Evil never does, it just reinvents itself, we are told. A meme tells us that Donald Trump is “as if we took everything that was bad about America, scraped it up off the floor, wrapped it all up in an old hot dog skin, and then taught it to make noises with its face.” He is the lowest common denominator in this country. If you want to gauge the mental health of America, Trump is the face of its sick side. Whether they are deplorables is perhaps debatable, but the people who support Trump are not our best thinkers, who value our way of life, let’s put it that way. They’re the bread and circus crowd. There are 73 million of them, at last count.
Steve Schmidt put the Hitler image next to Trump’s mugshot. He asks, when we look at the mugshot do we see something “sinister? Chilling? Authoritarian? Familiar in the pose?” and then compares it to Hitler. Take another look. It’s scary, the resemblance.
And here’s a mind blower. These defiant poses have always been the case with these guys. I’ve seen pictures of both Hitler and Trump as children and they both convey this sulking, skulking, angry, revenge driven persona. It’s not surprising that controlling others is what they sought to do as adults. Here’s Steve Schmidt’s take on this mugshot of Trump’s.
The last curtain on America’s barely hidden fascist party has been fully lifted. […]
The Trump image is a promise. The promise is dictatorship and the death of the republic.
It is an ugly image from a hideous figure in an ugly moment at the end of an ugly era. It is simultaneously appalling and captivating.
Here is the mighty leader of the MAGA movement in his full glory. “Heil Trump!” indeed.
The image that is soon to become ubiquitous as a sign of MAGA loyalty has a perfect pairing. It is this:
Of course this followed Mike Pence squinting into the camera holding back crocodile tears as he described choosing against participating in Trump’s subversion of the US Constitution. Mike Pence preserved it, yet Mike Pence is for four more years. It is ludicrous beyond any measure. In fact, it’s clinical and borderline psychotic. What is wrong with him as “a Christian, a conservative or Republican, in that order?”
It is madness. All of it. What FOX aired looked like an approximation of the “Hunger Games” kick-off from Panem with less worthy competitors. It is predictable, shocking and disturbing, while simultaneously being banal, stupid and unwatchable. We can certainly apply Thomas Paine’s words to this: “These are the times that try men’s souls.” It is despicable.
I share Steve Schmidt’s horror in this, because this was the most appalling of debates. As you’ve heard, Ramaswamy and DeSantis were deemed the “winners” being only a few points apart in a poll taken after the debate. They are both so lame that in any kind of a normal political year, they wouldn’t even be on the stage, or if they got there, they would be laughed off it.
Somehow the GOP has wended its way to be in the same position as a crippled Weimar Republic, which fell to Adolf Hitler in 1933. If you read German history it makes sense that a Germany devastated by WWI, and suffering hyperinflation, the effects of the 1929 depression, political extremism, etc., would be so messed up that it would choose fascism. Yet somehow the GOP found that path without any of those factors.
The GOP has been in steady decline as a party for the past 40 years. And now, evidently, it’s decided that fascism is its face. What other conclusion can you reach when the frontrunner for the nomination is a virtual Hitler clone? Is this coincidence?
The people on that stage know Trump is a monster. They know he doesn’t belong back in office. Yet their hands are up, yes, they would vote for him. Sieg Trump.
In order for evil to flourish, it only requires that people are cowards. That entire show on FUX was filled with abject, craven cowardice, even from the supposed ‘moderates,’ Christie and Hutchinson, who didn’t raise hands in fealty to Trump but signed a loyalty pledge to whomever the GOP wants as its candidate (ie #P 01135809). Nary a spine amongst ’em.
