Midnight Meme Of The Day!

 

by Noah

Politically, President Donald J. Biohazard is a lot more like his role models Mussolini and Hitler, but, as a Diva with a capital D, he certainly resembles Evita Peron on her Buenos Aires balcony more and more with each frightening passing day. No wonder Lindsey Graham and Miss Moscow Mitch love him so much.

As I've said before, I remember watching the Orange Menace To Society during the 2016 campaign and wondering how anyone could watch the now president for two minutes and not realize that he is very mentally ill, even more so than other politicians in my lifetime, even more so than easily half the people who have ever been committed to an insane asylum. I shouldn't wonder how people could vote for him, though, when all I have to do is go outside and listen to the idiocy of any number of typical conversations I hear as people walk by me. People clearly either want someone who is a mental case or they are too damn stupid to notice. Maybe both. I feel like the medical equipment manufacturers have to come up with a variation of those little plastic guns that are being used to take temperatures just by holding them up to our foreheads. You know, we need something like that, except it reveals your IQ and/or your level of sanity or mental acuity. We've put humans on the moon. We can do it. Is it too much to ask?

As it is, Donnie Psychopath's mental stability has deteriorated steadily since his inauguration. In his speech that day, he referred to what he called "American carnage" and has gone about doing his best to increase American carnage every day of his term. The entire Republican Party has joined him and become the Death Cult it has aspired to be for several decades. Now, the leader who that party adores, the president, has added to his and their attempts to take health care away from Americans and called for an end to any COVID-19 relief and he's even deliberately contaminating his own staff and Secret Service guards. He couldn't wait to rip off his mask upon his return to the White House virus hotspot that he himself created. He wants to make the hotspot hotter. He knows he's got COVID-19 and makes great efforts to spread it. He knew he had it when he went to that fundraiser in New Jersey. Maybe he even knew it when he went to Cleveland for the debate. That would be very Putin-like. You know; poison your rivals. Would you put it past him and the mask eschewing cultists he brought with him?

What did Trump know and when did he know it? He might even think he can get rid of his own infection just by passing it on to someone else. He certainly wants to spread it. He forces his guards into hermetically sealed SUVs with him just so his fans can gaze rapturously at him and cheer his efforts on. More and more people on his staff are testing positive every damn day. The initial spreading event may have even been when he introduced his anti-voting, anti-healthcare, pro-coathanger back alley abortion judge, aka Back Alley Amy, to the country.

At this rate, in ten days, Trump will be emptying gas cans all over the White House and burning it to the ground, claiming "I did a tremendous job, a better job of it than the English did." His fans will cheer that, too. Sean Insanity and Tucker Tiki Torch will wave Russian and Confederate flags on their shows and say he did the right thing. Or, maybe they'll all just claim that a group made up of the NAACP, teachers unions, LeBron James, "Antifa" and "top Satan-worshipping Democrat pedophiles" did it.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Stone crazy as Trump is, he has an eye for marketing and imagery. He uses imagery very well. The way to beat that is to turn it against him. That's why I made tonight's meme.

The White House as a backdrop for extreme fascism. The Eiffel Tower as a backdrop for extreme fascism. Hitler and his henchmen. Trump and his. They are on a tragic trajectory towards interchangeability. Tic Tock. Time to wake up. The alarm has been ringing for a long, long time. The sick irony of Trump and his henchmen walking through a park named after a man who came from Paris to aid the American Revolution is no coincidence. Which revolution do you honor, America?

Tic Tock.

By The Time We-- As A Society-- Figure Out Trump Is Hitler, It Will Be too Late To Do Anything About It. Has That Train Already Left The Station?

So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

-From "Choose Something Like A Star," Robert Frost (1916)

A little over a year ago, civil liberties attorney Burt Neuborne released a book, When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, which described how our constitutional system of checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by Trump and his shameless enablers inside all three branches of government. At the time, author Steven Rosenfeld explained how Neuborne-- who began his career by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, became the ACLU’s national legal director in the Reagan years and was the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School in the 1990s-- came to write a book comparing Trump and Hitler.

“Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?” he writes. “Partly it’s just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it’s hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln’s house. But that’s not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play.”

A younger Trump, according to his first wife’s divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches’ impact on his era’s press and politics. “Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation,” Neuborne says.

“Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches-- spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” Neuborne says. “You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric-- as a candidate and in office-- mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.”

Many Americans may seize or condemn Neuborne’s analysis, which has more than 20 major points of comparison. The author repeatedly says his goal is not “equating” the men-- as “it trivializes Hitler’s obscene crimes to compare them to Trump’s often pathetic foibles.”

Indeed, the book has a larger frame: whether federal checks and balances-- Congress, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College-- can contain the havoc that Trump thrives on and the Republican Party at large has embraced. But the Trump-Hitler compilation is a stunning warning, because, as many Holocaust survivors have said, few Germans or Europeans expected what unfolded in the years after Hitler amassed power.

Here’s how Neuborne introduces this section. Many recent presidents have been awful, “But then there was Donald Trump, the only president in recent American history to openly despise the twin ideals-- individual dignity and fundamental equality-- upon which the contemporary United States is built. When you confront the reality of a president like Trump, the state of both sets of brakes-- internal [constitutional] and external [public resistance]-- become hugely important because Donald Trump’s political train runs on the most potent and dangerous fuel of all: a steady diet of fear, greed, loathing, lies, and envy. It’s a toxic mixture that has destroyed democracies before, and can do so again.

“Give Trump credit,” he continues. “He did his homework well and became the twenty-first-century master of divisive rhetoric. We’re used to thinking of Hitler’s Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn’t take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump’s bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic. It fell into their hands as the fruit of Hitler’s satanic ability to mesmerize enough Germans to trade their birthright for a pottage of scapegoating, short-term economic gain, xenophobia, and racism. It could happen here.”

20 Common Themes, Rhetorical Tactics and Dangerous Policies

Here are 20 serious points of comparison between the early Hitler and Trump.

