Why do millions of Americans not see that a mentally disturbed chronically-lying, failing businessman with fascist tendencies should not be the leader of the free world? Hal Ginsberg and I discuss the disturbing appeal of Donald Trump on Monday’s Halitics video podcast….
“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”—Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom
There are millions of well-informed, thoughtful voters in the United States. Just not enough of them.
Donald J. Trump, the presidential candidate with the highest poll numbers, is clearly mentally and psychologically unstable, and quite likely in the early stages of dementia. His authoritarian (i.e. fascist) plans for when he would regain power places our 248-year-old democracy at peril. He wants to be a dictator and his allies and millions of his supporters relish the idea.
Another Trump presidency would cause chaos in this country and the world, with frightening and catastrophic consequences. This prediction is not an exaggeration. Respected, award-winning historian Douglas Brinkley warns that a second Trump term could lead to “the end of our democracy, and the birth of a new kind of authoritarian presidential order.”
This nightmare would occur because of a shameful and irrational denial by important people who should know better. America’s establishment, its institutions, influential leaders in all fields, and the mainstream media are not taking Donald Trump seriously enough. We are in the midst of what should be referred to as America’s Remarkable Election Denial.
Trump’s disturbed mind, dictatorial ambitions, and racist history are mostly brushed aside and often laughed at. He is not shy to inform us of his right-wing extremist agenda, vengeful fantasies, and his authoritarian ambitions, but most people figure he can’t be serious and surely could not be as dangerous as he appears to be. But his increasingly demented mental state and bizarre thinking are obvious and can’t be disregarded.
This country’s shortsightedness could lead to catastrophic consequences. Our Remarkable Election Denial is making it possible for him to win the November election and transform this country from an imperfect democracy to a fascist-style dictatorship led by an incompetent convicted felon with unmistakable signs of mental instability.
His increasing dementia should be obvious to anybody paying attention to his bizarre, hate-filled statements and speeches. For example, his recent rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, in which he mixed up the names of several important people and places, and inexplicably praised and compared migrants to the fictional cannibal killer Hannibal Lecter. Several weeks before that in Pennsylvania he stunned everyone with his bizarre depiction of the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg. “It was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways—it represented such a big portion of the success of this country.”
At the Wildwood, New Jersey rally, he strangely started talking about a “very good” hot doghe had just eaten, then reminisced about conversations he had with the late Frank Sinatra and Luciano Pavarotti about food. He also twice confused “Jimmy Conners” with “Jimmy Carter.”
We know Trump frequently messes up names and places, and often loses his train of thought. Earlier in the year he famously confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi several times when referring to the person in charge of security during the January 6 riots (neither woman was). A number of times he has said he ran against Barack Obama instead of Joe Biden.
His excuse: “Every time I do that, or I’ll say our president, Barack Hussein Obama — now, I do that because, you know, that makes a point. We understand that, right, because a lot of people say he’s running the country. I don’t personally think so.”
Recently, several prominent mental health professionals have expressed concern about his deteriorating brain function. Dr. John Gartner, a former professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, has been vocal about his professional analysis of Trump, asserting a stark difference between the candidates: “Biden is aging. Trump is dementing.”
Dr. Elisabeth Zoffmann, a forensic psychiatrist and an Associate Clinical Professor of Forensic and General Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, believes that Trump is displaying a range of behaviors that suggest cognitive challenges if not impairment. She concludes Trump appears to be suffering from Behavioral Variant Fronto-Temporal Dementia (BvFTD), which drastically affects personality, behavior, and social interactions.
Another example: outside a New York court recently Trump told everyone: “We can’t have an election in the middle of a political season. We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after Tuesday already.” It is known that Trump’s father, Fred, suffered from Alzheimer’s, a disease that is known to have a genetic component.
There is no rational reason 77-year-old Donald Trump should hold the most powerful job in the world. If Trump were elected president again, our political system might never recover and our democracy would likely only be remembered in history books (with no guarantee of even that). To anybody seriously paying attention, the evidence is overwhelming and indisputable. Yet millions of American voters, again largely because of America’s Remarkable Election Denial, don’t fully understand.
