As many observers have noted, Donald Trump is seeming extra unhinged of late, which is really saying something. He is slurring his words at rallies, going off on pointless, incoherent tangents (#theweave), slandering Kamala Harris as “mentally disabled” (every accusation is a confession, innit, Donny?), and claiming that Joe Biden is withholding hurricane aid even as Republican governors bluntly report the opposite. He has called for a day-long Purge in which cops can run riot, suggested that critics of the Supreme Court be summarily imprisoned, brought a 9/11 truther to a memorial at Ground Zero, and stood by a gubernatorial candidate who called himself a “Black Nazi,” all the while painting a totally false portrait of America as a crime-ridden hellscape in economic freefall (quick factcheck: crime is down and the economy is booming). And of course, as we noted two weeks ago, he continues to insist that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating housepets.

And that is but a small sample of Don’s oeuvre. A full accounting would require a David Foster Wallace-length tome.

And yet, if the polls are to be believed, this hideous excuse for a human being remains within a froghair of becoming President of the United States for a second time.

We shall reckon with what that says about America another time. For now, this state of affairs has prompted me to ponder where all this could possibly lead.

Think of how far the Overton window for acceptable behavior by a national politician has moved—or perhaps more precisely, how low we have sunk—when Donald Trump can both promise to “terminate” the Constitution and retweet a meme about his opponent giving a blowjob and still have seventy-some million Americans supporting him. (I cite those two examples because they so neatly embody his twin vices of authoritarianism and personal hideousness.) Some of Trump’s craziness is, admittedly, straight outta the theater of the absurd, beggaring satire. But ultimately it is not funny at all—it is terrifying. We have the candidate of one of our two major parties who is not only openly fascist, but also clearly out of his fucking gourd. And millions of our countrymen are fine with both those pieces.

Now hang on a minute, I hear you saying. So much of Trump is just bluster, right? He’s just owning the libs, and you King’s Necktie, are taking the bait hook, line, and sinker.

Am I?

I don’t have the stomach for another tiresome iteration of the take-him-literally-but-not-figuratively debate. (Or is it the other way round?) True, Trump’s word isn’t worth the sulfurous fumes on which it rides out of his piehole. He has promised myriad things that never had—and never will have—a prayer of materializing: the border wall, Infrastructure Week, a replacement for Obamacare, and so forth. But by the same token, he has in fact carried through with a great many travesties: the Muslim ban, a tax cut for the richest Americans, US withdrawal from the Paris Accord and the JCPOA, Dobbs. I could go on.

So what I want to ask, dear reader, is simply this: What do you think would constitute something so horrible, so over the line, so unconscionable and morally objectionable that Donald Trump would not go there, if there were some benefit to him in it?

I’ll wait.

AMERICAN WANNSEE

I think you may have guessed where this thought experiment is heading.

In conventional discourse it is commonplace to consider Adolf Hitler a monster unique in human history, which is how much of popular memory has duly recorded him. But read Volker Ullrich: Hitler was an ordinary politician of his era, one who hit upon a winning formula with his anti-Semitic rants, who saw that the crowd thrilled to them, and then built his persona and his program from there. The vision of him as something much more than that, as possessed by some supernatural evil, conveniently relieves us of the possibility that we too, like the Germans of the 1930s, could fall prey to such a demagogue, or even rally eagerly to his side.

But at the risk of shocking American exceptionalists, there is nothing special about our national character than makes us morally superior to the people of Germany. And I’ll go out on a limb and say that I don’t think Donald Trump possesses some magic moral backbone that Hitler was lacking, some steel core of integrity or principle that would keep him from going as far as the Fuhrer once did. And if you think the American people are more innately resistant to that sort of thing than our German friends, I’ll be happy to sell you a bridge that I keep down near Jane’s Carousel and the Shake Shack in Dumbo.

I can hear the howling and scoffing and sense the eye-rolling from Fox Nation already. We’ll get to Godwin’s Law in a moment. Just indulge me for a moment.