1. Neither was elected by a majority. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, receiving votes by 25.3 percent of all eligible American voters. “That’s just a little less than the percentage of the German electorate that turned to the Nazi Party in 1932–33,” Neuborne writes. “Unlike the low turnouts in the United States, turnout in Weimar Germany averaged just over 80 percent of eligible voters.” He continues, “Once installed as a minority chancellor in January 1933, Hitler set about demonizing his political opponents, and no one—not the vaunted, intellectually brilliant German judiciary; not the respected, well-trained German police; not the revered, aristocratic German military; not the widely admired, efficient German government bureaucracy; not the wealthy, immensely powerful leaders of German industry; and not the powerful center-right political leaders of the Reichstag-- mounted a serious effort to stop him.”

2. Both found direct communication channels to their base. By 1936’s Olympics, Nazi narratives dominated German cultural and political life. “How on earth did Hitler pull it off? What satanic magic did Trump find in Hitler’s speeches?” Neuborne asks. He addresses Hitler’s extreme rhetoric soon enough, but notes that Hitler found a direct communication pathway-- the Nazi Party gave out radios with only one channel, tuned to Hitler’s voice, bypassing Germany’s news media. Trump has an online equivalent.

“Donald Trump’s tweets, often delivered between midnight and dawn, are the twenty-first century’s technological embodiment of Hitler’s free plastic radios,” Neuborne says. “Trump’s Twitter account, like Hitler’s radios, enables a charismatic leader to establish and maintain a personal, unfiltered line of communication with an adoring political base of about 30–40 percent of the population, many (but not all) of whom are only too willing, even anxious, to swallow Trump’s witches’ brew of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never ending-search for scapegoats.”

3. Both blame others and divide on racial lines. As Neuborne notes, “Hitler used his single-frequency radios to wax hysterical to his adoring base about his pathological racial and religious fantasies glorifying Aryans and demonizing Jews, blaming Jews (among other racial and religious scapegoats) for German society’s ills.” That is comparable to “Trump’s tweets and public statements, whether dealing with black-led demonstrations against police violence, white-led racist mob violence, threats posed by undocumented aliens, immigration policy generally, protests by black and white professional athletes, college admission policies, hate speech, even response to hurricane damage in Puerto Rico,” he says. Again and again, Trump uses “racially tinged messages calculated to divide whites from people of color.”

4. Both relentlessly demonize opponents. “Hitler’s radio harangues demonized his domestic political opponents, calling them parasites, criminals, cockroaches, and various categories of leftist scum,” Neuborne notes. “Trump’s tweets and speeches similarly demonize his political opponents. Trump talks about the country being ‘infested’ with dangerous aliens of color. He fantasizes about jailing Hillary Clinton, calls Mexicans rapists, refers to ‘shithole countries,’ degrades anyone who disagrees with him, and dreams of uprooting thousands of allegedly disloyal bureaucrats in the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, who he calls ‘the deep state’ and who, he claims, are sabotaging American greatness.”

5. They unceasingly attack objective truth. “Both Trump and Hitler maintained a relentless assault on the very idea of objective truth,” he continues. “Each began the assault by seeking to delegitimize the mainstream press. Hitler quickly coined the epithet Lügenpresse (literally ‘lying press’) to denigrate the mainstream press. Trump uses a paraphrase of Hitler’s lying press epithet-- ‘fake news’-- cribbed, no doubt, from one of Hitler’s speeches. For Trump, the mainstream press is a ‘lying press’ that publishes ‘fake news.’” Hitler attacked his opponents as spreading false information to undermine his positions, Neuborne says, just as Trump has attacked “elites” for disseminating false news, “especially his possible links to the Kremlin.”

6. They relentlessly attack mainstream media. Trump’s assaults on the media echo Hitler’s, Neuborne says, noting that he “repeatedly attacks the ‘failing New York Times,’ leads crowds in chanting ‘CNN sucks,’ [and] is personally hostile to most reporters.” He cites the White House’s refusal to fly the flag at half-mast after the murder of five journalists in Annapolis in June 2018, Trump’s efforts to punish CNN by blocking a merger of its corporate parent, and trying to revoke federal Postal Service contracts held by Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

7. Their attacks on truth include science. Neuborne notes, “Both Trump and Hitler intensified their assault on objective truth by deriding scientific experts, especially academics who question Hitler’s views on race or Trump’s views on climate change, immigration, or economics. For both Trump and Hitler, the goal is (and was) to eviscerate the very idea of objective truth, turning everything into grist for a populist jury subject to manipulation by a master puppeteer. In both Trump’s and Hitler’s worlds, public opinion ultimately defines what is true and what is false.”

8. Their lies blur reality-- and supporters spread them. “Trump’s pathological penchant for repeatedly lying about his behavior can only succeed in a world where his supporters feel free to embrace Trump’s ‘alternative facts’ and treat his hyperbolic exaggerations as the gospel truth,” Neuborne says. “Once Hitler had delegitimized the mainstream media by a series of systematic attacks on its integrity, he constructed a fawning alternative mass media designed to reinforce his direct radio messages and enhance his personal power. Trump is following the same path, simultaneously launching bitter attacks on the mainstream press while embracing the so-called alt-right media, co-opting both Sinclair Broadcasting and the Rupert Murdoch–owned Fox Broadcasting Company as, essentially, a Trump Broadcasting Network.”

9. Both orchestrated mass rallies to show status. “Once Hitler had cemented his personal communications link with his base via free radios and a fawning media and had badly eroded the idea of objective truth, he reinforced his emotional bond with his base by holding a series of carefully orchestrated mass meetings dedicated to cementing his status as a charismatic leader, or Führer,” Neuborne writes. “The powerful personal bonds nurtured by Trump’s tweets and Fox’s fawning are also systematically reinforced by periodic, carefully orchestrated mass rallies (even going so far as to co-opt a Boy Scout Jamboree in 2017), reinforcing Trump’s insatiable narcissism and his status as a charismatic leader.”

10. They embrace extreme nationalism. “Hitler’s strident appeals to the base invoked an extreme version of German nationalism, extolling a brilliant German past and promising to restore Germany to its rightful place as a preeminent nation,” Neuborne says. “Trump echoes Hitler’s jingoistic appeal to ultranationalist fervor, extolling American exceptionalism right down to the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ a paraphrase of Hitler’s promise to restore German greatness.”

