Nothing more than Shadows

By David Brooks on October 15, 2018

Every day – even if one tries to avoid it – Trump interrupts everything, and each intervention is more obscene and untrue than the previous one. Many advise, including the president’s people, not to take the president’s comments so seriously. But now the messages have become so ominous that even veteran observers who don’t usually shout are sounding the alarm because they see this as reminiscent to the darkest moments in modern history.

In a series of political rallies to support Republican candidates loyal to the regime, Trump has done the usual: self-praise – he recently declared his presidency to be the greatest revolution ever carried out in this country – mock his opponents, attack immigrants, accuse the news media as being fake and calls them enemies of the people, but now he has raised the tone of the attack on his critics and opponents by declaring that they are part of an angry mob that is threatening law and order.

The Democratic agenda is socialism and open borders, he told his fans last week at a rally in Iowa. He added that, in the context of the midterm elections, “you don’t give power to an angry left mob. That’s what Democrats have become. They would return so quickly our country to Venezuela…” [I think he means that the US will become Venezuela?] Again and again he stated that the Democrats have become too extreme and, frankly, too dangerous to govern. He said they had gone mad.

In an opinion piece signed by Trump in USA Today, he said that if Democrats take control of Congress, that would bring the United States closer to socialism dangerously and that it would destroy prosperity in this country.

“Socialist Democrats (sic) liberals equals a communist America (sic). Patriots don’t allow that to happen. Vote Trump 2020,” says the motto of a T-shirt of one of the fans at a rally.

At a rally in Mississippi, he accused “radical Democrats want to destroy our laws… our institutions… demolish our prosperity in the name of socialism and probably worse.” As always, in these acts he underscored the threat of immigrants, accusing Democrats of wanting to return to this country into a giant sanctuary for criminal aliens, such as MS-13 [international criminal gang originated in Los Angeles during the eighties].

Laurence Tribe, professor of law at Harvard University, commented via tweet on these recent statements: so dangerous that it has been shown in many contexts, he (Trump) has rarely said anything as alarming as this. It is rhetoric taken directly from the book of fascists and dictators.

Perhaps that is why the work of philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, who explored totalitarianism and propaganda functions at the time when Hitler, Mussolini and Franco emerged, has resurrected as an urgent and necessary reading for these times.

As the midterm elections approach, the rhetoric of Trump and his opposition is often summarized by the media as an expression of a divided and polarized country. But it is worth remembering that Trump did not win the popular vote and won the White House with the vote of only a quarter of the citizens entitled to vote. Only an average of 40 percent approve of his performance in the polls. The Republican-controlled Congress has an approval rating of 16 percent, according to Gallup.

Abroad, according to a recent Pew Center survey of 25 countries, including the U.S. main allies, only 27 percent trust Trump; the lowest scores of all are those recorded in Mexico, where only 6 percent express confidence in Trump’s leadership.

All of which should provoke the question both for those inside this country and for foreign governments, how far should one collaborate with such a regime before becoming an accomplice? It is a question that was essential the last time this kind of darkness overshadowed the world.

http://www.jornada.com.mx/2018/10/15/opinion/027o1mun

Source: La Jornada