How Far Will the Orange Fascist Go

Pretty Damn Far (with No Small Help from the Imperialist and Repressive Dems)

As the decrepit warmonger Joe Biden shows that he values US support for Israeli genocide more than he cares about blocking a second term for the wannabe fascist strongman Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump, TIME Magazine’s Eric Cortellessa recently conducted two interviews with the orange-hued Dear Leader of America’s Reich-most major political party.

Cortellessa engaged Trump on his statement earlier this year that he wants to be “a dictator for a day…I ask[ed] him,” Cortellessa writes, “‘Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?’ Trump [said] ‘no. Quite the opposite. I think a lot of people like it.’”

Read that again: “I think a lot of people like it.”

The purpose of Cortellessa’s interviews was to hear straight from Trump’s ’s mouth what Trump wants to do in his second administration. Here is Cortellessa’s summary of what he learned:

“What emerged in two interviews with Trump, and conversations with more than a dozen of his closest advisers and confidants, were the outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world. To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense. He would gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office, and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”

By Cortellessa’s account:

“Trump remains the same guy, with the same goals and grievances. But in person, if anything, he appears more assertive and confident. ‘When I first got to Washington, I knew very few people,’ he says. ‘I had to rely on people.’ Now he is in charge. The arranged marriage with the timorous Republican Party stalwarts is over; the old guard is vanquished, and the people who remain are his people. Trump would enter a second term backed by a slew of policy shops staffed by loyalists who have drawn up detailed plans in service of his agenda, which would concentrate the powers of the state in the hands of a man whose appetite for power appears all but insatiable. ‘I don’t think it’s a big mystery what his agenda would be,’ says his close adviser Kellyanne Conway. ‘But I think people will be surprised at the alacrity with which he will take action.’”

This is all quite chilling but Cortellessa’s language is too mild and he was far too polite and careful not to offend and confront in his discussions with “sir” Trump.

We’ve had an imperial American presidency that mass-murderouslt menaces the world for eight decades. What’s new these days is that Trump, accurately described by Noam Chomsky in January 2020 as “the most dangerous criminal in human history,” represents the fascist takeover of that presidency.

Cortellessa reports Trump’s Orwellian claim that his critics are “fascists” but fails to point out to Trump or TIME’s readers that Trump has recently been openly channeling the ultimate historical fascist Adolph Hitler by saying that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and promising to rid the nation of of socialist, communist, and Marxist “vermin.”

In his discussions with Trump, Cortellessa never brings up that ominous language from the man who, in Cortellessa’s words, “is better positioned to win the White House than at any point in either of his previous campaigns,” and who “leads Joe Biden by slim margins in most polls, including in several of the seven swing states likely to determine the [2024 presidential election] outcome.”

Cortellessa never asks Trump about his reference earlier this year to nonwhite immigrants as “not people.” He never asks Trump why the putschist ex-president hosted the teen fascist Kyle Rittenhouse — the white supremacist militia member who murdered two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at an August 2020 Black Lives march in Kenosha, Wisconsin — and the open neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes in Mar a Lago.

Cortellessa never asks Trump about his complaint as president that top US generals didn’t behave like the German military command under Hitler.

Cortellessa never asks Trump about other richly fascistic aspects of Trump’s first presidency: Trump’s pardoning of the pathological racist war criminal Eddie Gallagher; Trump’s repeated positive references to foreign dictators; the praise Trump heaped on the blood-soaked Filipino strongman/hitman Rodrigo Duterte; Trump’s promise of pardons to border patrol agents who shot asylum-seekers; Trump’s defense of white supremacist terrorists in Charlottesville; Trump’s encouragement of racist mass shootings; Trump’s attempted deployment of the military to crush the George Floyd Rebellion; Trump’s reference to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries,” combined with a complaint that the US doesn’t get more immigrants from white Scandinavia; Trump’s pandemo-fascist cultivation of Covid-19 (valued initially by the Trump team as a killer primarily of disproportinatley Black and brown people living in Democratic cities); Trump’s sending of federal gendarmes to terrorize and disappear Black Lives protesters in Portland, Oregon; Trump celebration as just “retribution” of a federal task force’s extrajudicial execution of an anti-fascist (Michael Reinoehl) in September of 2020; Trump’s telling trip to the site of Rittenhouse’s murders on the last night of the 2020 presidential campaign; Trump’s constant sexist shaming of women; Trump’s successful appointment of three Christian fascists to the US Supreme Court; Trump’s rolling attempted subversion of the 2020 election; Trump’s call for the fascist Proud Boys to “Stand By” for him; Trump’s drive- and fly-by thumbs up to two Proud Boy rampages in Washington DC after the 2020 election; the Trump-triggered Capitol Riot of January 6, which Trump wanted to be led by AR-15-wielding fascist militaries…. and the record goes on (this is the short list).