11. Both made closing borders a centerpiece. “Hitler all but closed Germany’s borders, freezing non-Aryan migration into the country and rendering it impossible for Germans to escape without official permission. Like Hitler, Trump has also made closed borders a centerpiece of his administration,” Neuborne continues. “Hitler barred Jews. Trump bars Muslims and seekers of sanctuary from Central America. When the lower courts blocked Trump’s Muslim travel ban, he unilaterally issued executive orders replacing it with a thinly disguised substitute that ultimately narrowly won Supreme Court approval under a theory of extreme deference to the president.”

12. They embraced mass detention and deportations. “Hitler promised to make Germany free from Jews and Slavs. Trump promises to slow, stop, and even reverse the flow of non-white immigrants, substituting Muslims, Africans, Mexicans, and Central Americans of color for Jews and Slavs as scapegoats for the nation’s ills. Trump’s efforts to cast dragnets to arrest undocumented aliens where they work, live, and worship, followed by mass deportation… echo Hitler’s promise to defend Germany’s racial identity,” he writes, also noting that Trump has “stooped to tearing children from their parents [as Nazis in World War II would do] to punish desperate efforts by migrants to find a better life.”

13. Both used borders to protect selected industries. “Like Hitler, Trump seeks to use national borders to protect his favored national interests, threatening to ignite protectionist trade wars with Europe, China, and Japan similar to the trade wars that, in earlier incarnations, helped to ignite World War I and World War II,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump aggressively uses our nation’s political and economic power to favor selected American corporate interests at the expense of foreign competitors and the environment, even at the price of international conflict, massive inefficiency, and irreversible pollution [climate change].”

14. They cemented their rule by enriching elites. “Hitler’s version of fascism shifted immense power—both political and financial-- to the leaders of German industry. In fact, Hitler governed Germany largely through corporate executives,” he continues. “Trump has also presided over a massive empowerment-- and enrichment-- of corporate America. Under Trump, large corporations exercise immense political power while receiving huge economic windfalls and freedom from regulations designed to protect consumers and the labor force.

“Hitler despised the German labor movement, eventually destroying it and imprisoning its leaders. Trump also detests strong unions, seeking to undermine any effort to interfere with the prerogatives of management.”

15. Both rejected international norms. “Hitler’s foreign policy rejected international cooperation in favor of military and economic coercion, culminating in the annexation of the Sudetenland, the phony Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the horrors of global war,” Neuborne notes. “Like Hitler, Trump is deeply hostile to multinational cooperation, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the nuclear agreement with Iran, threatening to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, abandoning our Kurdish allies in Syria, and even going so far as to question the value of NATO, our post-World War II military alliance with European democracies against Soviet expansionism.”

16. They attack domestic democratic processes. “Hitler attacked the legitimacy of democracy itself, purging the voting rolls, challenging the integrity of the electoral process, and questioning the ability of democratic government to solve Germany’s problems,” Neuborne notes. “Trump has also attacked the democratic process, declining to agree to be bound by the outcome of the 2016 elections when he thought he might lose, supporting the massive purge of the voting rolls allegedly designed to avoid (nonexistent) fraud, championing measures that make it harder to vote, tolerating-- if not fomenting-- massive Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, encouraging mob violence at rallies, darkly hinting at violence if Democrats hold power, and constantly casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections unless he wins.”

17. Both attack the judiciary and rule of law. “Hitler politicized and eventually destroyed the vaunted German justice system. Trump also seeks to turn the American justice system into his personal playground,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump threatens the judicially enforced rule of law, bitterly attacking American judges who rule against him, slyly praising Andrew Jackson for defying the Supreme Court, and abusing the pardon power by pardoning an Arizona sheriff found guilty of criminal contempt of court for disobeying federal court orders to cease violating the Constitution.”

18. Both glorify the military and demand loyalty oaths. “Like Hitler, Trump glorifies the military, staffing his administration with layers of retired generals (who eventually were fired or resigned), relaxing control over the use of lethal force by the military and the police, and demanding a massive increase in military spending,” Neuborne writes. Just as Hitler “imposed an oath of personal loyalty on all German judges” and demanded courts defer to him, “Trump’s already gotten enough deference from five Republican [Supreme Court] justices to uphold a largely Muslim travel ban that is the epitome of racial and religious bigotry.”

Trump has also demanded loyalty oaths. “He fired James Comey, a Republican appointed in 2013 as FBI director by President Obama, for refusing to swear an oath of personal loyalty to the president; excoriated and then sacked Jeff Sessions, his handpicked attorney general, for failing to suppress the criminal investigation into… Trump’s possible collusion with Russia in influencing the 2016 elections; repeatedly threatened to dismiss Robert Mueller, the special counsel carrying out the investigation; and called again and again for the jailing of Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent, leading crowds in chants of ‘lock her up.’” A new chant, “send her back,” has since emerged at Trump rallies directed at non-white Democratic congresswomen.

19. They proclaim unchecked power. “Like Hitler, Trump has intensified a disturbing trend that predated his administration of governing unilaterally, largely through executive orders or proclamations,” Neuborne says, citing the Muslim travel ban, trade tariffs, unraveling of health and environmental safety nets, ban on transgender military service, and efforts to end President Obama’s protection for Dreamers. “Like Hitler, Trump claims the power to overrule Congress and govern all by himself. In 1933, Hitler used the pretext of the Reichstag fire to declare a national emergency and seize the power to govern unilaterally. The German judiciary did nothing to stop him. German democracy never recovered.”

“When Congress refused to give Trump funds for his border wall even after he threw a tantrum and shut down the government, Trump, like Hitler, declared a phony national emergency and claimed the power to ignore Congress,” Neuborne continues. “Don’t count on the Supreme Court to stop him. Five justices gave the game away on the President’s unilateral travel ban. They just might do the same thing on the border wall.” It did in late July, ruling that Trump could divert congressionally appropriated funds from the Pentagon budget-- undermining constitutional separation of powers.

20. Both relegate women to subordinate roles. “Finally,” writes Neuborne, “Hitler propounded a misogynistic, stereotypical view of women, valuing them exclusively as wives and mothers while excluding them from full participation in German political and economic life. Trump may be the most openly misogynist figure ever to hold high public office in the United States, crassly treating women as sexual objects, using nondisclosure agreements and violating campaign finance laws to shield his sexual misbehavior from public knowledge, attacking women who come forward to accuse men of abusive behavior, undermining reproductive freedom, and opposing efforts by women to achieve economic equality.”