In November, American voters, even if they don’t realize it, will choose between fascism (Donald Trump) or our continuing imperfect democracy (Joe Biden). For 248 years America enjoyed and proudly defended our democratic system of government. And just about the whole country was on board. That is no longer the case.
Millions of mostly uninformed American voters have mindlessly decided this mentally deficient former reality TV star and world-class grifter, Donald Trump, is their savior. Having no experience outside of our democratic system, most Trump followers wouldn’t know how to even recognize fascism.
Does fascism realistically apply to Trump’s MAGA crusade? Fascism comes in different forms, and there is no “one-size-fits-all” meaning. But the Cambridge English Dictionary defines fascism as “A political system based on a very powerful leader, state control of official and economic life, and extreme pride in country and race, with no expression of political disagreement allowed.”
The Council on Foreign Relations notes: “In many ways, fascist regimes are revolutionary in nature. They advocate for the overthrow of existing systems of government and the persecution of political enemies. However, such regimes are also highly conservative in their championing of traditional values. And although fascist leaders typically claim to support the everyman, in reality, their regimes often align with powerful business interests.”
Trump and his MAGA followers don’t want their movement labeled as fascism, and would deny that electing Donald Trump would lead to such a government. But it surely would.
Of course, re-electing Joe Biden would solve all our problems, right? Of course not. The President is too old, unpopular, and too attached to old solutions to save us from ourselves. He can only rescue us from much worse immediate outcomes. The real answer will have to come elsewhere, in the future, assuming we still have opportunities to make the necessary changes.
Some major European countries gave fascism a try in the 1930s and 1940s. The consequences were horrific. It took World War II to end it. Now we can see nationalism and authoritarianism on the rise across the globe, while democracy is losing ground.
For the first time in two decades, the world has more closed autocracies than liberal democracies. “28 percent of the world’s population, 2.2 billion people, now live in closed autocracies compared to 13 percent, 1 billion people, who live in liberal democracies,” according to last year’s democracy report from the Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem Institute) at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg. Trump, his advisors, and allies are aiming to be part of that trend.
In summation, we are on the verge of electing a fascist government led by a mentally disturbed criminal with millions of angry followers. With America’s Remarkable Election Denial, enabled by important leaders and influencers unwilling to speak the complete truth, we all could soon be living this national nightmare.
Then we would only have one last resort: The Supreme Court. Wait…never mind.
Hal Ginsberg and I agreed on most things today (that’s rare) on my regular Monday guest host spot on the Halitics video podcast (or vlog, if you prefer). We talked about what the U.S. owes war veterans, and didn’t avoid noting that most of our recent wars have been mistakes or worse. We also had a special guest caller, Carl from Santa Cruz, who jumped into the discussion. Other topics included Gaza, Biden, Ukraine and more.
Hal and I don’t always see things the same way, but we both agree that Trump is dangerous and the Democratic Party needs major changes. Due to scheduling issues, I join Hal Ginsberg on his Halitics YouTube Vlog Thursday instead of my regular Monday appearance. We talk about the presidential polls, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Party inadequacies, GOP extremism, and much more.
The GOP’s favorite phrase when it comes to presidential politics appears to be, “Nobody knew at the time.”
Once a president is sworn into office, regardless of how much evidence there is of crimes and irregularities committed to get him there, both the press and the electorate just seem to want to ignore that evidence and move along. After all, there’s never been a successfully contested presidential election in American history.
Which is why the GOP will again count on getting away with their crimes against electoral democracy this fall. The big question for America will be, “What did we miss that we should have known at the time?”
We have, you’ll recall, seen this movie before:
— When Richard Nixon ran against incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968, nobody knew at the time that Nixon’s campaign had reached out to the South Vietnamese leadership and promised to make them rich if they’d refuse to go along with the Paris talks and thus sabotage the peace deal that LBJ had worked out with them earlier that summer.
A week before the election, LBJ discussed it with Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, who agreed that, “This is treason.” Nonetheless, both men took the story to their graves; America didn’t learn about Nixon’s treachery until the LBJ library finally published the tape recordings of the phone call.
— When Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter, nobody knew at the time that Reagan’s campaign had cut a deal with the mullahs of Iran to hold the hostages, making Carter appear fatally weak and politically impotent.
