Time to talk about Trump

I've been dragging my feet of this one. Sure, Trump is loathsome, his father (Old Man Trump) was loathsome, I never watched The Apprentice because unless the stage and cast were cleared with a flamethrower at the end of an episode it would sicken me - if I wanted to watch peasants fighting each other for a hand full coins dropped by a millionaire I'd watch a cruise ship pulling into some poverty stricken island.

When Trump first ran for president, I was OK with it. He's running as a quasi-outsider, he has few ties to the openly satanic Republican Party elites, he was not in the pocket of Wall Street banksters (he had his own deep pockets from Wall Street and Old Man Trump). The US system is so deeply corrupt, that an outsider - any outsider - starts looking better than a Bush III or Clinton II. I figured the media would have their day with a celebrity/politician and he would fade away.

There were even rumours that as a long-time Clinton friend he was running just to fuck up the Republican candidacy process and ensure a Hillary victory. Trump is probably one of the most liberal Republican candidates in his own New York capitalist way. And the toupee, the sneering greed, the egomania - it was more comical than frightening.  I guess I should have been frightened long ago but I've spent most of my adult life staring in horror at American politicians (and Canadian too), that I almost don't care anymore...

But here is a good case from Old Man Tarpley that we should care:

Tarpley.net wrote:If Trump is able to win the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, there is reason to believe that he will then go on to seize the Republican presidential nomination. At that point, he would be facing feckless weaklings like the widely hated Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the cringing toady. Trump might steamroller both of them. The manifest lack of fighting qualities on the part of the two leading Democratic candidates suggests that Trump might then be well on his way to the presidency. God forbid.

Don’t kid yourself: There is simply no comparison between a bourgeois government – no matter how reactionary, no matter how oppressive, no matter how warmongering – and a mass movement of fascist thugs.

The danger of a Trump presidency must be taken with deadly seriousness. During the interwar period, many working-class politicians and trade union officials consoled themselves with the naive reassurance that the fascists and Nazis would not be able to seize power. Some anti-fascists went so far as to delude themselves that they were setting a trap for the fascists and Nazis in the form of state power. They kidded themselves that once the fascists had taken over, they would discredit themselves by their inability to govern, and would then fall from power. In Europe today, the fascist agitation of Trump is being sugarcoated with the idea that he is a clown and buffoon whom nobody needs to take very seriously. This is coherent with the view of the Italian dictator Mussolini among certain Anglo-American opinion makers, which is that Il Duce was nothing more than a buffoon. If so, he was a buffoon who somehow managed to get about 1 million people killed – so by the end, very few were laughing.

If Trump wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, do not rely upon the establishment of the Republican Party in the House, Senate, and Republican National Committee to save the country by blocking Trump’s path.[...] Plenty of anecdotal evidence shows that Republican bigwigs are already rushing to make their own cozy deals with Trump. They are endlessly corrupt and devious.

We should remember that Mussolini ruled as prime minister in a coalition government of nationalists, liberals, and populists from late 1922 until early 1925. This arrangement ended when the fascists murdered Matteotti, the leader of the Socialist opposition in parliament. On the way to power, Mussolini feared nothing so much as the united front of anti-fascists which never materialized. The tragedy of the United States today is that we lack even the building block of such a united front. However, this can and must change fast. This is one of those moments when the most revolutionary thing you can do is to state loudly and clearly what is happening.

This analysis is what spooks me. WWII was less than 80 years ago. Fascism is not some made-up bogeyman. The problem is not that the Facists might win, it's how they react to losing. The longer Trump builds up delusional expectations of American Superhuman-ness, the bigger the blow-out when he crashes.

Tarpley wrote:Trump’s mystique is that he has been invincible as a businessman (despite his numerous bankruptcies and bailouts from Old Man Trump), will be invincible as a candidate, and will be invincible as president against such formidable rivals as Russia, China, Mexico, and Japan. The emotional investment in this belief structure on the part of his rank-and-file supporters is enormous. What will happen to Trump when he has to taste the bitterness of defeat?

Trump claims to have a personal fortune of $12 billion, but even if it is only $8 billion, he can feel free to maneuver with absolute fascist cynicism and impudence in any direction he wants to go.Trump is generally not ideological at all, but rather the crudest of pragmatists. His stock in trade is hatred, scorn, and resentment targeted at certain scapegoats, plus the meaningless promise of making America great again. So he can follow the racist hatred wherever it leads him.

The only hope to defeat Trump at this stage is the physically and morally odious Ted Cruz. Cruz always looks the Penguin from Batman when I see him. Cruz is a Harper-clone from Calgary so with Harper we got our version of Bush II, now the Americans are running the Canadian version of BushII....

Tarpley wrote:Make no mistake: Cruz is fascist. Cruz is an example of clerical fascism – a fascist movement with religious leaders playing a key role. But he is the weaker fascist. Focusing on Trump is like saying Germany first, and then Japan. in December 1941. Trump is the more dangerous foe.

If we compare Trump to Cruz, we can easily see that Cruz is by far a weaker candidate. Cruz leans primarily on the Christian evangelicals who are numerous in the farm states and in the South, but less in the Electoral College megastates. He is heavily invested with groups who consider abortion to be the vital issue of the hour.  Cruz’s fanaticism on abortion in particular would make it next to impossible for him to win white suburban women in the Northeast, Midwest, and the West Coast. Trump could easily revert to his earlier pro-choice position and become viable in surprising places.. In short, Cruz cannot win a general election and take the presidency, whereas there is ample evidence that Trump might.

Fortunately, there is substantial evidence to believe that Trump CAN be defeated in Iowa. The rival fascist gang under Ted Cruz has procured the services of the sinister British “election management” firm Strategic Communications Laboratories. SCL has been busy for months identifying micro-electorates in Iowa to send micro-pandering messages to them. By contrast, Trump’s get out the vote operation in Iowa appears to be somewhat haphazard, and may have the indispensable precinct captains in fewer than half of the approximately 1650 precinct caucuses. Many pundits have already predicted that Cruz can beat Trump because the latter has relied too much on his own charisma and not enough on a mundane get out the vote operation.

Only the Republicans can make a whacked-out war-monger like Hillary Clinton seem sane. And only Trump could make the odious un-electable Cruz seem like the candidate of choice! When a clerical fascist is fighting a fascist demagogue for the candidacy of the nation with the world's largest military and stock-pile of nuclear weapons, well....



Still it is so much fun to watch Trump go rogue from the GOP...