The League of Radical Leftist Vermin 1, Donald Trump 0

Sometimes the losers, haters, and radical leftist vermin decide to fight back

When you’re a hopeless loser, the world deserves to know it.

Actually it was the mark of the stupid, which is what you get for sitting under a tree during a thunderstorm.

• Carl Hiaasen, Chomp

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

• H.L. Mencken

One of Donald Trump's particular and stupidly distressing habits is that he never does anything to highlight his ideas or policy proposals. That would be because he has no ideas beyond ridiculing his opponents. He can only build himself up by tearing others down.

The derogatory nicknames for his adversaries, annoying as they may be, belittle those he can’t compete with on ideas or policies. On some level, he’s well aware of this and knows that the only way to rise above others is to ridicule them for what he perceives as their “weaknesses.”

It’s a tiresome habit, but his low-information followers don’t care about his ideas or policy proposals. They only care that he continues to hate the same folks they do. He’ll no doubt continue to act as if he does to placate the drooling masses, and they’ll continue to adore him and hang on his every word as if they were divinely inspired.

We’ve reached a point in our history where a man with no pride or self-respect can claim to be the only person capable of repairing what ails America:

“I ALONE CAN FIX IT!”

But does he or any of his followers understand the problems facing America today? Do they care? Or is this all about who gets to grab the brass ring and then tell everyone else what they can or can’t do? It’s not that Donald Trump cares about America; more than anything, he wants to be President so that he can keep himself out of prison. While he’s at it, he’s planning to destroy democracy as we’ve known it for almost a quarter-millennium.

A week after Donald Trump channeled Hitler and Mussolini with his “vermin” speech—in which he promised to “root out” the “left-wing thugs,” which he called “vermin”—he sent out a violence-laced post on Truth Social this past weekend that was at once apocalyptic and authoritarian but also quite revealing.

2024 is our final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!

It had all the horrendous exterminationist language of the vermin speech—”demolish,” “expel,” “cast out,” “throw off” and “rout”. And it is also a plea to his followers, many of whom are Christian nationalists or followers of a plethora of end-time conspiracy theories, or both. It’s the “final battle,” he told them, an armageddon of sorts—wording that gets them completely engaged—and he needs them “at my side.”

Give the man credit; it’s almost as if he’s been committing Mein Kampf to memory, but that would assume that he reads, which we all know is a bridge too far for Donald Trump.

Still, when you pepper your speeches with phrases such as “we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists….” it’s a short distance to advocating for death squads to roam the streets looking for “vermin” and members of “the deep state.”

Donald J. Trump is unwilling to use the tools of democracy to win his way back into the White House. No, he’d drag America back to the equivalent of 1933 Germany if that's what it takes.

But this is also defendant Trump’s final battle for his freedom, and he was admitting it and asking for help from his massive cult following. He’s been in and out of court many times now, and, in his increasingly addled mind, he’s been thoroughly humiliated by prosecutors and judges who’ve put him in his place. The process has made vividly clear to him the likely ramifications. According to Rolling Stone, Trump has even fretted in the presence of his lawyers and confidantes about the possibility of prison, asking what it would be like.

He’s scared, knows the odds are against him, and he’s fighting a desperate rearguard action in the mainstream media and social media to paint himself as a sympathetic character. He wants to be seen as an underdog being oppressed by Joe Biden’s government and the “deep state.”

In his mind, he’s being persecuted, and the indictments he’s facing are all part of the “electoral interference” being employed by Joe Biden because “Sleepy Joe” knows he can’t win a fair election.

Unfortunately, he lacks the self-discipline, maturity, and mental acuity to pull off that propaganda coup.

For Trump, recent months have surely been like the Obama roast at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner—the kind of humiliation that spurs him to get revenge. He’s out of power, and he’s been made to feel very small, and it’s only going to get worse next year. He’s looking at the handwriting on the wall through his paranoid filter: They’re going to put him in prison and take away his businesses, his real estate, everything.

Trump doesn’t understand the importance of choosing his battles. He can never let a slight, whether real or perceived, go. Because of this, he wastes tremendous psychic energy and political capital on battles he shouldn’t fight. But because he lacks the maturity to understand the necessity of letting things go and living to fight another day, he’s petty to the point of being silly.

Combine that with his mental acuity in decline—as he’s displayed several times in thinking former President Obama is the person he’s running against and confusing Jeb Bush and George W. Bush, among other weird moments—and you have someone who is that much more desperate and delusional.

To listen to him speak at one of his rallies anymore is to hear someone who’s either unbelievably delusional or in precipitous mental decline. Or both.

