worse villains.  A very lengthy piece in Huffington Post looks at just how dangerous Trump would be if elected to the presidency.  The man is unfit for high office and America will likely face a catastrophe if Trump gains the White House.  Here are article highlights:

In 1991, Sue Carswell, a reporter for People, experienced a phenomenon familiar to her peers: calls from supposed PR guys named “John Miller” or “John Barron”, gratuitously boasting about Trump’s wealth, business success and romantic prowess. Most bizarre, all agreed, was that the caller spoke and sounded exactly like Trump himself. But this particular call was immortalized on tape.

As others had, Carswell recognized the distinctive voice and accent. Distinctive, too, was the callousness and narcissism of an abysmal- and unbalanced - human being.

Trump was 44 then, and living with his future second wife Marla Maples. Nonetheless, his boastful “representative” shared for public consumption that “Trump” had “three other girlfriends”, detailing at length his alleged romance with Nicholas Sarkozy’s future wife Carla Bruni. But not all women were so lucky- for the benefit of People’s readers “Miller” described how Madonna stalked Trump at a charity ball before facing the ultimate devastation: “He’s got zero interest that night.”

But here’s the thing which takes his performance from odious to pathological - Trump wanted a larger audience for his particular brand of self - aggrandizing swill, one in the millions, and was willing to assume a false identity to get it. It didn’t matter if he was lying; he didn’t care who got hurt. All that counted is what he needed in the moment.

To meet his needs, Donald Trump wants us to make him president. To meet its own needs, the media - particularly cable news - is helping him.

[T]here is nothing more “current” or important than Donald Trump’s psychological fitness to be president. All the hyperventilation of the media - parsing his “positions”, pontificating on his” strategy” and intuition- is a poisonous form of the “political correctness” he otherwise deplores, normalizing the abnormal by shoehorning him into the usual analytic boxes. And what it yields is, in great part, rubbish.

There is only one organizing principle which makes sense of his wildly oscillating utterances and behavior - the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder.

The Mayo Clinic describes it as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others.” This is bad enough in selecting a spouse or a friend. But when applied to a prospective president, the symptoms are disqualifying.

With Trump ever in mind, try these. An exaggerated sense of self-importance. An unwarranted belief in your own superiority. A preoccupation with fantasies of your own success, power and brilliance. A craving for constant admiration. A consuming sense of entitlement. An expectation of special favors and unquestioning compliance.

A penchant for exploiting or disparaging others. A total inability to recognize the needs of anyone else. An incapacity to see those you meet as separate human beings. An unreasoning fury at people you perceive as thwarting your wishes or desires. A tendency to act on impulse. A superficial charm deployed to disguise a gift for manipulation.

A need to always be right. A refusal to acknowledge error. An inability to tolerate criticism or critics. A compulsion to conform your ever - shifting sense of “reality” to satisfy your inner requirements . A tendency to lie so frequently and routinely that objective truth loses all meaning.

A belief that you are above the rules. An array of inconsistent statements and behaviors driven by your needs in the moment. An inability to assess the consequences of your actions in new or complex situations. In sum, a total incapacity to separate the world from your own psychodrama.

Recognize anyone?

If your life’s work is building hotels and casinos, this pathology can work for you -especially if your dad has started you out with a few million dollars in chips. . . . . The annals of business are filled with such people, some of whom wind up in jail, others of whom die rich. But however puissant they become in their chosen realm, their sickness of mind and spirit cannot ruin a country. That power is reserved for presidents.

By the consensus of mental health experts, this emotional impairment has a last fatal ingredient - there is no cure. For a man like Donald Trump, life offers no lessons, no path forward save to continue as you have until, like Icarus, you fly too close to the sun.

He is afflicted with a comprehensive and profound character disorder which leaves no corner of his psyche whole. And this dictates - and explains - every aspect of his behavior.

Take his recourse to bullying and slander. “I’m a counterpuncher,” he rationalizes. “[I]’ve been responding to what they did to me.” Now we understand, Donald - your enemies made you do it.