We didn’t learn about Reagan’s treason until the then-president of Iran, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, emigrated to America and wrote a 2013 article for The Christian Science Monitor in which he laid out the plot. The story was corroborated a year ago in The New York Times by Texas’ former Lt. Governor, Ben Barnes, who’d been along for the ride to Paris where the deal between the Reagan campaign and Iranian leaders was consummated.
— When the 2000 election recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court was halted by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court — handing the White House to George W. Bush by a disputed 537 votes — nobody knew at the time that Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, had commissioned a huge purge of voters, using a list of Texas felons that was 68% Black and Hispanic.
Harris did this because the national pool of Black and Hispanic names is relatively small: Black felons in Texas with names like Jim Washington or Jose Gonzalez are extremely likely to have similarly named counterparts in any other state with large Black and Hispanic populations like Florida.
Thus, when those Texas names were compared via a “loose match” (didn’t require a birthday or middle name match) with Florida voters’ names, disproportionate numbers of Black and Hispanic Florida voters were deemed to be possible felons who’d somehow recently moved to Florida from Texas, and tens of thousands were removed from the voter rolls. As the US Commission on Civil Rights noted:
“14.4 percent of Florida’s black voters cast ballots that were rejected. This compares with approximately 1.6 percent of nonblack Florida voters who did not have their presidential votes counted. … [I]n the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population.”
— When Donald Trump was certified the winner of the 2016 election, nobody knew at the time that Russia had illegally poured millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours into targeting swing state voters identified by the RNC, whose names were handed off to Russian Intelligence by Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
When Robert Mueller’s FBI team determined this crime had helped put Trump in the White House, and that Trump had personally intervened in investigations ten separate times in ways that could be prosecuted as criminal obstruction of justice, Bill Barr kept the news from America until the story had largely faded from the headlines.
What will it be this November? We have some clues.
— With the blessing of five Republicans on the 2018 Supreme Court, Republican-controlled states with large Black and Hispanic populations are purging voter rolls like there’s no tomorrow. Just between 2020 and 2022, fully 19,260,000 Americans — 8.5% of all registered voters — were purged. The purge rate in Red states was 40% higher than the rest of the country. We won’t know this year’s purge numbers until well after the election is over.
— The GOP is trying to organize an “army” of 100,000 rightwing warriors to show up at polling places to “oversee” elections and challenge voters they think look suspicious. They’ll also be challenging signature matches on mail-in ballots, particularly in Blue cities in Red states.
— Republican elected officials from the state level all the way up to the US Senate are refusing to say that they’ll accept or certify the result of the election this fall if Donald Trump doesn’t win. Multiple Republican members of Congress have asserted that only the House of Representatives should decide the presidential election this year (which would throw the election to Trump regardless of who the voters or electoral college choose).
— In multiple states, Republicans have passed laws allowing them to manipulate and change the location of polling places, criminalize voter registration drives, replace Democratic and nonpartisan election officials with partisan GOP hacks, and in Georgia and Arizona throw out ballots from entire precincts. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt noted for The Atlantic: “Throwing out thousands of ballots in rival strongholds may be profoundly antidemocratic, but it is technically legal, and Republicans in several states now have a powerful stick with which to enforce such practices.”
— Typically, when politicians engage in nakedly deceptive politicking or election theft they’re outed in the press and punished at the polls. Since 2020, however, Republicans have rewarded their politicians who tell lies and engage in underhanded tactics, suggesting there will be no limits to what the Trump campaign might do or say in the weeks leading up to the election, including the use of deepfakes and AI.
— Saudi Arabia and Russia — both allies of Trump — have cut oil production by over 1.4 million barrels a day to drive up gasoline prices leading up to this November, just like they did in a dress rehearsal during the fall of 2022. History shows that gas prices spiking over $5 or even $6 a gallon will have a measurable impact on inflation and thus the election.
— Russia fielded a small army of online trolls to assist Trump’s electoral efforts in 2016 and 2020. Expect the same in November, except this time, according to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, China is also getting into the act on the GOP’s behalf.
— Benjamin Netanyahu defied President Obama when he was engaged in delicate negotiations with Iran, visiting the US and addressing Congress at the invitation of Republicans. He’s expected to do the same slap-in-the-face gesture this fall to Biden, along with defying the president’s wish that Israel minimize civilian casualties in Gaza. Netanyahu will do everything he can to ensure Trump comes back into office if for no other reason than keeping himself out of prison; demoralizing young progressive voters will almost certainly be at the top of his list.