Not that he was ever the sharpest and/or most mature tool in the box, to begin with, but American Presidential candidates don’t openly channel Adolf Hitler virtually word for word.

You don’t. You can’t. To travel down that road demonstrates weakness, desperation, and the willingness to ignore how American governance works. Not since the WWII years has fascism posed such a clear and present danger in this country; who would’ve thought that such a threat would come from a former American President?

Trump sees a five-alarm fire, and he’s going for broke. While on the one hand, he is fervently trying to gain power again and transform America into a dictatorship, per Project 2025, in which he squashes the cases against him and weaponizes the government against his perceived enemies, Trump also seems to be planning for the possibility of losing the election.

Let’s first be clear that we’re talking about Trump here—and a Trump in mental decline—so don’t read too much into the word “planning.” Again, this is a desperate person grasping at things, but one who’s had good instincts about what works on those immersed in his cult. In the event he loses the election, he knows he can’t attempt to pardon himself or have state trials pushed off that are already likely to drag on past the election. But he still has his MAGA movement, which could wreak havoc—if he can get them motivated.

The unanswered question at this point is the degree of loyalty remaining in the MAGA base. Would they put themselves on the line as they did on January 6th? If Trump lost the 2024 election, could he command such an insurrection and perhaps overthrow the government with his base?

On the surface, a rebellion like January 6th would likely be more challenging to pull off a second time. There wouldn’t be an element of surprise, plus security would undoubtedly be ramped up to prevent such an uprising. There would need to be a different plan for another type of rebellion and attack upon the government.

Whether Trump still has the gravitas to lead sufficient numbers of his followers into battle seems unlikely, but certainly not impossible. It’s been done once, so with sufficient planning and commitment, who knows what might be possible?

Like any narcissist, Trump is very sensitive to his followers’ depth of commitment. Trump is ramping up the toxic fear, pushing the limits entirely in exploiting hate and bigotry, pointing to the enemies “within the confines of our country,” in the hopes of motivating that base to come to his defense and do whatever it takes to defend him, no matter what happens in the election.

The historian and expert on authoritarianism, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, explains how Trump is conditioning people to accept and even embrace violence as the only right thing to do.

[H]e conjures existential threats to the nation from non-White immigrants and an expanding cast of internal enemies, calls the thugs who are in prison for assaulting the Capitol on Jan. 6 "political prisoners," and praises autocrats such as Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin who depend on propaganda, corruption, and repression to stay in power.

All of this is part of his effort to re-educate Americans to see violence as justified, patriotic, and even morally righteous.

And she makes comparisons to fascists in history:

But to get people to lose their aversion to violence, savvy authoritarians also dehumanize their enemies. That’s what Trump is doing. Hitler used this ploy from the very start, calling Jews the “black parasites of the nation” in a 1920 speech. By the time Hitler got into power in 1933 and translated dehumanizing rhetoric into repressive policies, Germans had heard these messages for over a decade.

Trump won’t have the advantage of time that Hitler had, certainly not the benefit of a homogenous German culture, but he’s adopted much of the same dehumanizing rhetoric. His base has been indoctrinated for long enough that they’ll follow him wherever he goes.

He’s doing this because, if elected, he’s planning to follow through on his violent and extremist promises. He intends to engage in retribution against his enemies, and, as his aides have confirmed, he plans to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1871 and use the military to quash dissent and protests. And then there are the promises of internment camps and mass deportations.

Sounds like fun, eh?

We may wake up on 1.21.25 to an America we no longer recognize.

So, how do we prevent America from going the way of the Weimar Republic? How do we maintain American democracy?

First, as NYU journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen has repeatedly said, it will be imperative that the mainstream media focus on the stakes and not the odds. Polls are “scientifically” based on small samples and are often notoriously wrong. What isn’t wrong are the stakes- the continued survival of American democracy. There’s no way to put it in terms any simpler or more stark than that.

Second, Americans need to get off their asses and VOTE. It’s a proven fact that when voter turnout is high, Democrats do well. The more people we can get to the polls, the better the chances of defeating Donald Trump will be.

As much as I hate to put it in these terms, this WILL be the most critical election of our lives. There will be no excuse for not voting, so make plans to vote and talk to friends, family members, co-workers, and neighbors to ensure they’re planning to vote. Be annoying if you have to; nag them if you must.

It’s that important.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

(All of my posts are now public. Any reader financial support will be considered pledges- support that’s greatly appreciated but not required to get to all of my work. I’ll trust my readers to determine if my work is worthy of their financial support and at what level. To those who do offer their support, thank you. It means more than you know.)

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