Me The People by Nancy Ohanian

Whither Constitutional Checks and Balances?

Most of Neuborne’s book is not centered on Trump’s fealty to Hitler’s methods and early policies. He notes, as many commentators have, that Trump is following the well-known contours of authoritarian populists and dictators: “there’s always a charismatic leader, a disaffected mass, an adroit use of communications media, economic insecurity, racial or religious fault lines, xenophobia, a turn to violence, and a search for scapegoats.”

The bigger problem, and the subject of most of the book, is that the federal architecture intended to be a check and balance against tyrants, is not poised to act. Congressional representation is fundamentally anti-democratic. In the Senate, politicians representing 18 percent of the national population-- epicenters of Trump’s base-- can cast 51 percent of the chamber’s votes. A Republican majority from rural states, representing barely 40 percent of the population, controls the chamber. It repeatedly thwarts legislation reflecting multicultural America’s values-- and creates a brick wall for impeachment.

The House of Representatives is not much better. Until 2018, this decade’s GOP-majority House, a product of 2011’s extreme Republican gerrymanders, was also unrepresentative of the nation’s demographics. That bias still exists in the Electoral College, as the size of a state’s congressional delegation equals its allocation of votes. That formula is fair as far as House members go, but allocating votes based on two senators per state hurts urban America. Consider that California’s population is 65 times larger than Wyoming’s.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s majority remains in the hands of justices appointed by Republican presidents—and favors that party’s agenda. Most Americans are unaware that the court’s partisan majority has only changed twice since the Civil War-- in 1937, when a Democratic-appointed majority took over, and in 1972, when a Republican-appointed majority took over. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s blocking of President Obama’s final nominee thwarted a twice-a-century change. Today’s hijacked Supreme Court majority has only just begun deferring to Trump’s agenda.

Neuborne wants to be optimistic that a wave of state-based resistance, call it progressive federalism, could blunt Trump’s power grabs and help the country return to a system embracing, rather than demonizing, individual dignity and fundamental equality. But he predicts that many Americans who supported Trump in 2016 (largely, he suggests, because their plights have been overlooked for many years by federal power centers and by America’s capitalist hubs) won’t desert Trump-- not while he’s in power.

“When tyrants like Hitler are ultimately overthrown, their mass support vanishes retroactively-- everyone turns out to have been in the resistance-- but the mass support was undeniably there,” he writes. “There will, of course, be American quislings who will enthusiastically support an American tyrant. There always are-- everywhere.”

Ultimately, Neuborne doesn’t expect there will be a “constitutional mechanic in the sky ready to swoop down and save American democracy from Donald Trump at the head of a populist mob.” Whatever Trump thinks he is or isn’t doing, his rhetorical and strategic role model-- the early Hitler-- is what makes Trump and today’s GOP so dangerous.

“Even if all that Trump is doing is marching to that populist drum, he is unleashing forces that imperil the fragile fabric of a multicultural democracy,” Neuborne writes. “But I think there’s more. The parallels-- especially the links between Lügenpresse and ‘fake news,’ and promises to restore German greatness and ‘Make America Great Again’-- are just too close to be coincidental. I’m pretty sure that Trump’s bedside study of Hitler’s speeches-- especially the use of personal invective, white racism, and xenophobia-- has shaped the way Trump seeks to gain political power in our time. I don’t for a moment believe that Trump admires what Hitler eventually did with his power [genocide], but he damn well admires-- and is successfully copying-- the way that Hitler got it.”

Steven Hassan has made a name for himself as someone who rescues-- gently and without coersion-- victims of cults. An author and mental health counselor, Hassan is now widely recognized as one the the country's leading experts on mind control and cults. His newest book is The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control. Maybe he can help? But can anyone rescue 40 some-odd percent of a country... that doesn't want to be rescued?

Beto O'Rourke wrote that a friend of his reminded him the other day "of how despair spread across Germany in the 1930s--  of all the people who were not Nazis, but neither were they simply passive observers of the Nazis of all that transpired… the countless thousands who were completely devastated by what they saw happening to their country, felt utterly powerless to stop it, and, over time, quietly retreated from the world into darkness and despair. And today? How many millions are so heartbroken by what has come to pass in America that they have already retreated from the world? I refuse to be one of them. I still have faith in this country, faith that we can follow the optimism of our founders, faith that we can follow the example of El Paso… but it will take all we have from all of us who are willing to fight to save this country to make it so. And in this struggle, as Lincoln said at another defining moment in our history, 'we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.'"

Notorious closet case and inveterate liar Lindsey Graham sashayed over to Fox News yesterday to lisp into a microphone how when she goes "to meet God at the pearly gates I don’t think he’s going to ask me, 'Why didn’t you convict Trump?' I may be wrong, but I don’t think that’s gonna be at the top of the list." Yes, he may be wrong because maybe he raped hundreds of children in his day. Otherwise, his role in "acquitting" Trump very much will be one of the reasons that conspires to cast him into the fiery pit of eternal damnation.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Just look at this goon! You know how you can just judge someone's intelligence just by looking at them? Ken Cuccinelli needs to tie a string to his wrist with the other end tied to the doorknob of his office just so he can find his way back. God knows how he finds his way home every night but I guess he has a limo driver, a white one of course.

Thoughts come hard for Ken Cuccinelli. That's why he has trouble explaining that what he and his orange nazi freak of a boss really want to do with the Statue Of Liberty is tear it down. And you thought republicans want to preserve our statues! Silly you! They only want to preserve the statues that stand for a heritage of hanging black people. Robert E. Lee? fine. Lady Liberty? Not so much.

Cuccinelli did manage to say that the old "Give me you tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free" only applies to Europeans, aka white people. You know, like from Norway! So, let's give him some small credit for some sort of special white supremacist honesty, and then, let's beat him with a stick, like a pinata. I wonder if he'd get the irony. No, I don't really wonder at all.