I do not mean to suggest that an American version of the Final Solution is imminent; I propose it only as an exercise in imagination. Admittedly, it is almost impossible to think that any US president would order the mass murder of American citizens (though a US president—one of our best ever, in fact—once ordered their mass internment), or even of non-citizen resident aliens. But if you’ve ever been to a Trump rally—and I have not—or even watched one on TV, it certainly feels conceivable, or at least not inconceivable. Does anyone honestly believe that, were the circumstances right, upon some favorable emergency, when presented with a plan to massacre undocumented immigrants in industrialized slaughter (by Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon, for instance), Trump would say, “No—I can’t do that. It’s simply immoral.”

Of course not.

Sure, Trump might balk at such a proposal for other, non-ethical reasons. I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Donald is—occasionally—more sensible and pragmatic than others in his party, if only out of his innate, transactional sense of animal cunning for what the people want. For instance, he seems to know that outlawing abortion is an electoral loser, which is why he vacillates between baldly lying that he does not favor such a policy, when addressing the MSM, and his narcissist’s urge to brag—correctly—that he is responsible for overturning Roe, when talking to anti-abortion groups. The man loves the sound of applause.

But once you accept that Trump has no moral boundary that would stop him from committing genocide, either abroad or at home, we find ourselves staring into a very very dark abyss. Obsidian, in fact. Black as night, black as coal, in the words of Jagger & Richards. None more black, in the words of Nigel Tufnel.

Mass murder may yet remain way beyond the pale, even for Trump. But many many things that were once impossible to imagine have happened over the last nine years, and I have long since stopped considering anything too far-fetched. After all, he has already promised to round migrants up by the millions and place them in concentration camps—a wildly impractical proposal, with no details on offer of how that would work, with or without violent nationwide upheaval, not that practicality is the chief objection to it. But just the fact that he would suggest it! From the establishment of concentration camps it is but a hop skip and jump to the thing that so often happens inside them. For that matter, in his first term he already instituted and carried out a policy of kidnapping small children from their parents, caging them in inhuman conditions in what can only be called concentration camps, and making it impossible for thousands of them ever to be reunited with their families. Do you really doubt he could go even further in a second term, untethered from legal accountability as he would be, thanks to the right wing justices he installed on the Supreme Court?

One does not have to go so far as a second Holocaust to understand and accept the horrors that would likely accompany a second  Trump term. They have been widely reported upon, but to name just one, the likes of Mark Milley, Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and even Joe Biden are bracing to be arrested, or should be.

Participatory democracy can expect abrupt cancellation as well. I have mentioned previously that a very very smart and politically sophisticated friend of mine recently scoffed when I suggested that if Trump wins in 2024, there may be no presidential election at all in 2028. Maybe my friend is right, and I’m being alarmist. But for me, that’s a slam dunk, on an eight-foot junior high school hoop. Trump already tried to overturn an election he lost. How much easier would it be for him, as a sitting president in his second term, emboldened by his victory and with nearly a decade of institutional knowledge, and with that aforementioned toadying  SCOTUS supermajority behind him, to simply gin up some “national emergency” as a Reichstag  fire-like reason to “postpone” the election, indefinitely? Is the GOP gonna rise up and stop him?

In fact, the Republican Party and the so-called conservative movement at large have consistently behaved toward Trump precisely as center-right German politicians and business leaders did toward Hitler in the ‘30s: underestimating him, believing they could control him and use him rather than the other way round, enabling him and excusing his outrages, bowing to his every whim, and rationalizing their incremental (and sometimes not so incremental) submission to his atrocities until they were wholly complicit in absolute depravity. In a second Trump term, with a wrathful Donald unbound and on a quest for retribution, no sudden emergence of courage from the GOP can be expected. Very much the contrary.

I FOUGHT THE LAW

OK, now to my critics.

I assume that by now people are familiar with Godwin’s Law—probably a lot more familiar than is healthy for a democracy, if we need to be talking about it. In The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell writes:

(P)eople roll their eyes and tune out when they hear commentators or historians warn, yet again, about another big bad Great Dictator. Problem is, Donald Trump seems intent on making the Hitler comparison happen.

In recent weeks, the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio) have ramped up their baseless claims about violent invasions from impure foreigners, echoing “blood and soil”-style rhetoric deployed nearly a century ago. At a rally this past weekend in North Carolina, Trump declared that “a vote for Kamala Harris means 40 or 50 million more illegal aliens will invade across our borders, stealing your money, stealing your jobs, stealing your life.” Chillingly, he added that migrants were already “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest.” This followed earlier remarks in Arizona, in which he alleged that “young American girls” are “being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.”

