On November 3, former Vice President Joe Biden was elected the 46 President of the United States. Biden won the popular vote securing 51.1% of the popular vote (79,693,395 votes) to President Donald Trump’s 47.2% of the popular vote (73,708,217). President Elect Biden also won the electoral college, securing 306 to 232 electoral votes. President Biden won the electoral college by the exact same vote Trump won the electoral college over Hillary Clinton. When Trump won the electoral college and not the popular vote, he declared he had won by a “landslide” even though Clinton had won the popular vote by over 3 million votes. Not this time. Trump lost the popular vote by 6 million votes and the electoral college by 74 and by Trump’s own measure he lost in a landslide to Biden.
The “big lie” is the name of the political propaganda technique originally coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. It is where an outright lie is stated and repeated over, over, over and over again as if true, to sway public opinion that the lie is true and taken for granted. In other words, the more you repeat a lie to the public, it will be believed as true by the public. Since the November 3 election, President Donald Trump on a daily basis has been engaging in the “big lie” saying he won the election and is attempting to overturn the results the election to deny President Elect Joe Biden’s legitimacy by claiming the election was rigged.
On Thanksgiving day, when asked if he will leave the White House voluntarily, he said “of course” but only after the electoral college votes. Trump then went on to say it did not matter, the election was rigged and then complained that Biden was announcing cabinet picks.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Big_lie
On November 27, Trump tweeted:
“Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous “80,000,000 votes” were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia & Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he’s got a big unsolvable problem!”
TWITTER flagged the tweet “!This claim about election fraud is disputed”.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-biden-illegally-obtained-white-house
Trump is acting like a wounded, dying animal with his refusal to engage in a normal presidential transition. Trump and the Republican party want to steal the election from President Elect Joe Biden with Trump’s daily lying about the election results and filing frivolous lawsuits in the battleground states.
20 LESSONS LEARNED BY TRUMP FROM HITLER
None of Trump’s denials that he lost and outright lies about the election being rigged and that he has not lost to Biden should come as any surprise to anyone. For months before the election, Trump laid the groundwork repeatedly saying that the only way he would lose to Biden is if the election were rigged. He has also said absentee balloting was fraudulent without offering any evidence of it.
According to Donald Trump’s first wife’s divorce filings, Donald Trump kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches and kept the Hitler writings in a locked bedside cabinet. Trump learned his lessons well studying the rise to power and studying the writings from Adolf Hitler. The ugly truth is he adopted Hitler’s approach to seizing power, now he wants to use what he learned to hold onto power.
A remarkable book outlines the stunning similarities between Trump and Hitler. The book powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances were pushed to the brink by President Donald Trump who consciously followed Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s when the Nazis took power in Germany.
Burt Neuborne, is and author and one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU’s national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.
In July, 2019, Burt Neuborne’s book entitled “When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic “ was published. On August 09, 2019 a book review written by Steven Rosenfeld was published by Common Dreams, a U.S. based progressive news website that publishes breaking news stories, editorials and commentary. A link to the complete book review is here:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/leading-civil-rights-lawyer-shows-20-ways-trump-copying-hitlers-early-rhetoric-and?fbclid=IwAR1O9kLuT5nOSmmkP1kXeB5816nQagDFs1oNEYXmUaLr0rzqwWJ0wKVK-aQ
Neuborne says in his book:
“Ugly and appalling as they are, [Hitler’s] speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation. … Give Trump credit. He did his homework well and became the twenty-first-century master of divisive rhetoric. We’re used to thinking of Hitler’s Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn’t take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump’s bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. … The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic. It fell into their hands as the fruit of Hitler’s satanic ability to mesmerize enough Germans to trade their birthright for a pottage of scapegoating, short-term economic gain, xenophobia, and racism.”