If you want to know “How Far Trump Would Go” (the title of Cortellessa’s TIME write-up) in his second term, you might want to look back at Trump’s first term along the way, no?

Cortellessa fails to query Trump about his recent inflammatory comment that the nation will undergo “a bloodbath” if he isn’t re-elected. He never confronts Trump with the Hitlerian essence of the former president’s constant repetition of the multiply disproven Big Lie that the 2020 election stolen and of Trump’s dark, Nazi-channeling “stabbed in the back” claim that the nation’s real enemies are “internal” — the big bad supposed “radical Left,” a category in which he absurdly includes the capitalist-imperialist Biden Dems. Cortellessa never brings up Trump’s long record of sexual assault.

On top of all this, Cortellessa includes the following Prozac-like paragraph, which seems designed to put the readers back to sleep just in case his findings have woken them up too much about the fascist menace afoot:

“The courts, the Constitution, and a Congress of unknown composition would all have a say in whether Trump’s objectives come to pass. The machinery of Washington has a range of defenses: leaks to a free press, whistle-blower protections, the oversight of inspectors general. The same deficiencies of temperament and judgment that hindered him in the past remain present. If he wins, Trump would be a lame duck—contrary to the suggestions of some supporters, he tells TIME he would not seek to overturn or ignore the Constitution’s prohibition on a third term. Public opinion would also be a powerful check. Amid a popular outcry, Trump was forced to scale back some of his most draconian first-term initiatives, including the policy of separating migrant families. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, the ability of governments to carry out their designs ‘depends on the general temper in the country.’”

Please. Spare me. “Lame duck,” my ass. This motherfucker Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump is the deranged cult leader of a US Republi-fascist movement and has been blowing through one failing bourgeois-democratic rule of law and decency guard rail after another, as I documented in my recent essay “The Bourgeois Democracy Farewell Tour.” He has no intention of stopping at two terms.

Meanwhile we have the revolting spectacle of Trump brazenly and deliberately intimidating witnesses in direct defiance of the judge presiding over his felony campaign finance trial in New York City. This openly disrespectful, noxious, and criminal, jury- and witness-intimidating conduct is a big “F-You” to the rule of law whenever that law might dare to move against him.

Not that Blue America is exactly showing a strong commitment to democracy these days. As an old friend of mine recently wrote in a reflection on the brutal police state crackdown being inflicted on students protesting Israel’s Biden-backed genocide in Gaza: taking place in Democratic-run cities and on mainly Democratic college campuses:

“The iron fist of the state has started its work. And the justification sounds quite familiar: we like protest just fine (you know, free speech), but we don't have to listen to any of it, certainly don't have to negotiate with children, and once we think you've played around enough, and you refuse to go back to class like the obedient young people we are trying to condition, then you get your head cracked and become a felon. How it works in this system. And oh, if none this sounds particularly cogent, there's always the ‘outside agitators’ thing; our properly conditioned students would not do these things.”

Same as it ever was in a nation where the two dominant parties are, as Upton Sinclair once wrote, “two wings of the same bird of prey.”

Two wings but not identical. If the imperialist warmonger Joe Biden wins the 2024 election, the Republi-fascist Party and the more energetic and violent parts of its Amerikaner base will try to launch a one-sided civil war to take down the mythical “radical left state.” Blood will flow.

If Adolph Trump wins, the conciliatory fascism-appeasing/-complicit Vichy Dems will do like Al Gore in 2000-01 and Obama in 2016: meekly submit and try to normalize the dark revanchist outcome brought about by a right-tilted system, telling Americans that “we’re all on the same team” while angling for survival and position in the new Amerikaner order. The parties are not quite “the same”: one accepts defeat in elections, the other one no longer does that.

Revolution anyone? Orange Trumpolini, Genocide Joe, the whole damn dystem has to go.