Fascist in Chief

For the sake of this post, I define fascism as the seizing of the power and machinery of the State for the sake of furthering one's personal or other nondemocratic purpose. By that definition, Donald Trump is a fascist.

I have avoided using the "f" word. Also, for those who know me, I believed in 2016 that Donald Trump would be a better president than he is. I even have some receipts. In this very blog I wrote a post that ranked Donald Trump exactly in the middle of the fifteen or so Republican contenders at the time. Let's not forget that that list included out-and-out dangerous people like Ted Cruz and intellectual lightweights like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio. All fifteen of them were clowns. My mistake was believing that Trump might stop the tweets and other ridiculousness, and actually govern. Some "proposals"--if you could actually sort through them--were markedly non-conservative.

I was wrong, of course. The depth of his cruelty and narcissism has turned out to be bottomless. If there is one quote that has been worn out since January 2017, it is Maya Angelou: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." I plead guilty to not heeding that.

Every branch and agency of government has been converted to serve the personal whims of the President, with willing accomplices everywhere (both active and passive). DOJ, FDA, US Postal Service, Department of Education, State Department (the Secretary of State actually spoke at the Republican Convention), Department of Labor, CDC. By my definition, then, we are being governed by a fascist. [It is of interest to me--as a child of the 1960s when we distrusted the military completely--that the one place where there is at least a modicum of integrity and resistance is the active military personnel, as opposed to the civilians in DOD.] This is particularly of concern because who would trust this FDA if they said in October that there is a safe Covid vaccine available?

This has happened because Donald Trump is a sociopath. But it has also happened because Trump has been actively abetted by the most political Supreme Court of my lifetime, the Republicans in the US Senate, and a press that mistakes both-sideism for objectivity.

There is an other aspect of this that has some personal dynamic for me. The Religious Right is fully on board. Our family belonged to a religiously-conservative church body for many years. While we had problems with some of the teachings, the fact that we agreed with many of the core beliefs and that the church assiduously stayed out of politics allowed us to stay there longer than maybe we should have. We left the that church four or five years ago when it started becoming overtly political in ways with which we disagreed. Since the election of Trump, this church body has become just another part of the Religious Right, another arm of Trumpism and the GOP. In fact, based on some of the members we used to consider friends, a significant portion of the church membership has gone full QAnon.

I bring this up because it resonates with me that I can see how the fascists obtained power in Europe. It may not have happened as easily without the support and/or acquiescence of religious and moral leaders of the time, much like we are seeing here. American institutions seem to be much weaker than most of us thought, not up to the task. It is for this reason that I am not necessarily optimistic that we will find a way out of this.

I hope and pray that I'm wrong.