SHARED VALUES OF TWO DEMAGOGUES
The book review lists 20 very alarming points of comparison between Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump:
1. Neither was elected by a majority.
“Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, receiving votes by 25.3 percent of all eligible American voters. “That’s just a little less than the percentage of the German electorate that turned to the Nazi Party in 1932–33,” Neuborne writes. “Unlike the low turnouts in the United States, turnout in Weimar Germany averaged just over 80 percent of eligible voters.” He continues, “Once installed as a minority chancellor in January 1933, Hitler set about demonizing his political opponents, and no one—not the vaunted, intellectually brilliant German judiciary; not the respected, well-trained German police; not the revered, aristocratic German military; not the widely admired, efficient German government bureaucracy; not the wealthy, immensely powerful leaders of German industry; and not the powerful center-right political leaders of the Reichstag—mounted a serious effort to stop him.”
2. Both found direct communication channels to their base.
“By 1936’s Olympics, Nazi narratives dominated German cultural and political life. “How on earth did Hitler pull it off? What satanic magic did Trump find in Hitler’s speeches?” Neuborne asks. He addresses Hitler’s extreme rhetoric soon enough, but notes that Hitler found a direct communication pathway—the Nazi Party gave out radios with only one channel, tuned to Hitler’s voice, bypassing Germany’s news media. Trump has an online equivalent.
“Donald Trump’s tweets, often delivered between midnight and dawn, are the twenty-first century’s technological embodiment of Hitler’s free plastic radios,” Neuborne says. “Trump’s Twitter account, like Hitler’s radios, enables a charismatic leader to establish and maintain a personal, unfiltered line of communication with an adoring political base of about 30–40 percent of the population, many (but not all) of whom are only too willing, even anxious, to swallow Trump’s witches’ brew of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never ending-search for scapegoats.”
3. Both blame others and divide on racial lines.
As Neuborne notes, “Hitler used his single-frequency radios to wax hysterical to his adoring base about his pathological racial and religious fantasies glorifying Aryans and demonizing Jews, blaming Jews (among other racial and religious scapegoats) for German society’s ills.” That is comparable to “Trump’s tweets and public statements, whether dealing with black-led demonstrations against police violence, white-led racist mob violence, threats posed by undocumented aliens, immigration policy generally, protests by black and white professional athletes, college admission policies, hate speech, even response to hurricane damage in Puerto Rico,” he says. Again and again, Trump uses “racially tinged messages calculated to divide whites from people of color.”
4. Both relentlessly demonize opponents.
“Hitler’s radio harangues demonized his domestic political opponents, calling them parasites, criminals, cockroaches, and various categories of leftist scum,” Neuborne notes. “Trump’s tweets and speeches similarly demonize his political opponents. Trump talks about the country being ‘infested’ with dangerous aliens of color. He fantasizes about jailing Hillary Clinton, calls Mexicans rapists, refers to ‘shithole countries,’ degrades anyone who disagrees with him, and dreams of uprooting thousands of allegedly disloyal bureaucrats in the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, who he calls ‘the deep state’ and who, he claims, are sabotaging American greatness.”
5. They unceasingly attack objective truth.
“Both Trump and Hitler maintained a relentless assault on the very idea of objective truth,” he continues. “Each began the assault by seeking to delegitimize the mainstream press. Hitler quickly coined the epithet Lügenpresse (literally ‘lying press’) to denigrate the mainstream press. Trump uses a paraphrase of Hitler’s lying press epithet—‘fake news’—cribbed, no doubt, from one of Hitler’s speeches. For Trump, the mainstream press is a ‘lying press’ that publishes ‘fake news.’” Hitler attacked his opponents as spreading false information to undermine his positions, Neuborne says, just as Trump has attacked “elites” for disseminating false news, “especially his possible links to the Kremlin.”
6. They relentlessly attack mainstream media.
“Trump’s assaults on the media echo Hitler’s, Neuborne says, noting that he “repeatedly attacks the ‘failing New York Times,’ leads crowds in chanting ‘CNN sucks,’ [and] is personally hostile to most reporters.” He cites the White House’s refusal to fly the flag at half-mast after the murder of five journalists in Annapolis in June 2018, Trump’s efforts to punish CNN by blocking a merger of its corporate parent, and trying to revoke federal Postal Service contracts held by Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.”
