THE LONG NIGHTMARE OF DONALD TRUMP'S LONG KNIVES

Sidney Blumenthal

The Guardian-US

Donald Trump’s threat to execute Liz Cheney, “with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” is the apogee so far of his Hitlerian rhetoric. 

By his own words, Trump has proved her point that he is a “danger” to the constitution and defied his apologists who insist he can be contained or that he doesn’t really mean what he says. “And let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” he said. “Shoot Liz Cheney” has replaced “Hang Mike Pence.”

Hours after Trump declared his wish to kill Cheney, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, his reliable excuse maker for the executive collaborator class, published an editorial stating, “We don’t buy the fascism fears, and we doubt Democrats really do either.”

Trump is hellbent to break through any “sane-washing” of the media smoothing over his viciousness and vulgarity. His call for an elaborate execution of a pre-eminent political opponent, a conservative Republican of the most partisan pedigree, is his definitive and final answer to those who quibble about his intentions and his unmooring from all traditional politics.

His fascist-themed freakshow in Madison Square Garden followed by his firing squad fantasy are an

augury of a second administration. His closing act has overwhelmed any media reflex for euphemism and both-siderism. He contemptuously stomps on every effort at normalization.

Time and again, day after day, event after event, Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election, certainly about the candidate himself: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?

Many of Trump’s former White House staffers, cabinet secretaries and commanding generals are frantically attempting to warn against his madness, that he is “a fascist to the core”, as former chairman of the joint chiefs Gen Mark Milley has unequivocally stated. In private conversation, former staffers and others with intimate knowledge of Trump, all reliable people, talk about the real man as far viler than those who haven’t seen him behind closed doors could possibly know.

Knowledge of Trump’s vileness is widespread among top-level Republicans. “They all hate him,” a former senior Trump adviser told me categorically. And they all have stories, some exhibiting his narcissism, others his malice: how, for example, the time two senators from one state were summoned to the Oval Office to listen to Trump say he would travel there to have a mountain named after him. As a rule, they agree with Senator Mitch McConnell that he is “despicable”. Unlike those former Trump staffers waving their arms, they are silent and complicit.

Now, former staffers speculate about the hazy fine line between Trump’s infantilism and his dementia. There is no responsible person left around Trump. He has learned the lesson, sealed by January 6, not to trust the “normies”.

Trump’s night in the Garden on 27 October was early Hitler in style, not middle Hitler. The bellowing obscenities, racist sneers and violent threats were more reminiscent of the Munich beer hall phase of Hitler rousing the street gangs of Brownshirts than the Nuremberg rallies of disciplined ranks of storm troopers massed before his reviewing stand.

“An immense wave of eccentric barbarism … A primitive fairground brutality,” wrote the great German novelist Thomas Mann in 1930 about the Nazi rallies he observed. “This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style … hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. 

Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.”

“A quarter-of-an-hour before the opening time I walked through the chief hall of the Hofbräuhaus on the Platz in Munich and my heart was nearly bursting with joy,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf.

“The love in that room,” said Trump after his rally at Madison Square Garden. “It was breathtaking. It was like a love fest, an absolute love fest.”

Trump’s festival at the Garden was a fascist foreshadowing masquerading as a farce. As a screwball flying circus, it was a version of the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. Everything was turned upside down in a pandemonium. Trump’s comedians, however, were no Groucho. It would have been better for Trump if his speakers had been equipped like the mute Harpo with a honking horn.

Trump’s master race of misfits found an authentic voice in the comic relief of Tony Hinchcliffe, who amid his slurs about Black people (“We carved watermelons together”), Latinos, Jews and Palestinians, said, “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

Hinchcliffe is the host of a podcast aptly called Kill Tony. With a dubious laugh line, as if on cue, the stage swiveled. Triumph of the Will turned into West Side Story. His performance fatally died like the character Tony in West Side Story, only this Tony died by suicide.

Life is all right in America
If you’re all white in America

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/02/trumps-behavior-election