Of Vance’s demonizing of Haitian migrants in his own state, and the ensuing threats of violence toward them, Rampell writes:

It is hard to recall a senator in recent memory who’s done more to endanger the lives of his own constituents than Vance has.

I’m not saying he and Trump actually want to start a modern-day pogrom, but if they did, I’m not sure what they’d be doing differently.

So yeah, when people behave like Nazis (no “neo” about it), they deserve to be called out for it.

Mike Godwin, originator of the meme, himself disavowed it in a Washington Post op-ed last year, calling analogies to Hitler apropos and necessary for Trump, citing his “authoritarian instincts for consolidating state power in a single leader; dehumanizing political enemies as ‘vermin’; and claiming that immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ an infamous Hitler talking point.”

Even JD Vance himself, lest we forget, compared his running mate to Hitler way back inn 2016, before he had even done a fraction of the terrible shit he would go on to do. Rampell again:

Lest Trump’s fascist echoes be too faint for Vance to hear these days, the former president occasionally cranks up the volume with antisemitic tropes. For instance, he accused American Jews of voting for “the enemy” and agreed with a radio host that Vice President Kamala Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, is a “crappy Jew.” (Debates over “good” and “bad” Jews rarely end well for Jews.)

Last week, shortly after a Republican gubernatorial candidate was revealed to have expressed pro-Hitler views, Trump took things to their logical conclusion: He preemptively blamed Jews if he performs poorly this November. “If I don’t win this election,” Trump said at a summit devoted to (I kid you not) combating American antisemitism, then “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”

Not the most eloquent closing argument. But then, as Molly Ivins once quipped, it probably sounded better in the original German.

GOAT’S HEAD SOUP NAZI

Let’s go now to a recent essay by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, and the man whom my friend Tom Hall—himself one of the smartest political observers I know—calls the GOAT when it comes to this topic.

In a Substack piece called “Trump’s Hitlerian Month: A September to Remember,” Snyder notes the self-flattering hypocrisy of American exceptionalism: the syllogism that says no American president could be a tyrant because America is good and pure by definition. “(T)he idea that ‘comparison’ is a sin rests on the notion of the inherent and unimpeachable virtue of the American Volk, who by definition do nothing wrong, and whose chosen Leader therefore must be beyond criticism.” 

A taboo on “comparison” becomes a shield for the perpetrator.  Those who invoke the past are the true villains, the real source of the problem, or, as Trump says about journalists, the “enemy of the people.” Indeed, the more Trump resembles Hitler, the safer the man is from criticism on this point.

Snyder writes that ”The reason why we keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes is not because it could never happen here, but because something similar can always happen anywhere. That memory has to include the details of history, or else we will not recognize the dangers. 

‘Never again’ is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.”

He also rightly connects Trump’s Big Lie to its granddaddy, the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth of Versailles, and also the Big Lie that the Holocaust never happened.

His claim that we actually won the election in a landslide is a fantasy that opens the way to other fantasies. It is a conspiratorial claim that opens the way to conspiratorial thinking generally. It prepares his followers for the idea that other Americans are enemies and that violence might be needed to install the correct leader.

Snyder states bluntly: “Trump and Vance are running a fascist campaign,“ citing the dogs-and-cats thing in particular, and draining it of its comic value:

(Trump) found people who were both Blacks and immigrants, who could serve as the ‘them’ in his politics of us-and-them…..The fantasy of barbarians in our cities violating basic social norms serves to gird the Trump-Vance story that legal, constitutional government is helpless and that only an angry mob backed by a new regime could get things done.

It is worth knowing, in this connection, that the first major action of Hitler’s SS was the forced deportation of migrants. About 17,000 people were deported, which generated the social instability that the Nazi government the used as justification for further oppression.  Trump and Vance plan to deport about a thousand times as many people.

Now, the Hitlerian things that Trump says would be Hitlerian with or without this Hitlerian context of the last four years, the last year, or the last month. And this context would be Hitlerian with or without Trump’s recent Hitlerian utterances. It is helpful, however, to see all of this together, as a whole, because it makes it harder to excuse each individual piece of the story. 