7. Their attacks on truth include science.
Neuborne notes, “Both Trump and Hitler intensified their assault on objective truth by deriding scientific experts, especially academics who question Hitler’s views on race or Trump’s views on climate change, immigration, or economics. For both Trump and Hitler, the goal is (and was) to eviscerate the very idea of objective truth, turning everything into grist for a populist jury subject to manipulation by a master puppeteer. In both Trump’s and Hitler’s worlds, public opinion ultimately defines what is true and what is false.”
8. Their lies blur reality—and supporters spread them.
“Trump’s pathological penchant for repeatedly lying about his behavior can only succeed in a world where his supporters feel free to embrace Trump’s ‘alternative facts’ and treat his hyperbolic exaggerations as the gospel truth,” Neuborne says. “Once Hitler had delegitimized the mainstream media by a series of systematic attacks on its integrity, he constructed a fawning alternative mass media designed to reinforce his direct radio messages and enhance his personal power. Trump is following the same path, simultaneously launching bitter attacks on the mainstream press while embracing the so-called alt-right media, co-opting both Sinclair Broadcasting and the Rupert Murdoch–owned Fox Broadcasting Company as, essentially, a Trump Broadcasting Network.”
9. Both orchestrated mass rallies to show status.
“Once Hitler had cemented his personal communications link with his base via free radios and a fawning media and had badly eroded the idea of objective truth, he reinforced his emotional bond with his base by holding a series of carefully orchestrated mass meetings dedicated to cementing his status as a charismatic leader, or Führer,” Neuborne writes. “The powerful personal bonds nurtured by Trump’s tweets and Fox’s fawning are also systematically reinforced by periodic, carefully orchestrated mass rallies (even going so far as to co-opt a Boy Scout Jamboree in 2017), reinforcing Trump’s insatiable narcissism and his status as a charismatic leader.”
10. They embrace extreme nationalism.
“Hitler’s strident appeals to the base invoked an extreme version of German nationalism, extolling a brilliant German past and promising to restore Germany to its rightful place as a preeminent nation,” Neuborne says. “Trump echoes Hitler’s jingoistic appeal to ultranationalist fervor, extolling American exceptionalism right down to the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ a paraphrase of Hitler’s promise to restore German greatness.”
11. Both made closing borders a centerpiece.
“Hitler all but closed Germany’s borders, freezing non-Aryan migration into the country and rendering it impossible for Germans to escape without official permission. Like Hitler, Trump has also made closed borders a centerpiece of his administration,” Neuborne continues. “Hitler barred Jews. Trump bars Muslims and seekers of sanctuary from Central America. When the lower courts blocked Trump’s Muslim travel ban, he unilaterally issued executive orders replacing it with a thinly disguised substitute that ultimately narrowly won Supreme Court approval under a theory of extreme deference to the president.”
12. They embraced mass detention and deportations.
“Hitler promised to make Germany free from Jews and Slavs. Trump promises to slow, stop, and even reverse the flow of non-white immigrants, substituting Muslims, Africans, Mexicans, and Central Americans of color for Jews and Slavs as scapegoats for the nation’s ills. Trump’s efforts to cast dragnets to arrest undocumented aliens where they work, live, and worship, followed by mass deportation… echo Hitler’s promise to defend Germany’s racial identity,” he writes, also noting that Trump has “stooped to tearing children from their parents [as Nazis in World War II would do] to punish desperate efforts by migrants to find a better life.”
13. Both used borders to protect selected industries.
“Like Hitler, Trump seeks to use national borders to protect his favored national interests, threatening to ignite protectionist trade wars with Europe, China, and Japan similar to the trade wars that, in earlier incarnations, helped to ignite World War I and World War II,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump aggressively uses our nation’s political and economic power to favor selected American corporate interests at the expense of foreign competitors and the environment, even at the price of international conflict, massive inefficiency, and irreversible pollution [climate change].”
