"Left"Trump Minimization Syndrome

A Local Example

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There’s a six-foot three fifty-something long haired hat-wearing whitebro Trumpenlefty in “the number 1 college town in America.” He claims to have been a student of Howard Zinn, digs Vladimir Putin, and thinks that liberals, progressives, and radicals shouldn’t get agitated about Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump.

Braxton says January 6 was a big working-class protest that got a little out of control.

Braxton thinks the Democrats are every bit as fascist as the MAGA Republicans.

Braxton equates the Democrats’ Russiagate ruse with Adolf Trump’s effort to subvert and cancel the 2020 presidential election – an effort that included:

·       elaborate Trump team schemes for fake Electors.

·       attempts to make state officials alter vote totals.

·       numerous Republican members of the US House of Representatives refusing to vote to certify Joe Biden’s clear victory in the 2020 presidential election.

·       an attempt to intimidate Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence into defying the US Constitution by refusing to advance Biden’s Electoral College votes for Congressional certification.  

·       promoting the Big Hitlerian Lie that the election was “stolen” – a falsehood dangerously believed by most Republicans.

·       dozens of appeals to get judges to cancel Biden’s clear victory.   

·       a mass physical assault on the US Capitol that Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” wanted armed with military assault rifles in the hands of fascist paramilitary forces including Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Proud Boys.

·       plans to declare a state of emergency and send out the military to seize voting machines and hold a new election rigged to keep Trump in the White House.

January 6, Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch (Capitol Hill Putsch?), was predictable and predicted. Trump had made it clear from the start of presidency that he would not pursue a second term in the “normal” way – by trying to fashion policies that won enough support from voters to guarantee re-election. As president he was a wannabe fascist strongman looking for a Reichstag Fire. Trump’s mad and malignant conduct in the White House included:  

·       more than 37, 500 false Trump statements.

·       the embrace of neo-Nazis and other white supremacists at the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville.

·       constant nativist and racist demonization of Mexico.

·       the fanning of a deadly pandemic he hoped would especially kill off people of color and Democrats.

·       a reference to African nations and Black Haiti as “shithole countries” combined with the complaint that more white Scandinavians didn’t migrate to the US.

·       a complaint (to his Chief of Staff John Kelly) that the Pentagon’s top military officials  didn’t dutifully follow his every command like Germany’s generals supposedly did under Hitler. 

·       a promise to pardon Border Patrol agents who shot asylum-seekers

·       efforts to deploy the US military to crush the George Floyd Rebellion – which Trump wanted to be his Reichstag moment – in blood.

·       a brazen call out to the fascist Proud Boys (“Stand By!”) during a 2020 presidential “debate.”

·       applause for the teen fascist  Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder of two people with an illegally owned AR-15 at a Black Lives rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

I could go on and did, in the third chapter, titled “A Fascist in the White House,”  of my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America.  The examples of Trump’s malignant fascism before and during his first dystopian stay in the White House are almost endless.

Like Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, Donald “Get Wild” Trump’s January 6 (Capitol Hill Putsch) was a harbinger of things to come. As the now fully MAGA-tized Republican Party and Republican policy network has congealed around him as their damn near deified Dear Leader Trump – exempted from assassination by “divine providence” – in recent months has been openly channeling Hitler like never before. He:

·      calls for  “retribution” – vengeance – against his political enemies.

·       repeats his 2016 and 2020 refusals to promise to honor the outcome of the next presidential election unless it goes his way. 

·       says he wants to be “a dictator for a day” (right, for a day) so that “I can build the wall and drill, drill, drill” – not exactly one day projects — and tells a gathering of Christian fascists that they’ll never have to vote again after his next presidency because “we’ll have it fixed so good.”

·       engages in the preposterous fascist demonization of the centrist capitalist-imperialist Democrat Kamala Harris as “the most extreme radical leftist in the country.”

·       promises to sweep “Marxist vermin” out of the country. 

·       calls for the extra-judicial execution of suspected shoplifters. 

·       says that the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed for reaching out to his counterpart in China to assure him that Trump wasn’t about to start World War III after losing the 2020 election.

·       says that non-white immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and continues with his insane claim that Mexico and other Latin American countries are emptying their prisons and mental hospitals to send criminals and psychotics across the southern US border. 

·       promises to invade Mexico. 

·       promises to undertake a giant mass deportation program that will sweep up, imprison, and expel immigrants. 

·       promises to send the US military into cities to round up “illegals” and “end inner city crime in one day.”

·       boasts about appointing a Supreme Court that overthrew women’s half century constitutional right to an abortion and thereby enabled the restoration of female-enslaving forced motherhood in right-wing states.

·       brandishes a 2025 policy agenda that calls for (a) the replacement of tens of thousands of career federal civil servants with people whose top qualification for office is fealty to Trump; (b) the creation of an authoritarian “unitary executive” branch wherein no parts of that branch hold any autonomy from his control; (c) numerous other measures and actions designed to turn the US into a Christian white nationalist authoritarian state.

A “leftist” who cites the Trumpenleftish red-brown Grayzone and Caitlin Johnstone as credible sources, Braxton laughs all this off. He finds Trump’s rhetoric and the way liberals and others respond to that rhetoric amusing. 

