The Trump Revenge Video Is NOT A Joke.
Don’t Shrug It Off.

October 15, 2019 | revcom.us

 

Imagine this: Donald Trump walks into a church filled with scores of his political opponents and members of the media and single-handedly annihilates them, killing each one individually and glorying in the revenge he takes.

This was the video shown at a recent pro-Trump conference, attended by Trump Junior and Sarah Sanders and held at a Trump hotel in Miami. The existence of the video leaked over a week later. Sanders and Junior said they hadn’t seen it, with Sanders issuing an innocuous statement that she does not “support violence of any kind against anyone.” The White House said that Trump himself “strongly condemns” the video—but everyone knows that if Trump really feels something, he puts it out on Twitter, which he has not done.

These “sorry, not sorry responses” show that this sick and sadistic video expresses something that runs very deep in the fascist, pro-Trump/Pence base: the strong feeling that their opponents constitute a mortal threat that must be annihilated. The hardcore followers of Trump see a world in which they do not reign supreme and unchallenged as intolerable, and this video tells them—and tells us, if we will listen—that they must stop at nothing to preserve it. Such a base can easily dominate and do worse to an opposition that outnumbers them, even vastly outnumbers them, but cannot match their passion and organization.

The question we immediately face is this: can those who oppose this fascism be won to see that a world in which the destruction of the environment is not just allowed to proceed but further fueled… in which the nuclear codes are carried everyday by a narcissistic bully… in which immigrants are put in concentration camps and children are ripped from their parents, women are subjugated and LGBTQ people are denied human rights, Black people and Latinos are spoken of as sub-human and treated as enemies and aliens, critical thinking and evidence-based conclusions are assaulted, and the twin values of money-uber-alles and religious fanaticism are further enshrined while dissent is criminalized… is not just bad, but intolerable and indeed a direct and mortal threat to the existence of humanity?

A regime, a movement, like the one now in power is not going to be beholden to constitutions or elections that they can proclaim as rigged if the results do not suit them. They have told us that.

So, again, the question is whether those who do oppose this regime and what it stands for will be provoked and challenged to recognize or face this truth and confront it more deeply, and be inspired to take massive, nonviolent, sustained action to actually drive out this regime? The experience in Algeria, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong, and elsewhere over these past few years shows that such action can compel the fall of a regime. It must be done here. The “norms” which this regime has so relentlessly shredded cannot be relied upon to meet this threat.

The demonstrations over these next five weeks that build Saturday after Saturday —demonstrations which must draw in and give hope and energy to those who are under assault by this regime or sickened by what it does—will determine the answer. There is not someone else or some other force or some limit that these fascists recognize that will save humanity. It is you—it is us.