Here’s a sobering thought from David Kurtz at TPM:
By the time we sit down for turkey again next year, Donald Trump may be the president-elect for a second time. That persistent thought soured my holiday like spoiled deviled eggs. If this was the last Thanksgiving before the end of democracy as we know it, I hope you made it a good one.
In the last post I linked to Eric Lutz at Vanity Fair, Trump’s Attacks On Judge and Law Clerk Triggers “Hundreds” Of Threats: Report. David Kurtz adds,
Trump’s rhetorical attack on Thanksgiving came the day after a new revelation about the consequences of those kinds of attacks. The judge in the New York fraud case against him defended his gag order in a filing that revealed that he and his law clerk had received hundreds of credible threats in response to Trump’s attack. Among other things, the law clerk’s cell phone number and personal email address have been compromised.
Yet, somehow, the gag orders keep getting lifted, and the courts are taking their sweet time deciding whether to reinstate them. It’s as if the ambulance picks up a guy having a heart attack and then stops for doughnuts on the way to the hospital. Does one of Trump’s targets have to get killed to light a fire under some people?
Last night I finished reading Rachel Maddow’s book Prequel. You. must. read. this. There was much I did not know, although little of it was surprising. The one element I didn’t expect is that this massive plot that originated with the Third Reich to overthrow the U.S. government and replace it with a pro-German fascist state, for which the Department of Justice had tons of evidence clearly showing even some members of Congress were in on it, all got swept under the rug and the evidence classified after the War. So the corrupt thugs who took Hitler’s money and did Hitler’s bidding even as U.S. troops were fighting in Europe all got off without penalties. Because people were ready to move on, or something.
What was fueling a lot of the pro-Hitler sentiment in the U.S. was, of course, racism and antisemitism. Lots of people were ready to sell out the Constitution and democracy so they could deport — or worse — nonwhite people and Jews. Some things don’t change. And if they’d had Fox News back then, they might have succeeded.
(What screwed Hitler’s plans more than anything else was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which I understand he did not know about until it happened. For years he had spent considerable effort and money to ensure that the U.S. stayed out of his wars in Europe. December 7, 1941, swept all that away. Even then Hitler might not have declared war except that his invasion of the Soviet Union had stalled, and he persuaded himself that Japan would keep the United States busy in the Pacific, and that Japanese threats to Britain’s Asian colonies would weaken Britain.)
A lot of these American fascists were thugs who might as well have been wearing MAGA hats. They would have (and possibly did) murder their fellow Americans for the sake of the Cause. The rule of law meant nothing to them. And hardly anybody in the U.S. got the full story of the sedition, and now here we are again on the edge of a neo-fascist takeover.
Trump isn’t at all shy about letting the world know what he intends to do in a second term. See Donald Moynihan, Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State’ at the New York Times. No paywall. If we as a nation survive this, no more moving on. There must be full public disclosure and justice this time.
Note: We haven’t heard from gulag in a few days. Yesterday I sent him an email and also an ecard (I will get a notice if it is opened), but I haven’t received a response. I will let you know if I do.