I thought I would revisit a blog post I wrote in August 2019 when Donald Trump was in the White House. The post was rewritten for my book, The Trump Files.
Trump has been charged with 91 felonies for financial fraud, misusing classified documents and trying to interfere with a federal investigation into the files, for conspiracies related to the 2020 election, and racketeering in the Fulton County, Georgia election case.
Donald Trump is one of a host of strongmen identified in Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book. Her book lists Trump and other protagonists, including Jair Bolsonaro, Recept Tayyip Erdo?an, Adolph Hitler, Narendra Modi, Benito Mussolini, and Vladimir Putin. These men are fascists, and most came to power through elections. Remember, Trump is one of them.
Today, Trump is following the playbooks of these tyrants. Even though he has been indicted many times, he claims that these indictments are nothing but witch hunts that have plagued him for decades. Many of the men that were in Trump’s inner circle had a history of supporting strongmen, including some of the names above. Roger Stone and Paul Manafort come to mind (Ben-Ghiat, p. 61).
Yesterday, on the second day of the Hamas attack on Israel, Trump held a rally in New Hampshire. During his speech, he nonchalantly talked about the attack in Israel. He didn’t condemn the Hamas, nor show any empathy for the people who were murdered.
As President Biden said, “It was pure unadulterated evil.” Trump would not be able to fathom saying anything like this. He has no empathy and does not understand evil when it is right before him. It may be that he is looking into a mirror.
But, he saw it as an opportunity to “ramp up his Fascist reeducation of Americans to see violence and cruelty as positive.” Here is Ruth Ben-Giat’s post.
Trump continues his charade by feeding his cult the lies they believe are true. They travel hundreds of miles to their Leader. Cultists will say: “He’s the best. He’s awesome,” Mercier said. “He’s going to save our world and our country.”
The Authoritarian
But Trump is a dangerous authoritarian who knows that as long as he talks the talk with his supporters, and warns them of the “Others,” they will be safe because he is standing in the way of the others to protect them.
Too many of Trump’s former appointees are now calling him out when he was in office. They are too late. In an NBC survey, some of Trump’s former employees, staff, and allies still think he should be re-elected.
Even though, Bill Barr, James Mathis, John Kelly, Joseph Maguire, Dan Coats, Mick Mulvaney and others do not want him in the White House, most Republicans in Congress support him, and many of these representatives still support Trump’s contention that the 2020 was rigged and as a result stolen from him. There is no evidence for this. Quite the contrary. In two indictments, he is accused of attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.
And the Republicans in the House, without a speaker, and considering one of two men who still support Trump’s “Big Lie.”
Here is what I posted four years ago about the tyrant.
The Post from 2019
In France, at the 2019 G7 summit, is Donald Trump beginning to realize he’s not number one on the world stage? I noticed he was off balance and stone-faced in public and spoke with little to no authority. He knows that he’s been outmaneuvered by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, when he learned the foreign minister of Iran was secretly invited to the G7 summit by President Macron.
When Trump spoke in public, he resorted to his lies. Brian Stelter of CNN raised the issue that all in the media have avoided with Trump: What is going on with him? Is he unfit to carry out the responsibilities of the office of the president? Why doesn’t he tell the truth? Why is his reality so different from most Americans? Could it be that behind President Trump’s behavior is some form of mental illness? Why does he deny, in so many instances, his involvement in events that have happened and there is evidence to undermine his statements?
In the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Jeffrey D. Sachs writes in the foreword to the new edition:
Donald Trump is a profound danger to Americans and to the rest of the world. He will remain a profound danger until he is no longer president, since the dangers clearly result from Trump’s serious mental impairments that are untreated and are impervious to treatment. The authors of this volume deserve our nation’s gratitude and, most important, our deep attention and political response.149
Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 4.
Is He a Tyrant?
As soon as Trump was in office, he filed paperwork for the 2020 presidential race. And he planned a series of campaign-like rallies to feed his supporters the narcissistic vitamins that they need as much as he does. Indeed, Trump and his followers feed on each other. Trump has been called a narcissist by many authors and journalists. But Trump is not simply a narcissist. He may be a tyrant. In discussing tyrants past or present, Elizabeth Mika explains that “each one of them promises to bring back law and order, create better economic conditions for the people, and restore the nation’s glory.”
Becoming a Tyrant For a tyrant to appear in a society, three conditions are needed: the tyrant, his supporters (the people), and the society at large that supplies a ripe ground for the collusion between them. According to Mika, political scientists call this the toxic triangle. She also says that the force to bind all three is narcissism. The tyranny of Hitler and Stalin can easily be forgotten, and there lies a danger to humanity.
In the Company of…
According to Henry Giroux, forgetting results partly from miseducation. It also comes from denial.
It’s for others to decide if Trump is a tyrant. But there is an agreement among most that Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were tyrants. Perhaps if we remember what they were like, we can begin to look at the behavior of Donald Trump unusually. Mika supplies details about tyrants that need to be examined. Many in the American press, especially the main broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, FOX, and CBS), have not pursued the truth about Trump but only described his behavior as if his actions were normal. They aren’t normal.
For instance, Mika suggests that in the 1930s, many German moderates “underestimated” Hitler and as a result didn’t take him seriously. I believe we are doing the same with Trump. Consider this quote from Mika’s chapter: Hitler was seen by many as a bombastic but harmless buffoon, while many others, including members of clergy, intellectual elites, and the wealthy were nevertheless mesmerized by his grand visions of Germany’s future glory, and eagerly supported his agenda.
Trump’s Tyrant Friends
Mika also suggests that tyrants tend to identify with other tyrants. Why is it that Trump continues to indulge his relationships with Putin and Kim Jong-un? When Trump talks about these two, he flatters them, while he derides former members of his own administration, members who were held in some esteem, such as Pentagon head Jim Mattis. He believes Putin over his own intelligence agencies and claims that the recent North Korean missile launches are okay, when in fact these launches are provocations.
Hate-mongering has become an integral part of Trump’s persona. He has launched attacks on a wide range of people, especially if their skin color or native language differs from his. Hate-mongering was also a fundamental part of Hitler’s war on Jewish people and others who were different from him. This comparison is not to be dismissed as overreaching at all.
Trump’s Audiences
Finally, in this post, I’d point out that those who attend the Trump rallies are integral to Trump’s behavior. His audience feeds him with physical manifestations of their support, such as their chants, shouting, and dress. At the same time, Trump cheers these people on by lying to them about the nature of our society. His rallies are full of rage and hate, and he constantly wreaks havoc on any of the press that dare attend these events. For the members of the press, they are taking well-documented chances by attending these rallies.
0 Comments