It’s not that they are cowards. For one that makes it easy. But for the other they are caught in a disease. Cowardice is merely a symptom. You talk to Steve and he will tell you. I have never met the man. Would love to sit down across the table from him, though. No this goes far beyond being a coward. As a coward you would know you are doing something wrong. This is the equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome when people start to believe their captors and actually perform various things for them such as to try to steal an election. I never really got it till just now. Trump has had his unwavering control over people for years. As Michael Cohen. Trump had him under control. Michael is probably one of the heroes of this saga which is difficult to believe with his New York trash talk the continual lying. In the beginning Michael even went to jail for him. But that’s where you get the New York minute. Once the dust settled Michael cane to his senses. He realized that he had ruined his life for someone that tossed him off like a worn out pair of socks. That’s when he came out of the cold. He came in from the rain. And he decided to take Trump to task head on. This is one thing that Trump didn’t, couldn’t understand. One of his disciples was striking back. That was the start of something. It was like the little chip in the windshield that suddenly got a little bigger. Many people will write about the Trump saga and the crap that’s gone down. And you will find that Michael will be portrayed as something of a hero which he is. He was the little snowball at the top of the mountain that started rolling down and getting bigger. But that was only the beginning there were others. The Secretary of State in Georgia who recorded the moron. The mother and daughter election workers who stood up for freedom little knowing they would be thrust into the national spotlight. And there’s Fanni Willis that said not on my watch. You aren’t going to come into my state and crap on my state constitution and the constitution of the United States of America 🇺🇸. Well now you can say they are cowards. But not for the reasons you thought. No, they are cowards because they done opened a can of whuppass and they have no where to hide. They are down on their knees knowing that they are in some deep doo doo and they better start talking to someone because they are going to jail.
I know I come across a little extreme, but I’m still waiting for someone to show me nazis can be reasonable and cult members aren’t on a suicide mission.
Actually, that sounds like a reasonable request. But it ain’t gonna happen.
“All it takes for evil to triumph is enough good mennto.do.nothing.”
There aren’t enough good men left in the GOP. They were forced out after Gerald
Ford.
Steve Schmidt made the same comparison. Who is going to acknowledge that Hitler’s ohoto looks like a deer in the headlights compared to Trump*’s tiger?
The expression on Hitler’s face looks like he’s relaxing on the beach compared to Trump.
Yes everyone including myself thought when old Ronnie Reagan got elected he was the man. Didn’t he do good for California. And didn’t he do good for the actors. But he really wasn’t a good man. I mean people have their faults. Reagan had his. It was how good he was at hiding what a prick he really was. That’s just the plain, honest truth. That trickledown money laundering he passed was a prime example. One of the things that did that those morons did do was they would take small businesses and buy them out then sell off their assets and any business they would either send to Mexico or overseas. And you would leave good honest people that had worked somewhere for thirty years and was looking forward to retirement in a few years with a little money. All of a sudden these poor slobs would be standing there with a dumb look on their face. To old to learn a new trade and to young to retire going and getting a job at Walmart. Good luck, smoke em if you got em!
Yes, Reagan grew an outsized ego (or he’d never have run for President in the first place – it takes a dangerous amount of ego for ANYONE with an actual chance to do so) but his biggest problem was that he never reconciled his initial upbringing with the realities of the larger world beyond Dixon. Most of us from those kinds of small towns across America grew up knowing (and seeing/interacting with sometimes) local businessmen, “pillars of the community” and like any subset of people some are good people and some are not. It would seem Reagan mostly knew ok folks in that position. If one takes a closer look, a lot of well-liked “family businesses” in such places tend to fall off in stature when the person who built it up into something hands the reigns over to one (or more) of their offspring who were raised with a level of privilege most aren’t. That’s another topic for another time.
The point is that Reagan reached adulthood equating success in business with being REALLY smart, and also being a “good” person. As a politician, he ASSUMED that those rich people who supported him, who had access to him were rich because they were both so much smarter than almost everyone else but also better persons than almost everyone else. He was blind to how ruthless so many of them actually were. Some marvelled over how he would get a letter or talk with someone, just regular average or even poor people and couldn’t understand how it was that they were in the fix they were in and feel they needed help. Deserved help. It just never occurred to the adult Ronald Reagan that average and poor folks had problems caused by the greed and ruthlessness of those rich people who had his ear! Or wrote big checks to the GOP. Again, he ASSUMED, believed to his core they were so rich and successful and/or powerful because they were good people who were also blessed out outsized intellect! Hence so many of his policies.