This astoundingly graceless and unpresidential behavior is far too pointless and indiscriminate to qualify as strategy or tactics. The common thread in all this lashing out - often at those who can’t fight back - is that it has nothing to do with issues, or anything else one would expect from a normal candidate. It is another symptom of Trump’s pathology - the visceral reflex to humiliate and degrade anyone who displeases him, no matter the context or situation.

Opposition of any kind enrages him. He incites reprisals against protesters. He threatened violence in Cleveland as payback for the GOP’s “unfairness.” He fuels anger against Hispanics, Muslims, and other minorities whom he perceives as inimical. And never - not once - does he take any responsibility for stirring these toxic pots. For one of the symptoms of his disability is an absence of conscience or accountability.

Which brings us to a central problem of Trump’s warped psychology - he believes that filling the presidency requires nothing but the wonder of himself. This gives the lie to GOP’s most craven rationalization of its own capitulation: that a suddenly docile Trump will, as president, defer to a cadre of wise and experienced advisors drawn from the party establishment.

This is pernicious nonsense. Consistent with his character disorder, Trump proudly insists that his chief advisor is himself. Even were he so inclined, in order to learn from others he must know enough to discern good advice from bad. But such is his pathology that he feels no need to learn much of anything from anyone. And so, from the beginning, he has plunged us down the bottomless rabbit hole of his intellectual emptiness.

His ignorance and grandiosity form a lethal compound. He disowns NATO, unaware that he is playing into Putin’s hands; blithely proposes nuclear proliferation in Asia; muses aloud about using nuclear weapons; and imagines negotiating one-on-one with North Korea’s psychotic leader. He proposes a trade war potentially ruinous to the world economy. He abets ISIS and Al Qaeda by scapegoating all Muslims at home and abroad. Oblivious to the appalled reaction around the globe, he promises to compel the respect of world leaders through “ the aura of personality.”

His equally spurious domestic “proposals”, such as they may be, reflect nothing but the unreality of his own self-concept. His tax plan is absurd on its face. His astonishing proposal to trash America’s credit by defaulting on our debt reveals an inability to differentiate between running a casino and a country. His posturing for the NRA is as dangerous as it is dishonest.

One can forecast the inevitable day to day damage to our country - the lashings out, the abuses of power, the mercurial and confidence- destroying lies and changes of mind, the havoc his distorted lens would wreak upon our institutions and our spirit. But most dangerous of all is the collision between a volatile world, a leader unable to perceive external reality, and the often unbearable pressures of the presidency. That Trump’s judgement would crack time and again is certain - the only question is how dangerous the moment.

So how have we fallen prey to a man who, by the damning evidence of his own behavior, is psychologically unfit to be president? When did boasting top coherence; mindless posturing become strength; a talent for ridicule supplant experience or judgement; a gift for scapegoating surpass wisdom or generosity? Why must we even contemplate someone with this stunted inner landscape as the world’s most powerful man?

[T]wo institutions deserve special condemnation.

First, the Republican Party. For too long it fed the GOP’s middle and working class base easy scapegoats - Washington, minorities - while the Paul Ryans of the party contravened its voters’ interests: pushing free trade, reduced entitlements, and tax cuts for the rich. Trump is what happened to the party when its electorate spat this pablum out. . . . . Even more contemptible is the party’s embrace of Trump. For we have reached, as David Brooks wrote, the GOP’s “McCarthy moment” - a turning point when concern for country should override grubby pragmatism. 

But, with honorable exceptions, the broadcast media has been even more shameful and complicit. Worst of all is cable news -in pursuit of revenue and ratings, they have given Trump $3 billion in free advertising, feeding his candidacy - and his ego - by spreading the mythology of his imperviousness and power. . . . . Wallowing in self interest, they have shrunk from saying what must be said: that Trump is unfit for higher office. 

The Republican Party is beyond redemption. The media have five months left. Let them use it well.

Never in my memory have I been so frightened by a candidate for the White House and never do I remember a comparable blindness of so many to the threat that the nation faces.