At the same time he thinks that any discussion of Trump and the Trump’s party’s fascism is just a way of getting folks to identify with and vote for the Democratic Party. He can’t seem to seriously fathom the existence of radicals who militantly oppose Trumpism-Republi-fascism, the capitalist-imperialist Democrats, and the underlying bourgeois system that produced both of the nation’s reigning corporate parties all at the same time (imagine!). Bring up any of Trump and Trumpism’s horrors and Braxton thinks you need a what-about-ist lecture on the dismal Dems.

Conflicts within the ruling class and between ruling class parties (one still clinging to bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy and the other one ready to smash American capitalism’s outer domestic democratic shall and go full on white Christian nationalist in the imperial homeland) do not exist for Braxton. He seems to think that Trump is a working class antiwar “populist” up against a liberal imperialist Deep State.

Braxton tells people  that “the deep state” will prevent Trump from acting on the new ramped-up Project 2025/Trump 47 MAGA agenda.

He considers Trump comical, not a serious threat. He considers concern about Trump and Trumpism to be nothing more than liberal and left “hysteria.”

Braxton thinks leftists and liberals who express concern about Trump’s fascist rhetoric, history, and promises have “TDS,” short for “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”  

Braxton doesn’t actually read or listen to Trump’s ever more Hitlerian speeches and comments.

Braxton thinks the “deep state” was behind the recent assassination attempt on the “populist” peace candidate Trump. He worries that “the deep state” will succeed in killing the harmless blustering comedian Trump.

Braxton says that MAGA people are “a minority in the Republican Party.” So what if that party has purged all but a tiny hint of a sliver of its non-fascist elements during the Biden years?   

It’s hard not to notice the parallel here between Braxton’s take on Trumpism-fascism and how many Americans foolishly responded to the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. In his epic history of Hitler’s rise and fall and in his personal memoir of reporting from Germany on the rise of the German fascist state, the legendary journalist and author William Shirer noted the disturbing failure of many Americans (and others) to take seriously the threat posed by Hitler and his Nazi Party.  As the world found out during a global war that cost more than 50 million lives, Hitler meant everything he said in Mein Kampf about wanting to wage an eliminationist war to make Germany great again, to give Germany new “breathing space,” to eliminate Marxists and the first socialist society (the Soviet Union, which lost 20 million lives to the Third Reich), and to liquidate European Jewry.

It’s a shame more people didn’t develop Hitler Derangement Syndrome.

Braxton likes to cite his old professor Zinn’s good friend Noam Chomsky on the evils and bipartisan of US imperialism.  No argument there.  But Braxton might want to look again at something Chomsky said in January of 2020, right before Trump started spreading  Covid-19 from coast to coast, complimenting the pandemic’s white survivors for having “good genes.”

‘Are [Trump’s UkraineGate] crimes a basis for impeachment? Seems so to me. Has Trump committed vastly more serious crimes? That is hardly debatable. What might be debatable is whether he is indeed the most dangerous criminal in human history (which happens to be my personal view). Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other “deviants,” along with tens of millions of Slav “Untermenschen.” But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species). Trump is. And those who think he doesn’t know what he’s doing haven’t been looking closely…Is that a wild and ludicrous exaggeration? Or the very simple and apparent truth? It’s not difficult to figure out the answer. We’ve discussed it often before. There is no need to review what is happening on Trump’s watch while he devotes every effort to accelerating the race to catastrophe, trailed by such lesser lights as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Australia’s Scott Morrison…Every day brings new forebodings. We have just learned, for example, that the gigantic Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica has been eroding from warm water below…’

Contrary to what Braxton and the rest of his fascism-denying Trumpenleft ilk say, this is not an advertisement for Kamala Harris.  Appropriate horror at Trump and Trumpism does not require jumping into the “quicksand” of “the bourgeois electoral bullshit/BEB” (Bob Avakian) this year.

For the fifty-third time,  I consider the Democrats to be: a capitalist-imperialist and neoliberal Weimar party; a potential Vichy party; “the party of inauthentic opposition” (Sheldon Wolin); an “enabler and conciliator of the Republifascists;” a party of capitulation, complicity, cowardice, class rule, and collaboration; “the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems;” a party that is responsible for hideous and indeed genocidal war crimes in Gaza. I will not join Democrats in yet another march up killing floor gang planks to the right-tilted US electoral slaughterhouse. Rather I challenge all decent people who are properly horrified – unlike Braxton – by the menace of Trumpism-fascism to:

1. fight the Amerikaner Christian white nationalist fascists the way they need to be fought in the aftermath of the election, the way the Democrats can and will never fight them, beyond the holy quadrennial major party candidate-centered electoral extravaganza – in the streets, the public squares, the workplaces, the schools, in all spheres of society, even at risk to yourself and loved ones.

2. join the actual radical Left in looking radically down to the taproot of how and why US society (including the Democrats) hatched a fascist party and movement and how that terrible development emerged from the inner contradictions and workings of American capitalism-imperialism

3. Reject any return to the capitalist-imperialist bourgeois-democratic status quo as the goal behind the fight against 21st Century US fascism. Understand that the future is now irrevocably radical and that the question is this: do we want (a) the terrible and enslaving, reactionary radicalism of fascism and ecocide on the path to human extinction (or worse) or (b) the beautiful and liberating radicalism of revolutionary socialism on the path to the elimination of all human oppression and exploitation?