[CORRECTED] To stop Trump and to win the 2026 midterms, Democrats will have to attack Trump for the fascist he is
The Democrats are afraid to take on Trump directly, and to mount a focused attack on him for the fascist he is, and on his fascist supporters for the fascists they are.
Democrats need to take aim at a lawless president who in the words of General Mark Milley “is fascist to the core”.
Younger readers may not know much about the fascism of Benito Mussolini in Italy or Adolf Hitler in Germany. Yet to understand what is going on in the U.S. currently, it is useful to read up on that history.
Hitler, for example, bent all the institutions in Germany to his will in a process known as the Gleichstaltung (synchronization, or getting everyone on the same frequency), and punishing those who resisted. He took over the universities. He took over the press. He took over the courts.
At times through the process of Gleichschaltung,, he got all of them to toe the Nazi Party line. His supporters roughed people up in the streets, and sometimes murdered them. He took over the police. He installed loyalists, those directly beholden to him personally, in all positions of power.
After he assumed dictatorial powers with the passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, he murdered Ernst Röhm and other leaders of the SA or Brownshirts in Jone-July 1934. The SA (Stormtroopers) had been his principal militia, which controlled the streets. He also murdered generals and leaders of the military, in 1938 and subsequently.
It is useful to reflect on the world of Unreason in which Hitler rose to power and thrived until Germany’s military defeat in 1945.
Returning to the present, Democrats are lost in a world of rational arguments, in a world of Unreason when it has become clear that reason no longer holds sway. In the United States, today, we no longer live in a world governed by reason, but rather in a world in which mass propaganda and mass emotions often determine government actions.
Journalists don’t have a vocabulary to describe such actions. Often they tone down their reporting to make the events they describe fit within a “normal” framework readers can more easily understand.
Democrats thought they could slide by Trump, failing to indict him for almost two years under the Biden Administration after he led an attempted coup d’état on January 6, 2021. During Trump’s presidency (2017-2021) they were afraid to impeach him on broad grounds, for years, and finally did impeach him on narrow grounds related to Ukraine. But the counts of impeachment failed to capture the broad pattern of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for which Trump appeared to be responsible.
Will the Democrats find the courage to take on Donald Trump, the fascist president of the United States, directly?
Who knows?
The issue is fascism and the rule of law. Will the Democrats take on the issue and the forces of fascism directly?
Who knows?
Democrats believe voters will vote on the basis of bread and butter issues, as the result of rational calculations. They interpret their narrow losses in the House and the Senate in 2024, and their narrow victory in the House in 2022, as a vindication of their non-confrontational approach.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Given Trump, the leader of an abortive coup in 2021 and a convicted felon in 2024, they should have won huge victories in both years.
How can they expect to win in 2026 if they don’t denounce the fact that criminals are running the government, that the leader of these criminals is a malevolent president who is committing “high crimes and misdemeanors” every day, and who, moreover, is an active Russian asset who is acting every day to further Russian interests. Consider, for example, Trump’s actions toward Russia andUkraine.
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