14. They cemented their rule by enriching elites.
“Hitler’s version of fascism shifted immense power—both political and financial—to the leaders of German industry. In fact, Hitler governed Germany largely through corporate executives,” he continues. “Trump has also presided over a massive empowerment—and enrichment—of corporate America. Under Trump, large corporations exercise immense political power while receiving huge economic windfalls and freedom from regulations designed to protect consumers and the labor force.
“Hitler despised the German labor movement, eventually destroying it and imprisoning its leaders. Trump also detests strong unions, seeking to undermine any effort to interfere with the prerogatives of management.”
15. Both rejected international norms.
“Hitler’s foreign policy rejected international cooperation in favor of military and economic coercion, culminating in the annexation of the Sudetenland, the phony Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the horrors of global war,” Neuborne notes. “Like Hitler, Trump is deeply hostile to multinational cooperation, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the nuclear agreement with Iran, threatening to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, abandoning our Kurdish allies in Syria, and even going so far as to question the value of NATO, our post-World War II military alliance with European democracies against Soviet expansionism.”
16. They attack domestic democratic processes.
“Hitler attacked the legitimacy of democracy itself, purging the voting rolls, challenging the integrity of the electoral process, and questioning the ability of democratic government to solve Germany’s problems,” Neuborne notes. “Trump has also attacked the democratic process, declining to agree to be bound by the outcome of the 2016 elections when he thought he might lose, supporting the massive purge of the voting rolls allegedly designed to avoid (nonexistent) fraud, championing measures that make it harder to vote, tolerating—if not fomenting—massive Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, encouraging mob violence at rallies, darkly hinting at violence if Democrats hold power, and constantly casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections unless he wins.”
17. Both attack the judiciary and rule of law.
“Hitler politicized and eventually destroyed the vaunted German justice system. Trump also seeks to turn the American justice system into his personal playground,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump threatens the judicially enforced rule of law, bitterly attacking American judges who rule against him, slyly praising Andrew Jackson for defying the Supreme Court, and abusing the pardon power by pardoning an Arizona sheriff found guilty of criminal contempt of court for disobeying federal court orders to cease violating the Constitution.”
18. Both glorify the military and demand loyalty oaths.
“Like Hitler, Trump glorifies the military, staffing his administration with layers of retired generals (who eventually were fired or resigned), relaxing control over the use of lethal force by the military and the police, and demanding a massive increase in military spending,” Neuborne writes. Just as Hitler “imposed an oath of personal loyalty on all German judges” and demanded courts defer to him, “Trump’s already gotten enough deference from five Republican [Supreme Court] justices to uphold a largely Muslim travel ban that is the epitome of racial and religious bigotry.”
Trump has also demanded loyalty oaths. “He fired James Comey, a Republican appointed in 2013 as FBI director by President Obama, for refusing to swear an oath of personal loyalty to the president; excoriated and then sacked Jeff Sessions, his handpicked attorney general, for failing to suppress the criminal investigation into… Trump’s possible collusion with Russia in influencing the 2016 elections; repeatedly threatened to dismiss Robert Mueller, the special counsel carrying out the investigation; and called again and again for the jailing of Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent, leading crowds in chants of ‘lock her up.’” A new chant, “send her back,” has since emerged at Trump rallies directed at non-white Democratic congresswomen.
19. They proclaim unchecked power.
“Like Hitler, Trump has intensified a disturbing trend that predated his administration of governing unilaterally, largely through executive orders or proclamations,” Neuborne says, citing the Muslim travel ban, trade tariffs, unraveling of health and environmental safety nets, ban on transgender military service, and efforts to end President Obama’s protection for Dreamers. “Like Hitler, Trump claims the power to overrule Congress and govern all by himself. In 1933, Hitler used the pretext of the Reichstag fire to declare a national emergency and seize the power to govern unilaterally. The German judiciary did nothing to stop him. German democracy never recovered.”