In the second half of his piece, Snyder echoes Rampell in recounting in great detail Trump’s openly anti-Semitic remarks of late, including warning American Jews of the repercussions if he doesn’t win, ostensibly couched as an I’m-on-your-side caution about their potential fate under Democratic rule, but also functioning as a blunt threat. Of course, the scapegoat in question need not be Jews for Trump’s fascism to obtain; in the case of him and his followers, immigrants and people of color largely seem to serve that role. I invite you to read Snyder’s whole essay, but if you take away only one line, maybe it should be this one:

“In the silence about Trump’s fascism, those who care about freedom and the future will hear one more reason to act.”

THE (UN)DECIDERS

The race for the White House remains razor close, and we are told that a tiny handful of our countrymen—swing voters, who have not yet made up their minds—will determine who wins.

Hang on while I go get my US Army Arctic Warfare Extreme Cold Weather parka to warm me from the chill that just went down my spine.

Let me get this straight. The people we’re relying on to save our democracy are the people who can’t decide between Trump and Harris? For them, I offer this chestnut from David Sedaris, which remains pertinent as ever:

I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

And Sedaris wrote that in 2008, when the choice was between Barack Obama and John McCain. My literary powers do not extend to thinking of an updated metaphor that reflects the menu choice between Kamala and Trump.

But those undecideds are, apparently, not limited to low-information voters. Witness those two pompous asses who comprise the august New York Times’s dynamic duo of resident right wing apologists—er, I mean, opinion columnists—Bret Stephens and Ross Douthat, both of whom have been seen recently stroking their chins in allegedly high-minded contemplation of whether Kamala is a sufficiently palatable alternative to an openly fascist twice-impeached convicted felon who has promised to install a dictatorship. The Stephenses and Douthats of the world and their fellow travelers are either neck deep in their own narcissism and denial of reality, or unwilling to admit that they are actually fine with white Christian nationalism, despite their high-minded veneer. 

On that topic, a strong candidate for the most ridiculous magazine article of 2024 is one in The Atlantic last month titled “Let Us Now Praise Undecided Voters,” by Gal Beckerman. It was one of those very-pleased-with-itself, mildly contrarian think pieces that magazines like the otherwise very fine Atlantic like to run…..and maybe the cautiousness and slow-moving decision-making that it praises does have some merit when it comes to deciding, say, what ice cream flavor to choose (an example the article employs). But when it comes to choosing between the fascist candidate for president and the non-fascist one, it was one of the most absurd pieces of journalism I’ve read in ages. But it pairs nicely with the likes of Stephens & Douthat.

But The Atlantic soon made up for it with a superb article on that same topic by the great Ronald Brownstein called “The Undecided Voters Are Not Who You Think They Are.” Its point: most undecided voters are not choosing between Trump and Harris, they are unsure whether they will vote at all.

That makes a lot more sense, even if I still find it hard to believe anyone doesn’t recognize the crisis we’re in, or the imperative of acting. Let’s hope the Democratic strategists are working to impress upon those folks the importance of this election, and get them to the polls in November. Because the stakes could not be higher or the options more stark.

The New York Times has been among the most egregious offenders when it comes to sanewashing Trump, engaging in outrageous bothsidesism, and holding Kamala to a ridiculously high standard while giving Donny a pass. That pattern continues, and it’s infuriating. But credit where it’s due: the Gray Lady’s editorial board published an endorsement of Vice President Harris that hit the bullseye:

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth—Donald Trump is not fit to be president—should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election. For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

HOME, HOME ON DERANGE

This essay is unlikely to be read by Trump’s supporters and defenders, but if it were, I am sure they would return their usual diagnosis of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Because they have a lot of credibility when it comes to recognizing hysteria and displacement from objective reality.

But that is their standard retort whenever anyone warns of something awful that Trump (we are told) would never do…..like mount a coup. (Looking at you again, Douthat). Yes, it is hard to imagine Final Solution on American shores. But tyrants depend on the unimaginable, and the inability of their constituents to fathom it.

So how far would he go? I don’t want to find out.

*********

Illustration by Randy Pollak; Photo by Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty, originally published in The New Republic’s issue “What American Fascism Would Look Like.”