But these are all things we know about right now, even if there’s little we can do about most of them.
Given the Nixon/Reagan/Bush examples, our biggest concern should be to find the things we’d otherwise look back on after the inauguration and say about them, “Nobody knew at the time…”
How can we fit all the numerous news events into a one-hour Halitics YouTube videocast? By moving as fast as we can! I join Hal Ginsberg, as I do every Monday to talk about everything political and newsworthy. Sometimes we agree, sometimes not, but we cover a lot, and you can decide whom you most agree with. Hal and Halitics is on every weekday. Take a look.
Do elite Republicans and the CEOs who fund them hate working people? Or are they simply unable to control themselves, even when deep down inside they know they’re ruining America?
In Ohio, there’s a growing statewide petition effort to get a constitutional amendment on this fall’s ballot to raise the $10.45 minimum wage to $15, including tipped workers. It’s increasingly looking like it’ll make the ballot, so Republicans in the state senate have come up with a plan to take the steam out of the petition drive: promise legislation that, they say, would raise the minimum wage to $15 except for tipped workers, who’d see a raise from $5.25 to $7.50, and phase it in over 4 years. The bill, according to one of its sponsors, was written by the restaurant industry.
Bernie Moreno, Ohio’s Republican candidate for the US Senate against incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown, was recently forced by a court to pay $400,000 in wages he’d stolen from employees at his used car business and says he thinks there shouldn’t be a minimum wage at all.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis just signed into law a Republican bill that forbids cities in the state from mandating employers provide outdoor workers with “heat protections” including water. The legislation, largely written by agricultural industry lobbyists, also scales back child labor protections and forbids cities from instituting their own safeguards for children in the workplace.
In Iowa, a Republican majority in the state legislature wiped out public employees’ right to collectively bargain; it was signed by the state’s Republican governor with a new twist, mimicking a recent move by Florida’s DeSantis, making it illegal for the state to automatically deduct union wages from state workers’ paychecks.
These efforts are the tiniest tip of the iceberg: anti-worker legislation designed to keep working people poor has been passed repeatedly, in various forms, in every Republican-controlled state in the nation at the same time Republican legislatures in Red states compete to see who can lower taxes on their state’s rich people the most.
Which raises the question: Why?
When working people have more money in their pockets, they tend to spend almost all of it. Thus, as wages increase and more people move into the middle class, the result is almost always an economic stimulus to the state which raises both the revenues and the profits of businesses in that state.
We saw this nationwide in the 1940-1980 era when wages for working class people grew even faster than the income of the top 1 percent, and in multiple states and cities that have seen economic vitality grow after raising their minimum wage.
When workers have safety protections, they’re less likely to be injured, reducing costs of workman’s compensation, health insurance, and hiring replacements. When children are kept out of the workplace, they’re more likely to get an education and grow up with more opportunity and lifetime economic stability.
So, again, why are Republicans and the billionaires who own them so committed to gutting worker protections while increasing the wealth of the top one percent?
Could it be that these billionaire and multimillionaire CEOs are simply addicts who’ve developed an elaborate religious, political, and cultural rationalization for their addiction?
Science shows that acquiring wealth stimulates the pleasure/reward circuits in the brain’s ventromedial prefrontal cortex, just behind the eyes in the front-most part of the brain. Studies that map blood flow and electrical activity in the brain demonstrate that even anticipating money lights up this region, much like what happens when we’re presented with food or sex.
Sometimes we become aware of this.
I’m still haunted by the insight of a woman who called into my radio program about a year ago and noted that for most of her life she’d lived paycheck-to-paycheck but, because of some life circumstance (perhaps it was an inheritance: I don’t recall), she now has more money than she needs. She’s secure.
“And I find myself checking my bank balance every day,” she told me, as I recall. “I never did that before.”
She seemed troubled by her apparent newfound “love of money,” probably because so many Christians were raised to believe Paul when he wrote to Timothy:
“For the love of money is the root of all evil: which, while some coveted after, they have … pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
Jesus, of course, was history’s most famous socialist: he and his disciples shared everything they owned via a common purse. When a rich man asked him how to get to heaven, Jesus told him to sell everything he owned and give the money to the poor.