“When Congress refused to give Trump funds for his border wall even after he threw a tantrum and shut down the government, Trump, like Hitler, declared a phony national emergency and claimed the power to ignore Congress,” Neuborne continues. “Don’t count on the Supreme Court to stop him. Five justices gave the game away on the President’s unilateral travel ban. They just might do the same thing on the border wall.” It did in late July, ruling that Trump could divert congressionally appropriated funds from the Pentagon budget—undermining constitutional separation of powers.
20. Both relegate women to subordinate roles.
“Finally,” writes Neuborne, “Hitler propounded a misogynistic, stereotypical view of women, valuing them exclusively as wives and mothers while excluding them from full participation in German political and economic life. Trump may be the most openly misogynist figure ever to hold high public office in the United States, crassly treating women as sexual objects, using nondisclosure agreements and violating campaign finance laws to shield his sexual misbehavior from public knowledge, attacking women who come forward to accuse men of abusive behavior, undermining reproductive freedom, and opposing efforts by women to achieve economic equality.”
WHITHERING CONSTITUTIONAL CHECKS AND BALANCES?
Most of Neuborne’s book is not centered on Trump’s fealty to Hitler’s methods and early policies. He notes, as many commentators have, that Trump is following the well-known contours of authoritarian populists and dictators: “there’s always a charismatic leader, a disaffected mass, an adroit use of communications media, economic insecurity, racial or religious fault lines, xenophobia, a turn to violence, and a search for scapegoats.”
The bigger problem, and the subject of most of the book, is that the federal architecture intended to be a check and balance against tyrants, is not poised to act. Congressional representation is fundamentally anti-democratic. In the Senate, politicians representing 18 percent of the national population—epicenters of Trump’s base—can cast 51 percent of the chamber’s votes. A Republican majority from rural states, representing barely 40 percent of the population, controls the chamber. It repeatedly thwarts legislation reflecting multicultural America’s values—and creates a brick wall for impeachment.
The House of Representatives is not much better. Until 2018, this decade’s GOP-majority House, a product of 2011’s extreme Republican gerrymanders, was also unrepresentative of the nation’s demographics. That bias still exists in the Electoral College, as the size of a state’s congressional delegation equals its allocation of votes. That formula is fair as far as House members go, but allocating votes based on two senators per state hurts urban America. Consider that California’s population is 65 times larger than Wyoming’s.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s majority remains in the hands of justices appointed by Republican presidents—and favors that party’s agenda. Most Americans are unaware that the court’s partisan majority has only changed twice since the Civil War—in 1937, when a Democratic-appointed majority took over, and in 1972, when a Republican-appointed majority took over. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s blocking of President Obama’s final nominee thwarted a twice-a-century change. Today’s hijacked Supreme Court majority has only just begun deferring to Trump’s agenda.
A link to the complete book review is here:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/08/09/leading-civil-rights-lawyer-shows-20-ways-trump-copying-hitlers-early-rhetoric-and?fbclid=IwAR1O9kLuT5nOSmmkP1kXeB5816nQagDFs1oNEYXmUaLr0rzqwWJ0wKVK-aQ
TRUMP REFERRED TO WORLD WAR II VETERANS AS CHUMPS AND LOSERS
On March 13, the Atlantic published a controversial article written by its editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg where Trump called those who served in time of war “chumps and losers”. The truth of the Atlantic story was confirmed by many new agencies including FOX news.
According to the Atlantic, when President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.
Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood during World War II as “suckers” for getting killed.
Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, “Who were the good guys in this war?” He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.
From June 4 to June 12, a truly remarkable thing happened in the United States. Former Secretaries of Defense, many General’s and military commanders condemned President Trump use of the active military to quell protests in the United States over the death of George Floyd. It all began on June 4 with former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. Former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is a retired United States Marine Corps general who was appointed by President Donald Trump to serve as the 26th US Secretary of Defense. After Mattis spoke out, the flood gates were opened and current and former military commanders spoke out condemning Trump’s use of the military against the American people who were protesting.