I might suggest that we just turn Kenny into a statue by covering him with molten bronze or copper and placing him on a marble pedestal somewhere (somewhere where there's tons of pigeons) but Trump would get so jealous that there was a Cuccinelli statue before there was a Trump statue. So would Stephen Miller, Kellyanne, and the rest of the White House hood-wearers and eugenics fans, but, hey, let's do it anyway. Maybe we should add a grateful kneeling Tucker Carlson blowing Cuccinelli to the tableau while Mike Pence and Moscow Mitch look on in aroused envy. Now, let's see. What words should we put on the plaque? Something any Trump administration scumbag or ally can be proud to live by. How about:

Humanitarianism is the expression of stupidity and cowardice
-Adolph Hitler

How Many Seats-- And WHICH Seats-- Will Flip... And Why Does It Matter Anyway?

When someone predicts that the Democrats will win 25 seats of 30 seats or 50 seats or however many seats in November, it's important to ask them "which seats?" The numbers are foolish and meaningless. Which seats will the Democrats take away from Republicans? Let's assume for this exercise that the wave is strong enough so that the Democrats hold all these open seats, once considered competitive, as I expect them to:

• NH-01 Carol Shea-Porter to Chris Pappas
• NV-04 Ruben Kihuen to Steven Horsford
• NV-03 Jacky Rosen to Susie Lee
• MN-01 Tim Walz to Daniel Feehan
• MN-08 Rick Nolan to Joe Radinovich

I also expect Democrats to win 16 of the Republican open seats, despite plenty of bad DCCC recruiting endangering solid opportunities and making victories solely dependent of the anti-red wave, particularly in CA-39 and FL-27.

• NJ-02 Frank LoBiondo to Jeff Van Drew
• PA-05 Pat Meehan to Mary Gay Scanlon

• PA-06 Ryan Costello to Chrissy Houlahan
• WI-01 Paul Ryan to Randy Bryce
• CA-49 Darrell Issa to Mike Levin
• AZ-02 Martha McSally to Ann Kirkpatrick
• MI-11 Dave Trott to Haley Stevens
• WA-08 Dave Reichert to Kim Schrier
• NJ-11 Rodney Frelinghuysen to Mikie Sherrill
• PA-07 Charlie Dent to Susan Wild
• KS-02 Lynn Jenkins to Paul Davis
• NC-09 Robert Pittenger to Dan McReady
• WV-03 Evan Jenkins to Richard Ojeda
• NM-02 Steve Pearce to Xochitl Torres Small
• FL-27 Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to Donna Shalala
• CA-39 Ed Royce to Gil Cisneros

Now the Republican incumbents I see losing, again despite some truly horrible DCCC recruiting (as in CO-06 and... New Jersey):

• PA-17 Keith Rothfus to Conor Lamb
• CA-45 Mimi Walters to Katie Porter
• CA-50 Duncan Hunter to Ammar Campa-Najjar
• CA-48 Dana Rohrabacher to Harley Rouda
• CA-25 Steve Knight to Katie Hill
• IA-01 Rod Blum to Abby Finkenauer
• KS-03 Kevin Yoder to Sharice Davids
• NE-02 Don Bacon to Kara Eastman
• WA-05 Cathy McMorris Rodgers to Lisa Brown
• WA-03 Jaime Herrera Beutler to Carolyn Long
• CA-10 Jeff Denham to Josh Harder
• NJ-07 Leonard Lance to Tom Malinowski
• NJ-03 Tom MacArthur to Andy Kim
• ME-02 Bruce Poliquin to Jared Golden
• MN-02 Jason Lewis to Angie Craig
• MN-03 Erik Paulsen to Dean Phillips
• FL-26 Carlos Curbelo to Debbie Mucarsel-Powell
• IA-03 David Young to Cindy Axne
• VA-10 Barbara Comstock to Jennifer Wexton
• MI-08 Mike Bishop to Elissa Slotkin
• MI-06 Fred Upton to Matt Longjohn
• VA-07 Dave Brat to Abigail Spanberger
• VA-02 Scott Taylor to Elaine Luria
• IL-12 Mike Bost to Brendan Kelly
• IL-13 Rodney Davis to Betsy Londrigan
• IL-06 Pete Roskam to Sean Casten
• KY-06 Andy Barr to Amy McGrath
• NY-24 John Katko to Dana Balter
• NY-27 Chris Collins to Nate McMurray
• NY-19 John Faso to Antonio Delgado
• NY-22 Claudia Tenney to Anthony Brindisi
• TX-07 John Culberson to Lizzie Fletcher
• TX-23 Will Hurd to Gina Ortiz Jones
• NC-13 Ted Budd to Kathy Manning
• UT-04 Mia Love to Ben McAdams
• CO-06 Mike Coffman to Jason Crow
• GA-06 Karen Handel to Lucy McBath
• OH-01 Steve Chabot to Aftab Pureval
• PA-01 Brian Fitzpatrick to Scott Wallace
• TX-32 Pete Sessions to Colin Allred

And below is my favorite block of districts. These are the ones no one expects to see flipping and, by all rights, they shouldn't... except they may in a wave election. In wave elections, the DCCC ignore districts they deem "impossible" and don't recruit their shit candidates so good candidates are able to slip in. Also the DCCC doesn't deploy their staffers and consultants who always make it harder for Democrats to win races. Take TX-10 for example. Normally an impossible district for a Democrat. The DCCC never gave it a second glance and a strong Democratic candidate, Mike Siegel, won the primary and could, in a strong enough wave, take out the incumbent. Exact same story in TX-36, IA-04, KS-04 and PA-11. Those would be sweet wins no one expectson election night. Others are just candidates who could be swept in despite mediocrity just because of a wave, like Dan Kohl, Perry Gershon, Joseph Kopser, Lauren Baer...

