Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
Trump: A Reason Europe Is Rearming
Poland is building one of the West’s most muscle-bound militaries, on course to deploy more battle tanks than Britain, France, Germany and Italy – combined.
How will leaders in Poland — and, to varying degrees, others across Europe — manage the inevitable economic and political fallout of major military buildups in the face of Moscow’s aggression and Washington’s distraction?
Credit Warsaw with a baseline of strategic sanity. It faces a revanchist enemy in Russia, which invaded Poland in 1939 and subjugated it for decades after World War II. This month, a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to eliminate “Polish statehood in its entirety.”
And don’t forget, Poland lives in a hostile neighborhood. It is bordered in part by Belarus, a Russian puppet; by Ukraine, which Putin is determined to subjugate; and by Kaliningrad, a Russian outpost bristling with weapons. Defense was one of the few major policies that was not a subject of debate in Poland’s bitterly contested elections last month.
Yet Poland is also a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, covered by the United States and 29 other Western allies’ commitment to its defense if attacked. More than 10,000 American troops are stationed in Poland, and 80 percent of military hardware heading for Ukraine passes through Polish transit points.
So what’s it worried about?
Beyond Russia’s snarling, there is a simple explanation: Donald Trump.
Trump repeatedly told White House aides in 2018 that he wanted to pull the United States out of NATO, a move that would leave the bloc leaderless and neutered.
“It would be extremely stressful if America pivoted away from Europe, and that’s the worry with Trump,” a top European diplomat told me. “Every foreign ministry is thinking about this.”
When Trump threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO, Poland was spending roughly 2 percent of annual economic output on defense. It is on track to double that next year, and Warsaw looks likely to increase military outlays further, especially if the war in Ukraine drags on.
Almost no other NATO country, including the United States, spends as much on defense as a percentage of gross domestic product. . . . Poland’s spending binge — for top-shelf fighter jets, attack helicopters, rocket launchers, air defense systems and artillery, as well as tanks — is impelled by the rising threat from Russia, which has shifted its own economy onto a wartime footing. But Warsaw’s buildup is also a hedge against Trump’s return to the White House and the chance that he will set NATO adrift.
That prospect has set alarm bells ringing across Europe.
In Germany, for years a defense-spending laggard, Chancellor Olaf Scholz last week committed the government to a long-term military expansion, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars annually through the 2030s. But the German economy is limping through a recession, the budget is constrained by a constitutional debt limit, and the hollowed-out army has struggled to fill its ranks with recruits. Which social programs will Berlin raid to pay for a beefier new military?
President Emmanuel Macron has embarked on France’s biggest military spending increase in a half-century, earmarking nearly $450 billion to boost outlays through the end of the decade by a third. His parallel effort to push Europe to take ownership of its security through better military and industrial coordination — and less reliance on Washington’s weaponry and leadership — springs from a clear-eyed assessment: The United States, distracted by China and entertaining the possibility of Trump’s return, is an unpredictable ally.
An enduring defense buildup in Europe depends partly on robust economies and healthy demographics. Both look anemic these days. Birthrates are low across the continent — Poland’s population is projected to shrink by a tenth by 2050 — and Europe’s post-pandemic economic rebound trails the United States’.
Russia has shifted to a wartime economy to finance its aggression in Ukraine and very possibly elsewhere. As an autocracy, it is less susceptible to the mounting pressures that will result. Europe’s ability to respond will shape the West’s new security posture as much as or more than anything Washington devises. That challenge looms right now.
Monday, November 20, 2023
Trump Dreams of an American Fourth Reich
Donald Trump’s hate sermons are becoming even more intense and combustible. As he comes ever closer to openly quoting Adolf Hitler and the other 20th-century fascists, his behavior is clearly intentional and strategic.
Trump publicly admires and praises tyrants and demagogues and views them as role models. If he returns to power in 2025, he intends to create an American Fourth Reich. Consider Trump's speeches, interviews and social media posts over the last few weeks.
At a rally in Hialeah, Florida, last Wednesday, Trump painted a picture of a hellish (predominantly white) America overrun by serial killers and other human monsters from foreign (and predominantly nonwhite) countries, insisting that only he could save (white) America from the death and contamination caused by Democrats and “the left.”
The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson continues from there: . . . . This was a dystopian, at times gothic speech. It droned on for nearly 90 minutes. Trump attacked the “liars and leeches” who have been “sucking the life and blood” out of the country. Those unnamed people were similar to, yet different from, the “rotten, corrupt, and tyrannical establishment” of Washington, D.C. — a place Trump famously despises, and to which he nonetheless longs to return.
Over the past seven or years or s, I have watched many of Trump’s speeches. This was one of the most frightening and most disturbing I have seen. It was fascinating in much the same way as witnessing the aftermath of a horrible car accident or watching a horror movie.
On Friday, in an interview with Univision, Trump threatened to use the Department of Justice to put his political enemies in prison: “They have done something that allows the next party … if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election.” Trump also defended his regime’s cruel family separation policy (and by implication concentration camp system) that targeted millions of brown and Black migrants and refugees.
