Just Because Trump Espouses Fascism, That Doesn't Make Him Wrong About Scott Walker

According to a new CNN poll, only a third of Republicans wish that Trump would quit the GOP race and he's the candidate most GOP voters say they want to see on the debate stage. 22% of Republicans say they think he'll be the eventual party nominee.

Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who are registered to vote, 52% say they want Trump to stay in the race for the party's nomination, while 33% hope that he drops out. Another 15% say they'd like to see him make an independent run for the presidency.

...The majority of those Republicans surveyed that wants Trump to remain in the race includes numbers of those seen as the core of the GOP primary electorate: 58% of white evangelicals, 58% of conservatives, and 57% of tea party supporters.

Not only is Trump still #1 in the national polls, he is leading in New Hampshire and coming in second in Iowa, after Scott Walker. Writing for Newsweek, Jeffrey Tucker makes the case-- without any kind of stretch at all-- that Trump is a fascist and his appeal to the Republican base isn't unlike the appeal Mussolini and Hitler made to conservatives in the 1930s. "I just heard Trump speak live," he wrote. "The speech lasted an hour, and my jaw was on the floor most of the time."

I’ve never before witnessed such a brazen display of nativistic jingoism, along with a complete disregard for economic reality. It was an awesome experience, a perfect repudiation of all good sense and intellectual sobriety... His speech was like an interwar séance of once-powerful dictators who inspired multitudes, drove countries into the ground and died grim deaths.

Since World War II, the ideology he represents has usually lived in dark corners, and we don’t even have a name for it anymore. The right name, the correct name, the historically accurate name, is fascism. I don’t use that word as an insult only. It is accurate.

Though hardly anyone talks about it today, we really should. It is still real. It exists. It is distinct. It is not going away. Trump has tapped into it, absorbing unto his own political ambitions every conceivable resentment (race, class, sex, religion, economic) and promising a new order of things under his mighty hand.

You would have to be hopelessly ignorant of modern history not to see the outlines and where they end up. I want to laugh about what he said, like reading a comic-book version of Franco, Mussolini or Hitler. And truly I did laugh as he denounced the existence of tech support in India that serves American companies (“how can it be cheaper to call people there than here?”-- as if he still thinks that long-distance charges apply). But in politics, history shows that laughter can turn too quickly to tears.

...Because Trump is the only one who speaks this way, he can count on support from the darkest elements of American life. He doesn’t need to actually advocate racial homogeneity, call for whites-only signs to be hung at immigration control or push for expulsion or extermination of undesirables. Because such views are verboten, he has the field alone, and he can count on the support of those who think that way by making the right noises.

Remember, Mussolini's ghostwriter and ideological philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, once said, "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power," which sounds not just like Trumpism but like what most Republicans seem to believe in.

What Democrats seem to enjoy most about Trump's crackpot campaign are his unprecedented attacks against his GOP opponents. In many cases he's saying exactly what Democrats believe but that their own candidates and elected officials are "too polite" to say out loud. The latest victim of Trump's rage is the man standing between himself and a first place finish in Iowa, the governor of the neighing state, Scott Walker.

On Saturday Trump went for the hat trick, gleefully insulting Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker because one of Walker’s fundraisers called the billionaire real estate mogul “DumbDumb.”

“Finally, I can attack!” Trump said at a packed rally at Oskaloosa High School. “Wisconsin’s doing terribly. It’s in turmoil. The roads are a disaster because they don’t have any money to rebuild them. They’re borrowing money like crazy. They projected a $1 billion surplus, and it turns out to be a deficit of $2.2 billion. The schools are a disaster. The hospitals and education was a disaster. And he was totally in favor of Common Core!”

The mention of the state-driven education standards-- from which Walker, like many Republican governors, has walked away-- incited a prolonged boo. That was not enough for Trump, who told a story about Walker giving him a “beautiful plaque” out of gratitude for campaign donations and wondered if “Wisconsin paid for it.”