• IA-04 Steve King to J.D. Scholten
• KS-04 Ron Estes to James Thompson
• WI-06 Glenn Grothman to Dan Kohl
• NY-21 Elise Stefanik to Tendra Cobb
• NY-01 Lee Zeldin to Perry Gershon
• TX-10 Michael McCaul to Mike Siegel
• CA-04 Tom McClintock to Jessica Morse
• CA-22 Devin Nunes to Andrew Janz
• CA-21 David Valadao to TJ Cox
• MT-AL Greg Gianforte to Kathleen Williams
• TX-21 Lamar Smith to Joseph Kopser
• TX-06 Joe Barton to Jana Lynne Sanchez
• TX-27 Blake Farenthold to Eric Holguin
• TX-31 John Carter to MJ Hegar
• TX-36 Brian Babin to Dayna Steele
• IL-14 Randy Hultgren to Lauren Underwood

• NC-02 George Holding to Linda Coleman
• FL-25 Mario Diaz-Balart to Mary Barzee Flores
• FL-06 Ron DeSantis to Nancy Soderberg
• FL-18 Brian Mast to Lauren Baer
• SC-01 Mark Sanford to Joe Cunningham
• MO-02 Ann Wagner to Cort Van Ostran
• OH-12 Troy Balderson to Danny O'Connor
• OH-10 Mike Turner to Theresa Gasper
• OH-14 David Joyce to Betsy Rader
• PA-11 Lloyd Smucker to Jess King
• PA-16 Mike Kelly to Ron DiNicola

That would be 88 seats flipping, a best-case scenario (and more than anyone else is predicting), especially if you're counting all the districts in the last category, which is more a fantasy than a possibility. Half? Maybe. Then it would mean 79 seats flipping. Would you be happy with that? Why's it important, since the Democratic Party sucks so bad and could well wind up doing nothing but hold Trump at bay and pass some crap like PayGo to completely disarm any hopes of advancing a progressive agenda? Yes, they suck, but the Republicans suck way worse-- like sharp teeth instead of filed down teeth. Still, can anyone doubt the Democrats really are the lesser evil? Noted historian Christopher Browning has an essay in the new New York Review of Books that it's reasonable to use as an explanation for why, with Trump lurking, it's so important to make sure the lesser evil wins, The Suffocation of Democracy. He's often asked, he wrote, "about the degree to which the current situation in the United States resembles the interwar period and the rise of fascism in Europe" and he notes that there are "several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference." And that's what the essay is all about. It's long but... it's more exciting than watching baseball on TV.

In the 1920s, the US pursued isolationism in foreign policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations. America First was America alone, except for financial agreements like the Dawes and Young Plans aimed at ensuring that our “free-loading” former allies could pay back their war loans. At the same time, high tariffs crippled international trade, making the repayment of those loans especially difficult. The country witnessed an increase in income disparity and a concentration of wealth at the top, and both Congress and the courts eschewed regulations to protect against the self-inflicted calamities of free enterprise run amok. The government also adopted a highly restrictionist immigration policy aimed at preserving the hegemony of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants against an influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. (Various measures barring Asian immigration had already been implemented between 1882 and 1917.) These policies left the country unable to respond constructively to either the Great Depression or the rise of fascism, the growing threat to peace, and the refugee crisis of the 1930s.

Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, stability, and prosperity since 1945. His preference for bilateral relations, conceived as zero-sum rivalries in which he is the dominant player and “wins,” overlaps with the ideological preference of Steve Bannon and the so-called alt-right for the unfettered self-assertion of autonomous, xenophobic nation-states-- in short, the pre-1914 international system. That “international anarchy” produced World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, the fascist dictatorships, World War II, and the Holocaust, precisely the sort of disasters that the post–World War II international system has for seven decades remarkably avoided.

In threatening trade wars with allies and adversaries alike, Trump justifies increased tariffs on our allies on the specious pretext that countries like Canada are a threat to our national security. He combines his constant disparagement of our democratic allies with open admiration of authoritarians. His naive and narcissistic confidence in his own powers of personal diplomacy and his faith in a handshake with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un recall the hapless Neville Chamberlain (a man in every other regard different from Trump). Fortunately the US is so embedded in the international order it created after 1945, and the Republican Party and its business supporters are sufficiently alarmed over the threat to free trade, that Trump has not yet completed his agenda of withdrawal, though he has made astounding progress in a very short time.

A second aspect of the interwar period with all too many similarities to our current situation is the waning of the Weimar Republic. Paul von Hindenburg, elected president of Germany in 1925, was endowed by the Weimar Constitution with various emergency powers to defend German democracy should it be in dire peril. Instead of defending it, Hindenburg became its gravedigger, using these powers first to destroy democratic norms and then to ally with the Nazis to replace parliamentary government with authoritarian rule. Hindenburg began using his emergency powers in 1930, appointing a sequence of chancellors who ruled by decree rather than through parliamentary majorities, which had become increasingly impossible to obtain as a result of the Great Depression and the hyperpolarization of German politics.

Because an ever-shrinking base of support for traditional conservatism made it impossible to carry out their authoritarian revision of the constitution, Hindenburg and the old right ultimately made their deal with Hitler and installed him as chancellor. Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

One can predict that henceforth no significant judicial appointments will be made when the presidency and the Senate are not controlled by the same party. McConnell and our dysfunctional and disrespected Congress have now ensured an increasingly dysfunctional and disrespected judiciary, and the constitutional balance of powers among the three branches of government is in peril.

Whatever secret reservations McConnell and other traditional Republican leaders have about Trump’s character, governing style, and possible criminality, they openly rejoice in the payoff they have received from their alliance with him and his base: huge tax cuts for the wealthy, financial and environmental deregulation, the nominations of two conservative Supreme Court justices (so far) and a host of other conservative judicial appointments, and a significant reduction in government-sponsored health care (though not yet the total abolition of Obamacare they hope for). Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.

But the potential impact of the Mueller report does suggest yet another eerie similarity to the interwar period—how the toxic divisions in domestic politics led to the complete inversion of previous political orientations. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy. In Germany this reached the absurd extreme of the Communists underestimating the Nazis as a transitory challenge while focusing on the Social Democrats-- dubbed “red fascists”-- as the true long-term threat to Communist triumph.

By 1936 the democratic forces of France and Spain had learned the painful lesson of not uniting against the fascist threat, and even Stalin reversed his ill-fated policy and instructed the Communists to join democrats in Popular Front electoral alliances. In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by-- horror of horrors-- a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist. The victory of the Popular Front in 1936 temporarily saved French democracy but led to the defeat of a demoralized and divided France in 1940, followed by the Vichy regime’s collaboration with Nazi Germany while enthusiastically pursuing its own authoritarian counterrevolution.

