The Republican candidate for president uses crude language at rallies. Vulgarisms on the campaign trail. Off-color remarks in town halls. The media has deployed every euphemism imaginable to describe the former president’s public usage of bad words like ****, **** and ****.
We won’t print those obscenities here, which explains why much of the legacy media has to rely on grandma-isms such as “pottymouth” to write about these events.
Ample coverage of a rally in Pennsylvania this week might suggest that his salty discourse has hit new lows. After praising the size of a late golf legend’s manhood, the MAGA leader advised his supporters to send a message to his opponent: “We can’t stand you, you’re a s— vice president.”
How very shocking … if it was 1980.
Let’s state the obvious, again: Donald Trump is not fit for office, and not because he uses language that’s now commonplace in Disney films.
There’s just one F-bomb that should rattle us all right now and it’s being used by those who know Trump best: Fascism.
Tuesday in a bombshell New York Times interview, John Kelly, the Trump White House’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that he believes the former president meets the definition of a fascist. “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure,” said Kelly.
The paper also published audio of the interview in which Kelly said that Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government” and believes he should have “an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.”
Kelly’s not the only four-star general to sound the alarm. Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is quoted in a new book by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that the former president is “fascist to the core.”
Woodward also said in an interview on the Bulwark Podcast last week that another source once close to Trump, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, privately told the author that he agrees with the assessment laid out in the book that Trump is a threat to the country.
New reporting by the Atlantic on Tuesday backs up the general’s assertions. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, the Atlantic reported, citing two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
The allegations are as serious as they come, but shouldn’t be surprising to anyone whose paid attention to Trump’s praise of dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. If reelected, he’s said, he’ll use his powers to punish those who oppose him and he’d be a dictator on “Day 1.” Well, just for one say, he said.
If Trump should be reelected, the response from the right will certainly be cited in history books as a case study in how propaganda was used to sell authoritarianism.
Fox News was quick to slap a veneer of normality on Trump’s aspirations of erecting a Nazi-like regime in his image. On “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning, host Brian Kilmeade twisted himself into a tortured piece of logic while arguing that Trump’s admiration for Nazis was harmless. Kilmeade claimed that Kelly and Mattis “didn’t like the president” and made sure his requests “never got done.”
“He obviously has frustration, and I can absolutely see [Trump] go, ‘You know what? It’d be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis, or whatever,” said Kilmeade.
Fox isn’t alone in defending the indefensible. It takes a village to raise an authoritarian regime.
Leading the villagers online is Elon Musk. The Space X chief executive, who has turned the platform formerly known as Twitter into a clearing house of conspiracy and misinformation, posted a screenshot of an alleged article from the Atlantic with the headline “Trump Is Literally Hitler.” Supposedly, it was chilling proof of liberal targeting. Except it was a fake headline tacked atop a real article that ran under the real headline, “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had.’”
I’ve used plenty of unprintable language while subjected to the “Earth 2” rhetoric of Fox News or the lies and conspiracies shared by folks like Musk. What they’re propagating is far more dangerous than the decline of decorum in politics, or the presidential use of swear words formerly associated with truck drivers and sailors.
It’s called propaganda, and it’s been used to soften the edges of every rising fascist regime in memory. Pay attention to that. As for cursing? Who gives a ****?