I remember an old SNL sketch where the setting was Reagan sitting at the Resolute Desk, with the view not showing Reagan, but the camera was where his head would be. An actor that impersonated his voice would ask practical, annoying questions not unlike a child asking a parent some uncomforatable ones about their parents telling them to do one thing because it was “good” yet they themselves acted differently and seemingly hypocritically. And for each one, each time he’d ask why he/his character would say or do such, that he didn’t understand his increasingly annoyed staffers would say “Just read the script Ron”, or “Just say what’s in the script Ron!”
That was Reagan in a nutshell. A guy who’d lived an extremely charmed life and never realized it who gave far more deference to rich people than they deserved. He grew to believe all the conservative bullsh*t and as a politician was an actor playing a role, albeit one in which he’d come to believe in for the reasons I’ve stated.
At least Herr. Hitler had the fortitude to forthrightly look squarely at the camera. Mr. T hung his head, tucked his chin in, and shielded himself looking through his eyebrows.
Regan should have gone to jail as the evil pissant he was. His hairdo and him sending millions to jail for using cannabis and acting holier than thou, while running a cocaine for arms operation with our enemies and drug cartels, to fund an illegal war in Central America to overthrow democracy. His trained killers, some trained in Georgia of all places, raped, tortured and killed peasants. When Olivier North and the whole deal was exposed, he walked on a legal technicality. Mr. Bobblehead was taped giving an explanation saying I might have been at the meetings but I don’t remember. Phuck him. Hearing the pundits still kissing his arse is evil. He also set in motion where we are today by destroying unions and the middle class. May he rot in Hell along with his Hairdo wife.
Funny you should mention unions and the cowboy President, I’m getting pretty old now, some memory’s have left me, but weren’t the problems we are still having with air traffic control, due to government involvement in union plans that would treat the controllers with better pay, more reasonable hours and benefits they were asking for?
Any one that HAS been a union member like me, realizes there are pluses AND minuses, but, when treated reasonably and rewarded for jobs well done, many union members are more willing to donate time and muscle to community projects …
Big money has bent almost ALL reason out of every community small or large … Here in Iowa, Grassley has followed the money train for several years … His ONE comment shown on TV many times to our public, as an answer to a question from a small group in a town meeting, “Senator Grassley, do you accept Donald Trump’s presidency, without reservation?” – “YES, without reservation”, was his answer …
I wonder if he still does, but his answer now would be clouded with stuttering explanations of self-righteous actions of his own …
The big stink in Iowa now, is not so much the pig farms or large cattle farms, but rather the Republicans being lead around by the ring in their noses, doing or setting up whatever situations the big money boys want …
And of course, the Republicans here have no better plan for our future as a platform we can see and discuss … Typical of more and more States with Republican Governors and Republican Senators, take Joni Ernst, who floated in on the Koch Brother’s millions, where they want all restrictions and limits or quality controls, like the FDA would be run instead by units of the manufacturing companies themselves … WHAT?
Oh, OK, they were tired of paying million dollar fines for permanently destroying streams in Minnesota State, with dumping crap from their paper company process directly into those streams without treatment for PH control, or neutralizing acids and poisonous content …
The Koch’s probably are too busy counting their money, since they only get 40 billion dollars each per year, tough, I suspect, to pay for cleaner systems, help citizens move away from coal and oil instead of pushing flammable and corrosive shale oil down here from Canada, through often-failing pipelines …
I wonder how much a Senator like Joni, costs the Koch’s?
Yeah, that’s right forgot about that. When airline pilots went on strike he used some mumbo jumbo political crap and fired their a$$es. Strike solved. Course we had no pilots and air traffic controllers were in that to. So we didn’t have them. But it was like the janitors cleaned the boards they should be able to direct air traffic. He solved part of that problem by putting the air controllers left on salary so they couldn’t clock their hours. Pilots was like you got a license to fly a Cessna, great, great your hired. Be here tomorrow you are going to Australia if you can find it. Yep incidents went through the roof but who cares. People are mostly getting where they want. 66 years old and I have yet to set foot in a commercial airline.