Faced with the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the US election and collusion with members of his campaign, Trump and his supporters’ first line of defense has been twofold-- there was “no collusion” and the claim of Russian meddling is a “hoax.” The second line of defense is again twofold: “collusion is not a crime” and the now-proven Russian meddling had no effect. I suspect that if the Mueller report finds that the Trump campaign’s “collusion” with Russians does indeed meet the legal definition of “criminal conspiracy” and that the enormous extent of Russian meddling makes the claim that it had no effect totally implausible, many Republicans will retreat, either implicitly or explicitly, to the third line of defense: “Better Putin than Hillary.” There seems to be nothing for which the demonization of Hillary Clinton does not serve as sufficient justification, and the notion that a Trump presidency indebted to Putin is far preferable to the nightmare of a Clinton victory will signal the final Republican reorientation to illiberalism at home and subservience to an authoritarian abroad.

Such similarities, both actual and foreseeable, must not obscure a significant difference between the interwar democratic decline and our current situation. In his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis portrayed a Nazi-style takeover in the US, in which paramilitary forces of the newly elected populist president seize power by arresting many members of Congress and setting up a dictatorship replete with all-powerful local commissars, concentration camps, summary courts, and strict censorship, as well as the incarceration of all political opponents who do not succeed in fleeing over the Canadian border. Invoking the Nazi example was understandable then, and several aspects of democratic decline in the interwar period seem eerily similar to current trends, as I have noted. But the Nazi dictatorship, war, and genocide following the collapse of Weimar democracy are not proving very useful for understanding the direction in which we are moving today. I would argue that current trends reflect a significant divergence from the dictatorships of the 1930s.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

Trump has shown unabashed admiration for these authoritarian leaders and great affinity for the major tenets of illiberal democracy. But others have paved the way in important respects. Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states-- twenty-nine of them Republicans-- represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators-- enough to block conviction on impeachment charges-- represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives.

In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics. We are approaching the point when Democrats might still win state elections in the major blue states but become increasingly irrelevant in elections for the presidency and Congress. Trump’s personal flaws and his tactic of appealing to a narrow base while energizing Democrats and alienating independents may lead to precisely that rare wave election needed to provide a congressional check on the administration as well as the capture of enough state governorships and legislatures to begin reversing current trends in gerrymandering and voter suppression. The elections of 2018 and 2020 will be vital in testing how far the electoral system has deteriorated.

Another area in which Trump has been the benefactor of long-term trends predating his presidency is the decline of organized labor. To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway. The increasingly uneven playing field caused by the rise in corporate influence and decline in union power, along with the legions of well-funded lobbyists, is another sign of the illiberal trend.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights. On these issues, often described as the guardrails of democracy against authoritarian encroachment, the Trump administration either has won or seems poised to win significant gains for illiberalism. Upon his appointment as chancellor, Hitler immediately created a new Ministry of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, who remained one of his closest political advisers.

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of the Washington Post and the New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

The very first legislation decreed by Hitler under the Enabling Act of 1933 (which suspended the legislative powers of the Reichstag) authorized the government to dismiss civil servants for suspected political unreliability and “non-Aryan” ancestry. Inequality before the law and legal discrimination were core features of the Nazi regime from the beginning. It likewise intruded into people’s private choices about sexuality and reproduction. Persecution of male homosexuality was drastically intensified, resulting in the deaths of some 10,000 gay men and the incarceration and even castration of many thousands more. Some 300,000–400,000 Germans deemed carriers of hereditary defects were forcibly sterilized; some 150,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans considered “unworthy of life” were murdered. Germans capable of bearing racially valued children were denied access to contraception and abortion and rewarded for having large families; pregnant female foreign workers were often forced to have abortions to prevent the birth of undesired children and loss of workdays.

Nothing remotely so horrific is on the illiberal agenda, but the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures.

The domestic agenda of Trump’s illiberal democracy falls considerably short of totalitarian dictatorship as exemplified by Mussolini and Hitler. But that is small comfort for those who hope and believe that the arc of history inevitably bends toward greater emancipation, equality, and freedom. Likewise, it is small comfort that in foreign policy Trump does not emulate the Hitlerian goals of wars of conquest and genocide, because the prospects for peace and stability are nevertheless seriously threatened. Escalating trade wars could easily tip the world economy into decline, and the Trump administration has set thresholds for peaceful settlements with Iran and North Korea that seem well beyond reach.

It is possible that Trump is engaged in excessive rhetorical posturing as a bargaining chip and will retreat to more moderate positions in both cases. But it is also possible that adversarial momentum will build, room for concessions will disappear, and he will plunge the country into serious economic or military conflicts as a captive of his own rhetoric. Historically, such confrontations and escalations have often escaped the control of leaders far more talented than Trump.

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.

Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change-- which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate-- will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.

Do Republicans Not Know Trump Is A Congenital Liar? Or Do They Just Not Care? Or Even Approve?

If you input "Big Lie" into Google, the first thing that pops up is Post Malone's song.

Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, when I pull up give that bitch my line
And you know that I'ma get mine, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you got the shit you don't got
Heard you say that shit a hundred times, yeah yeah
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie
Say you flexin' that's a big lie, say you flexin' that's a big lie

Right after that you get the wikipedia definition-- including the original German große Lüge-- explaining that the Big Lie is a propaganda technique that was coined by Hitler in 1925 for his book, Mein Kampf, the only book that Trump is known to have read and which is first wife says he keeps on his night stand. Hitlerexplained that the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Sound familiar?

Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, a forerunner of Huckabee's daughter, "put forth a slightly different theory which has come to be more commonly associated with the expression 'big lie'. Goebbels wrote the following paragraph in an article dated 12 January 1941, 16 years after Hitler's first use of the phrase. The article, titled Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik (English: "From Churchill's Lie Factory") was published in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel.

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

During World War II the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, a precursor to the CIA) prepared a report on Hitler's psychological profile, that included this-- "His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." Who does that sound like?

Last year, Emily Dreyfuss, writing for Wired, explained how the Big Lie technique is used by people like Trump: repetition.

