Trump Is a Fascist:
So Why Is He the Only Thing on TV?
December 14, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
There is controversy among mainstream pundits and commentators over whether or not Donald Trump is a fascist. Let’s settle that. He is.
Donald Trump launched his run for president by declaring that Mexicans who come to the U.S. were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Trump threatened to deport 11-12 million Mexican immigrants along with U.S.-born citizens of Mexican descent—never mind that ever since the end of slavery people born in the U.S. have been citizens. When a Black Lives Matter protester got punched at one of Trump’s rallies, Trump said, “Maybe he deserves to get roughed up.” On December 13, in the context of defenders of police murder counterattacking against protests against police brutality by inventing a non-existent “war on police, “Trump told the New Hampshire police union, “Anybody killing a police officer—death penalty. It's going to happen, OK.”
Trump has called for a complete ban on all Muslims entering the United States and for the authorities to openly spy on mosques and close some. He insulted Carly Fiorina, a Republican woman candidate for president, as having a face “too ugly” to be president, and attacked a woman reporter from Fox News—who asked Trump why he called women "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals"—by insinuating she must have been menstruating.
Trump is an unapologetic serial liar. That’s part of his “appeal”—he embodies and projects the American combination of ignorance and arrogance. He appeals to a core base of “angry white males” who have been “left behind” by traumatic economic and culture changes in U.S. society, and incites them to violence against Black people, immigrants, women, Muslims and others. When two men in Boston beat up a homeless Mexican man and one said, "Donald Trump was right—all these illegals need to be deported," Trump responded, "People who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again.”
Trump has a history of racist, fascist incitement. Back in 1989 he played a key role in whipping up a lynch-mob atmosphere against the Central Park 5, Black and Latino youth in New York City who were rounded up and unjustly convicted after a white woman was raped in Central Park. They were later completely exonerated (see “Propaganda Instruments of the Ruling Class… And the Railroad of the Central Park 5” by Bob Avakian).
As we wrote last week:
“Let's be clear: Trump’s lies that Muslims danced with glee at the destruction of the World Trade Center are no different from the rumors that white racists spread in the Jim Crow South that a Black man had allegedly raped a white woman, or the lies that circulated like a virus in medieval Europe that Jews had killed a Christian child and used the blood to make matzoh. The aim, and almost always the result: a brutal mutilation and lynching of a Black man, or a pogrom (mass destruction and murder of an entire community) of Jewish people.
“Crimes of that magnitude cannot be allowed to happen again.”
Why Is Trump Getting So Much Play?
Whether hyping him on right-wing talk radio, gushing over him on Fox, “grilling” him on CNN and MSNBC, or laughing with him on SNL, the whole spectrum of the ruling class media has given a fascist demagogue the stage to set the agenda for Election 2016. And that is not fundamentally because he is “doing well in the polls.” He is doing well in the polls mainly because he is being pumped out in the way he is.
Whatever combination of factors account for Trump being on TV all the time, the essential one is that the extreme fascist rhetoric and solutions he is spewing out speak to the needs of a system of global exploitation and oppression that confronts extreme challenges.
There are inescapable parallels between this situation and the early stages of the rise of Hitler in Germany—the most significant parallel being the ruling classes up against a whole set of crises for which they had no answers. The rulers of USA confront a wave of uprisings and protests against a reign of police murder and terror that that they rely on to keep millions of Black and Brown people locked down. They are bogged down deeper and deeper in unjust wars that bring misery to millions, with no way out. There is an intense and potentially explosive contradiction between changes in the situation of women in the world and traditional morality that has been a social glue holding America together since day one…
All that is the context for the emergence of Trump and his agenda, and other Republican presidential contenders who are cut basically from the same mold. Powerful sections of the ruling class see a need to give the microphone to Trump to mobilize a base of hard-core lunatic defenders of this system. And the ruling class as a whole—as reflected in their media—insist Trump is a legitimate candidate for president at a time when their system faces extreme challenges. That’s the backdrop to why CNN’s Don Lemon sucked up to Trump in a recent interview with, “You’re always leading the conversation.”
The Democrats Are Not the Answer
Counting on the Democrats to stand up to Trump and the Republicans is a recipe for disaster. Even if they do oppose some of what Trump is doing, they are part of, and starting from the interests of, the same system. And most important: why should a world that is just a little bit less horrible than what Trump is calling for be something we are willing to accept, with all the body- and spirit-crushing exploitation, unjust wars and oppression grinding on?
The Democrats, by the way, are more than capable of doing the populist-appeal-to-white-racists thing too. In his first campaign for the White House in 1992, Bill Clinton flew to Arkansas for a photo op at the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged Black man. And just before the Southern primaries, Clinton posed with a Georgia senator in front of a chain gang of Black inmates in white prison suits at Stone Mountain, Georgia, second home of the Ku Klux Klan.
Yes, Trump is a fascist! No, the Democrats are not the answer.
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