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Group of fascists
Republicans can no longer pretend the man they want to nominate again as president won’t try to destroy democracy like he did last time. Donald Trump is now openly embracing the fascist rhetoric of Nazi Germany promising to rid America of anyone who opposes him.
“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” Trump obscenely vowed on Veterans Day, a national holiday usually honoring the so-called “greatest generation” who fought and died to defeat Nazi Germany.
President Biden publicly condemned Trump for intentionally adopting “vermin” to describe his opponents, “a specific phrase with a specific meaning” used by dictators Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini during World War II to dehumanize Jews and others to justify their extermination.
“It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany and it isn’t even the first time,” Biden said. “Trump also recently talked about, quote, the blood of America is being poisoned. Again, it echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”
Hateful, Violent
Poisoning the blood of America was the hateful racial and religious bigotry Trump regularly used to attract support from the violent, far-right militias who led the mob attack on Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, in his attempt to overthrow the certification of Biden’s presidential election by the American people.
Let’s be perfectly clear who these vermin are Trump and his Republican supporters despise and want to “root out” of America. They’re more than 81 million Americans who cast the largest number of votes in history to defeat Trump’s corrupt, divisive presidency after a single term by more than eight million votes.
Trump has never been supported by a majority of American voters. Trump won the 2016 presidential election despite receiving nearly three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton because presidential elections are the only elections in America that aren’t decided by a majority vote.
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An archaic Electoral College system created by the 1787 constitutional convention in a compromise between large and small states gave small states more power than large ones in deciding presidential elections. As a result, the presidency is often decided by a handful of battleground states that can go either way.
Closely Divided
The 2024 presidential election for the entire nation will also be decided by a relatively small number of votes in a few closely divided states and that should be terrifying for every American who cares about living in a democracy. We’ve never entered a presidential campaign before with the leading candidate for the Republican nomination openly spewing Nazi rhetoric threatening to exterminate his political opponents.
Of course, we’ve never had a presidential campaign before when the Republican nominee was likely to be the only president in history who tried to remain in office illegally after losing reelection. One reason Trump is desperate to regain the presidency is to stop federal prosecutors from convicting him for attempting to overthrow our democracy and stealing top-secret government documents.
Trump’s 2016 election was a shock because many Americans didn’t believe such a hateful, bigoted candidate could ever be elected. We know better now. All that prevented far more damage to democracy during Trump’s presidency was a small group of Republicans including his own vice president who refused to support his criminal schemes.
The longest lasting destruction to democracy Trump left behind was a corrupt, rightwing Supreme Court supermajority that immediately abolished a half-century of Constitutional freedom for women to make their own decisions about their own lives. It could continue denying equal rights based on gender, race, religion or LGBTQ identity for decades.
When Trump and MAGA Republicans begin openly bandying about actual Nazi catch phrases to describe voting restrictions in Trump’s second term, it’s long past time to revoke the media moratorium on ever comparing Trump’s post-election plans for America to Hitler’s Third Reich. Trump’s already discussed with his most extreme advisors invoking the Insurrection Act on Day One to deploy the military against public protests.
Trump’s devoted followers treat his vicious hatred for any American opposing him as political entertainment. It’s not. Let’s hope Trump himself was one of the few who actually enjoyed watching television on January 6 because it was all about him. Most Republicans have simply tried ever since to pretend it never happened.
It did and I’m one of the millions of American voters who will never forget. That’s not because I deserve to be called radical-left vermin by Trump for supporting the civil rights movement in the 1960s to end White supremacy.
Just the opposite. I’m a leftwing American voter who loves the beautiful vision of democracy Thomas Jefferson and our founders believed would one day exist in our nation of immigrants in which all Americans would have equal rights. We will turn out every American vote we can to protect our democracy from destruction.
