Thursday, May 09, 2019

, Further columnist

Members of the invasion. Getty Images

Trump held another deranged Nazi rally Wednesday, this time in Panama City Beach in the Florida Panhandle, which helped him win in 2016 but which this week sported over 100 plastic yard signs reading “Pres. Trump Help Tyndall Now” along his motorcade route because seven months after Hurricane Michael the area remains devastated, proving he can't even get it together to help white people who like him, never mind brown people who don't. During his usual lying, racist, ugly verbosity, Trump triumphantly riled up his "psychopathic baying hogs" on the need for his idiotic wall, ranting about the secretly funded "invasion" of aliens at the border and the threat they pose.

"When you have 15,000 people marching up, and you have hundreds and hundreds of people, and you have two or three border security people that are brave and great...And don't forget, we don't let them and we can't let them use weapons...Other countries do. We can't. I would never do that. But how do you stop these people?" he coyly queried the rabble. One fan dutifully, gleefully shouted, “Shoot them!” Our fine human being of a leader chortled, and the crowd roared. "Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement,” he happily noted. "Only in the Panhandle!" The Pied Piper had done his evil work. Good one!

So here's the U.S. President making "jokes" about mowing down desperate, brown, poor people fleeing for their lives. It was a brazen enough glitch his goons tried to deflect - Clean-Up in Aisle 2 - by releasing a transcript that stopped short of the moment, fooling nobody on Twitter: "Then what happened." Still, none of us should be shocked. We have been in this unholy place, with him issuing awful, racist, unconscionable, violence-inciting "jokes" as trial balloons since the start - offering to pay legal fees for his very fine people assaulting protesters, bizarrely assuring listeners that while he "hates these people" - reporters - he "would never kill them," praising"passionate" supporters who beat upa Latino man, and applauding a frenzied supporter who attacked a BBC reporter as "my kind of guy."

Little wonder it turns out the racial-purification-themed armed thugs patrolling the border invoked the Nazis; Trump does too.

Little wonder it turns out the racial-purification-themed armed thugs patrolling the border invoked the Nazis; Trump does too. A recent biography of Hitler cites chilling parallels: His speeches were full of "vulgar comparisons," vile stereotypes, base allegations against multiple "others," sly taunts that fines were ineffective against "Jewish criminals" - to which his loyal, Lock-Her-Up crowds chanted “Beatings! Hangings!” - and endless lies designed to exploit tribal hatreds and gain attention. Trump crowds likewise respond, sheep-like, to his rhetoric by "just saying the thing Trump leads them to," argues political analyst Jared Yates Sexton. "It's what he does. He floats the idea, lets the audience finish it," a technique that affords Trump "plausible deniability" even when he's suggesting murdering innocents. "Trump is intentionally playing the worst instincts of these people and priming them like a weapon," he says.

"He's telling them he's willing to kill, and they're eating it up."