Tuesday, August 10, 2021

How Many Times Does Trump Need To Use Nazi Imagery (And Talk Like A Nazi And Act Like A Nazi) Before We Admit That He Is A Nazi?

Donald Trump is using a logo resembling the Nazi eagle emblem to sell "membership" cards.

The cards also misspelled "official" as "offical". . . . Which reminds me of "offal".

It is far from the first time Trump (and the Seditionist party which continues to slavishly worships him) has used Nazi imagery or logos to promote himself. In just the last 14 months . . .

June 11, 2020: Donald Trump casually refers to the Secret Service as the "S.S.".

June 18, 2020: Trump's re-election campaign ads feature an inverted red triangle, which the Nazis used to identify political prisoners, liberals, and members of opposition parties. Trump's campaign runs 88 Facebook ads with the inverted red triangle in all 50 states before Facebook deletes the material for violating its policy against organized hate.

July 2, 2020: Trump's campaign is selling t-shirts with an eagle logo bearing a striking resemblance to the classic Nazi eagle. The phrase "America First" was popularized by white supremacist and fascist groups in the 1930s.

September 5, 2020: Two Trump videos meant to show his support for US veterans feature footage of German and Russian WWII soldiers. (Another video uses footage of Russian fighter jets, adding even more weight to the already-laden-with-evidence claim that Trump is Putin's handmaid.)

February 26, 2021: The stage at the annual CPAC gathering is in the shape of an odal rune used by the Nazis. The symbol has also been appropriated by modern Neo-Nazis.
April 16, 2021: The GQP launches the "America First Caucus", dedicated to preserving "Anglo-Saxon Political Traditions" (aka white supremacy and Nazism).
July 7, 2021: From Michael Bender's Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost: Trump praised Hitler during a 2018 conversation with John Kelly, his White House chief of staff. "Hitler did a lot of good things," Trump insisted. Kelly tried to explain to who the allies and adversaries were in both World Wars, but Trump continued defending Hitler, saying Germany made economic gains under the Nazis.

(This short list does not include the numerous instances of racist and anti-Semitic comments from Trump and his ilk. Here are two examples from one week in August 2020.)

Back in 1990, Trump's first wife, Ivana, told her lawyer that Trump kept a copy of Hitler's speeches (My New Order) in a cabinet by his bed. "It was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he's a Jew," Trump later said.

(Also: In the first six months of 2021, Trump was forced to refund almost $13 million in donations, because of deceptive fundraising tactics.)

* * *

Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American literature and humanities at the University of London, is the author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream" (2018). From an interview she did with Vox (here):
[After World War I,] it is quickly connected with . . . the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. It became linked to anti-immigration movements, and sympathizers of fascism, and was popularized by Charles Lindbergh, the famous American pilot who lead the "America First Committee" — a group of some 800,000 Americans who wanted to keep us out of WWII. . . .

It connects back to the nativism of the 1840s and 1850s, and it sounds broadly anti-immigrant. In a moment where people were very concerned about waves of immigration, which was a big motivating force for the KKK, it was only natural that America First would become a rallying cry for nativists and racists.

[To be clear, who did the America First-ers want to keep out?]

Anybody who's not white, not Protestant, not what they saw as a native-born American, an old-style American. And that was their notion of what America was supposed to be. So America First did have very strong resonances with ideals like "Make America Great Again," which was a phrase that they nearly echoed as well. The idea then, as now, was that the true version of America is the America that looks like me, the American fantasy I imagine existed before it was diluted with other races and other people. America First spoke directly and powerfully to that segment of white America that felt they were losing their power, their dominance. It was a way of saying me first, only my version of America should be allowed to have any sway here.
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1 comment:

  1. allanWednesday, August 11, 2021 11:20:00 PM

    Talking Points Memo, July 14, 2021
    Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly compared then-President Trump's refusal to concede the election to Adolf Hitler, saying that Trump preached "the gospel of the Führer" by pushing falsehoods of a "stolen" election.
    In an excerpt of the book "I Alone Can Fix It" by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker that was obtained by New York Magazine, Milley fumed that Trump had led the country to the brink of its own "Reichstag moment" with his efforts to delegitimize democracy. ...
    Milley was reportedly disturbed over Trump supporters rallying to the then-President’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud, calling them "Brownshirts in the streets." ...
    "These guys are Nazis ... These are the same people we fought in World War II," Milley said a week after the Capitol was breached by a mob of Trump supporters and endangered lawmakers' lives, according to Leonnig and Rucker.
    ***

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