You only use 10 percent of your brain. Eating carrots improves your eyesight. Vitamin C cures the common cold. Crime in the United States is at an all-time high.

None of those things are true.

But the facts don't actually matter: People repeat them so often that you believe them. Welcome to the “illusory truth effect,” a glitch in the human psyche that equates repetition with truth. Marketers and politicians are masters of manipulating this particular cognitive bias-- which perhaps you have become more familiar with lately.

President Trump is a "great businessman," he says over and over again. Some evidence suggests that might not be true. Or look at just this week, when the president signed three executive orders designed to stop what he describes-- over and over again-- as high levels of violence against law enforcement in America. Sounds important, right? But such crimes are at their lowest rates in decades, as are most violent crimes in the US. Not exactly, as the president would have it, "American carnage."

...Repetition is what makes fake news work, too, as researchers at Central Washington University pointed out in a study way back in 2012 before the term was everywhere. It's also a staple of political propaganda. It's why flacks feed politicians and CEOs sound bites that they can say over and over again. Not to go all Godwin's Law on you, but even Adolf Hitler knew about the technique. "Slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea," he wrote in Mein Kampf.

The effect works because when people attempt to assess truth they rely on two things: whether the information jibes with their understanding, and whether it feels familiar. The first condition is logical: People compare new information with what they already know to be true and consider the credibility of both sources. But researchers have found that familiarity can trump rationality-- so much so that hearing over and over again that a certain fact is wrong can have a paradoxical effect. It's so familiar that it starts to feel right.

I'm going to guess this works even more effectively as you descend the intelligence curve and get to the average Trump voter.

This week presidential historian Jon Meacham castigated Trump for calling the media an "enemy of the people," pointing out that the phrase itself and that the whole reason authoritarians use it is part of a "totalitarian" strategy. "It’s an elective kind of base management. It’s pernicious, it’s dangerous... It’s simply a Stalinist phrase, for God’s sake. It comes out of totalitarian regimes to declare that a free press is the enemy of the people."

Early yesterday morning The Atlantic published an essay by Olivia Pascall, Trump's Tweets and the Creation of 'Illusory Truth', asserting that Trump's repetition of words like "witch hunt" could have a psychological effect on Americans-- say it enough, and people might start to believe it... Trump’s consistent tweeting-- and the constant media coverage of those tweets-- makes his favorite phrases familiar to the American public. And that familiarity could be key to making his claims seem plausible, even believable."

Every time a Trump tweet calling the investigation a “witch hunt” flashes up on people’s Twitter feeds or television screens-- regardless of the context-- it’s becoming more and more familiar to them. They’re becoming increasingly fluent in the language of Trump’s claimed innocence. Even if they don’t think Mueller’s investigation is a rigged witch hunt, they are becoming more and more familiar with the idea that it could be.

... [T]he way to combat this effect would be for people to stop responding directly to the president’s charges. “It’s actually very ineffective to say, ‘Oh, this isn’t a witch hunt,’ because what you’re doing is reinforcing the ‘witch hunt’ frame,” he says. “You can’t just get people to stop believing something by contradicting it.” [A more effective response is] creating a positive, alternative story, such as “Mueller’s investigation is aimed at safeguarding America’s elections.” But that’s not always a natural position for the president’s opponents, or the media, to take. What effect all of this repeated language could have on public opinion of the investigation itself is unclear. It probably won’t turn public opinion in the president’s favor anytime soon, but it might mean that people take the Russia investigation less seriously-- the most recent Suffolk poll is already indicating that it’s a relatively unimportant issue for voters in the midterms. It’s almost certainly succeeding in framing the debate around whether it’s a witch hunt. And maybe, for the president’s purposes, that’s enough.

Yesterday everyone was talking about Susan Glasser's New Yorker piece about Trump lying more... and purposefully. "In his first year as President," she wrote, "Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to The Post. In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229. In June and July, he averaged sixteen false claims a day. On July 5th, The Post found what appears to be Trump’s most untruthful day yet: seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions he made in a campaign-style rally in Great Falls, Montana, were 'false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.'" The Post fact-checkers never refer to his lies as "lies," although their chief, Glenn Kessler pointed out that Señor T "has a habit of repeating the same falsehoods over and over again, especially as they concern his core political causes, such as trade or immigration or getting European allies to contribute more to NATO."

History books will likely declare the last few months a turning point in the Trump Presidency, and Kessler’s laborious work gives us metrics that confirm what is becoming more and more apparent: the recent wave of misstatements is both a reflection of Trump’s increasingly unbound Presidency and a signal attribute of it. The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to. The fact that Trump, while historically unpopular with the American public as a whole, has retained the loyalty of more than eighty per cent of Republicans-- the group at which his lies seem to be aimed-- means we are in for much more, as a midterm election approaches that may determine whether Trump is impeached by a newly Democratic Congress. At this point, the falsehoods are as much a part of his political identity as his floppy orange hair and the “Make America Great Again” slogan. The untruths, Kessler told me, are Trump’s political “secret sauce.”

...Other metrics make clear the significant changes in Trump’s approach to the Presidency in recent months, as he has become more confident, less willing to tolerate advisers who challenge him, and increasingly obsessed with the threats to his Presidency posed by the ongoing special-counsel investigation. One is the epic turnover rate of Trump’s White House staff, which as of June already stood at the unprecedented level of sixty-one per cent among the President’s top advisers.

...The previous gold standard in Presidential lying was, of course, Richard Nixon. Barry Goldwater, the Republican Presidential nominee four years before Nixon won the White House in 1968, famously called Nixon “the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.” Writing in his memoirs, Goldwater observed that Nixon “lied to his wife, his family, his friends, longtime colleagues in the U.S. Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people, and the world.”

There have been comparisons between Nixon and Trump since Trump first entered office, but these, too, have escalated in recent months as the President has been shadowed by the threat of the ongoing special-counsel investigation into the electronic break-in of the Democratic National Committee (another eerie Watergate echo) and whether Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. Trump’s obsession with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, also comes with metrics: he has called the Mueller probe a “witch hunt” on Twitter more than twenty-one times a month on average this spring and summer, compared with an average of just three times a month in the previous nine months.

A little entertainment?