Courtesy of Bastrop Advertiser
Aug. 13, 2020
By Bill McCann
When I saw a headline on a conservative political column last week, I thought for a millisecond the writer had fled the dark side to join the Never Trumpers. The headline read “Leadership by fear leads us astray.” I was wrong. As it turned out, the column castigated both pro athletes who kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality against Black people and the Bastrop County commissioners who voted recently to remove from the courthouse grounds symbols of the failed white-supremacist war against the United States in the 1860s.
The column was silent about President Donald Trump’s ongoing tactics, as current leader of the United States, to stoke fear, hate, discord and divisiveness. In stirring up fear and hate, Trump has been using Adolf Hitler’s playbook from the 1930s and 40s in Germany.
From the moment Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 he has raised fears and sought scapegoats to get supporters to find someone else to blame for their problems. He characterized immigrants as “criminals, drug dealers and rapists” and promised to ban Muslims from entering the country. He has engaged in race baiting and sided with white supremacists. Hitler was a white supremacist whose scapegoats included Jews.
Trump has cozied up to authoritarian leaders in Brazil, North Korea, Poland, Turkey and Russia. Like Hitler, Trump has attacked the legitimate news media as the “enemy of the people.” Accurate reporting that puts Trump in a bad light is always “fake” news.
Anyone who has studied Hitler will recall he loved big crowds and revved them up with rants packed with propaganda and lies. He thought if you told a big lie often enough, people would believe it. Trump loves rallies too. Plus, he has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims as president, telling some of the same big lies again and again, according to Washington Post fact checkers.
Hitler attacked and undermined the courts and the electoral process. So has Trump. Even before the outcome of the 2016 presidential election Trump warned it was rigged. He is doing the same thing ahead of the November 2020 election.
In a desperate effort to rekindle his faltering reelection campaign, Trump has ratcheted up his fear-mongering rhetoric in recent months amid the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread public protests in cities following killings of unarmed Black people by police. His Independence Day speech at Mount Rushmore was a Hitlerian attempt to fire up white Americans against anti-racism protesters in cities around the country. He inaccurately called protesters “far-left fascists.” Fascists are, in fact, far-right authoritarians like Hitler.
In July, Trump ordered anonymous federal forces to Portland, Ore., and threatened to send them to other Democrat-run cities. The heavily-armed forces arrived under the guise of protecting federal buildings from protesters, but the forces really were window dressing for Trump’s “law and order” reelection campaign pitch and to get campaign ad videos. The federal agents mistreated peaceful protesters and did everything but goosestep through city streets. They mostly inflamed the protests.
Trump and his sycophants Attorney General William Barr and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz have tried to blame nationwide anti-racism protests on leftist “antifa” outside agitators, especially when protests sometimes turned to riots. But Washington Post fact checkers, other news reports, and local police records found no evidence of antifa being behind rioting and looting that occurred in May and June. Antifa is a loose political protest movement that fights fascism and white supremacy.
My uncles were anti-fascists. They fought against Hitler’s army in Europe in World War II, as did millions of other patriotic American uncles and fathers and grandfathers. Now Trump calls the anti-fascists “terrorists.” What does that say about him?