Not exactly a billionaire’s or CEO’s mantra.
Jesus notwithstanding, in our society we’re trained from childhood to respect and even worship great wealth. Cinderella is desperate to marry a rich prince. Brave knights serve their feudal lords and kings. Jack climbs his beanstalk and risks his life to steal a giant bag of gold coins.
We’re also trained by many of our religions to defer to wealth. Royal families have told their people for centuries that they rightly rule because it’s their god’s will.
Some British coins have the inscription “ELIZABETH II : D G REG : F D” on them, an abbreviation for the Latin Dei Gratia Regina Fidei Defensor which roughly translates to:
“She rules [Britain] and defends the faith by the grace of God.”
The American version of this comes via the followers of the 16th century protestant reformer John Calvin, who fled European religious persecution and populated the US east coast and western Michigan in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The big challenge of that pre-democracy era was determining how to create a consensus around who should run society, from business to governments. How to find the truly “good people” who’d make the right decisions for society?
Instead of salvation coming from confession or good works, Calvin taught, his god decided our social station before we were even born (predestination). As St. Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:4–6 and Calvin loved to quote, each of our fates was determined “before the foundation of the world.”
Thus, Calvinists concluded, whoever has the most money must have the biggest measure of spiritual blessing, chosen by their god even before birth. And those with the most spiritual blessing should, of course, run things from companies to governments.
It’s a nice sales pitch for the morbidly rich, and our society revels in it to this day, if less consciously than in the era of kings and kingdoms. And it distracts us from the damage these wealthy people do to our society and our politics.
Just look at the deference we give to the very rich in our society, and how they’ve nearly completely taken over our political and economic system. Trump’s main claim to fame, for example, is his assertion that he’s “really rich,” which seems to thrill his cult followers. People treat billionaires like rock stars. See: Davos.
But, like Scrooge McDuck, many of these wealthy people are simply addicts, constantly seeking the dopamine rush of another million or billion dollars added to their money bins. To keep that wealthy growing, they make the most profitable investment available to truly rich Americans: they buy politicians who will cut their taxes and reduce regulatory costs for their companies.
The latest twist they’ve found, since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery, has been to buy judges themselves: both the Supreme Court, the federal judiciary, and state courts are now stacked with jurists hand-picked by servants of the morbidly rich for their deference to great wealth.
Addicts usually do a lot of damage before their compulsions are brought under control. In this case, these wealth and power addicts have ripped America apart, gutted the middle class, and have largely converted our democracy into oligarchy. Those wealth addicts in the fossil fuel industry are actively dooming all life on the planet to disaster just to increase their dopamine highs.
Years of research on addiction tell us that the first step to recovery is to deny addicts access to the substance that triggers their addiction. With substances like methadone, we’ve learned to allow addicts to stave off withdrawal in a way that prevents them from damaging society in their never-ending quest for another “hit.”
From the 1930s to the 1980s, we used income tax brackets between 74% and 90% to keep the wealth junkies from damaging the rest of us.
It’s time to relearn that lesson and re-institute the societally protective tools that will minimize the damage the morbidly rich can inflict on the rest of us, including reversing Citizens United and returning to a top 74% tax rate on income over $5 million a year.
Without taking these steps to protect American democracy, we can expect these addicts to continue to chip away at our democracy and keep pushing their bought-off stooges into power.
With these steps, we can return our society and government to a semblance of stability and reinvigorate both democratic norms and a vital middle class.
Lots to talk about as usual on Monday’s Halitics, when I join veteran radio man Hal Ginsberg, living on the other coast (East).We discuss shooting cats to impress Donald Trump, Bill Maher’s right-on New Rules commentary about our weak AG, Merrick Garland, Trump’s trials and travails (Biden has overtaken him in a lot of polling), and much more….
Sports betting, smartphones in school, campus demonstrations, Trump on trial…so much to talk about and only so much time to discuss them. Another Halitics videocast produced by Hal Ginsberg with me like we do every Monday. Can we all get along? asked Rodney King 33 years ago. It doesn’t appear so, Rodney.
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