These white supremacist plans are part of a larger project to revoke birthright citizenship, invoke the Alien Enemies Act to imprison or deport (or worse) the Trump regime’s perceived enemies, and using the law more generally as a weapon to crush dissent and resistance.
Last weekend, on Veterans Day, Trump escalated his Nazi-style threats by declaring that his political enemies to be "vermin" or human poison to be purged from the system. That came at a MAGA rally in New Hampshire and also in a post on his Truth Social platform . . .
At a fundraising event in San Francisco last Tuesday, President Biden spoke out against Trump’s antisemitism and white supremacy: “In just the last few days, Trump has said, if he returns office, he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called ... the vermin in America — a specific phrase with a specific meaning…. It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the '30s.”
Declaring that the enemies of the regime and the Great Leader are mentally ill and then imprisoning them for "treatment" is a common practice in authoritarian states.
Predictably, the mainstream news media and responsible political class responded with performative shock and surprise at Trump’s week-long channeling of Hitler and Nazism. In fact, Trump’s hateful behavior and language are no surprise.
For at least the last seven years (and for decades before that), Trump has shown himself to be a casual antisemite. He reportedly once slept with a copy of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet next to his bed. It is no coincidence that professed Nazis, white supremacists and other hate-mongers are among Trump’s strongest supporters, or that he refuses to publicly disavow or condemn them.
It appears that the American news media and political class, and by implication the mass public, have already forgotten that since at least September Trump has publicly spread conspiracy theories about being “stabbed in the back,” suggesting that the country is being “poisoned” by immigrants and that “good Jews” should support him while “bad Jews” will be punished for their “betrayals.”
But the mainstream media is bored with Trump's rhetoric and has now largely moved on. That irresponsible choice further normalizes Trump’s evil and the larger neofascist assault on the country’s democracy and civil society.
It is nearly incredible that the presumed nominee of one of the country’s two institutional political parties is explicitly channeling Hitler and the Nazis. That should be dominating the news. Trump's Fourth Reich aspirations constitute a national emergency. But America is an unhealthy society where all this will likely be normalized as just "culture war" tactics or political "polarization."
If Donald Trump's American neofascist movement did not have tens of millions of followers, it would not pose an existential threat to democracy. History is full of examples of “good people” who become capable of doing horrible things to others once they are given permission and encouraged by fascist leaders, fake populists and demagogues.
Trump’s Fourth Reich will not be an exact copy of its German counterpart from nearly a century ago. Instead, Trump’s Fourth Reich (or that of his successors) will be adapted to fit contemporary America’s cultural norms, values and institutions. The final horror is still evolving, but the threat and dangers are very clear. The American people are running out of time.
Sunday, November 19, 2023
Trump Has Crossed the Line to Fascism
The former president, after years of espousing authoritarian beliefs, has fully embraced the language of fascism. But Americans—even those who have supported him—can still refuse to follow him deeper into darkness.
I [previously] dug in my heels when Donald Trump’s critics described him and his followers as fascists. Authoritarians? Yes, some. Illiberal? Definitely. But fascism, a term coined by Benito Mussolini and now commonly used to describe Italy, Germany, and other nations in the 1930s, has a distinct meaning, and denotes a form of government that is beyond undemocratic.
Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.
I argued that for most of Trump’s time as a public figure, he was not a fascist but rather a wannabe caudillo, the kind of Latin American strongman who cared little about what people believed so long as they feared him and left him in power. When he would make forays into the public square, his politics were insubstantial and mostly focused on exploiting reflexive resentment and racism, such as when he called for the death penalty for the Black youths wrongly accused in the infamous Central Park–jogger case. But Trump in those days was never able to square his desperate wish to be accepted in Manhattan society with his need to play the role of an outer-borough tough guy. He was an obnoxious and racist gadfly, perhaps, but he was still a long way from fascism.
As a candidate and as president, he had little in the way of a political program for the GOP beyond his exhausting narcissism. He had only two consistent issues: hatred of immigrants and love for foreign autocrats. Even now, his rants contain little political substance. . . .
Trump had long wanted to be somebody in politics, but he is also rather indolent—again, not a characteristic of previous fascists—and he did not necessarily want to be saddled with any actual responsibilities. According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill.
After Trump was elected, I still warned against the indiscriminate use of fascism, because I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us.
The events of the past month, and especially Trump’s Veterans Day speech, confirm to me that the moment has arrived.
For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:
We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out to The Washington Post, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”
Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.
Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words. Trump seized on this strategic error by his opponents and used it as a kind of political cover.
Today, the mistake of early overreaction and the subsequent complacency it engendered have aided Trump in his efforts to subvert American democracy. His presence in our public life has become normalized, and he continues to be treated as just another major-party candidate by a hesitant media, an inattentive public, and terrified GOP officials. This is the path to disaster: The original fascists and other right-wing dictators of Europe succeeded by allying with scared elites in the face of public disorder and then, once they had seized the levers of government, driving those elites from power (and in many cases from existence on this planet).
[H]e has reportedly expressed admiration of Hitler (and envy of Hitler’s grip on the Nazi military), so when the Republican front-runner uses terms like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country, we are not required to spend a lot of time generously parsing what he may have meant.
More to the point, the people around Trump certainly know what he’s saying. . . . Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word.
I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.
As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.
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