Others that spoke out included Air Force General Mike Hayden, Former director of the CIA and NSA under Bush and Obama, Marine Corps General John Allen, the Former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Navy Admiral James Stavridis, Former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Air Force General Richard Myers, Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush, William Perry, the Former Defense Secretary served under President Bill Clinton, Navy Adm. William McRaven, Former commander of US Special Operations Command, Ash Carter, the Former Defense Secretary, former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell, a retired general.
A link to a related blog article is here:
https://www.petedinelli.com/2020/06/14/our-us-military-know-who-they-have-sworn-to-serve-and-protect-we-the-people-and-our-constitution-a-breathtaking-week-that-was/
REFUSING TO CONCEDE
On Thursday, November 25, President Trump said he will leave the White House if the Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden. This is the closest statement he ever made to conceding the election to Biden. Trump also reiterated false claims of massive voter fraud. Trump said it would be hard for him to concede under the current circumstances and declined to say whether he would attend Biden’s inauguration. The electors are scheduled to meet on December 14 and simply put Biden will win and Trump will lose.
COMMENTARY AND ANLALYSIS
In chapter six of Mein Kamp entitled “War Propaganda”, Adolph Hitler reviewed the use of propaganda during World War I. Hitler writes the way Trump communicates to his supporters:
“All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.
…
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.
…
The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out.”
MILITARY LOYALTY TO AMERICAN PEOPLE AND UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION MADE A DIFFERENCE
One thing that Hitler and Trump do not have in common that likely helped save the United States democracy from Trump Fascism is that our United State Military is loyalty to the American people and our United States Constitution. Nazi Germany’s military was absolutely loyal to Hitler and willing to engage in genocide against Jewish German citizens. The United States military takes an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States and not the President of the United States.
Our military academies are some of the very best institutions of higher learning educating the cream of the crop of their generation. Cadets taught in our military academies learn the importance of preserving our country with the lessons learned from our civil war, World War I and especially World War II fighting Germany’s, Italy’s and Japan’s fascism.
When Trump first entered office, he surrounded himself with retired generals in key roles. The retired generals included Jim Mattis as Defense Secretary, John Kelly as Homeland Security Secretary and later Chief of Staff, and H.R. McMaster as National Security Adviser. All 4 generals were thought to be solid appointments. All 4 brought a sense of stability to the White House in the minds of the public. They were viewed as true patriots that would at least keep Trump in check and not allow Trump to start a war.
Trump went so far to call his appointments “my generals”. Soon all the relationships disintegrated between Trump and the former generals and there was no trust. All were forced out by Trump, no doubt because they were too loyal to the country and the people they served. They told Trump simply things he did not want to hear. Their sin in Trump’s mind is that they dedicated their lives to protecting the public, did not make money and were “chumps” for their willingness to give their lives for their country and fight for the freedoms we all enjoy.
Trump wanted their absolute loyalty to him and him alone, and when they left his service, he disparaged them in no uncertain terms saying they were not up to their jobs.
EVICTION DAY IS JANUARRY 20, 2021
The White House is under the concurrent control of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the United States Secret Service. Come January 20, 2021 at 12:00 Noon when Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46 President of the United States, if Trump and his wife, and 14-year-old son and family members are not moved out of the White House, they will be forcefully evicted.
Trump is already making it known that he wants to run again in 2024 and telling his supporters he wants to keep his options open. As he has done for the last 4 years, he promotes hostility and mistrust amongst his supporters undercutting our democracy for the sake of holding onto power. Most assuredly, the country has not seen the last of its once and future fascist who became president .
Trump’s Republican party is supporting his efforts to discredit the election with the likes of Republican Senators Mitch Mc Connell, Lindsay Graham and Rudy Giuliani supporting his legal challenges. McConnell, the Senate majority leader said that “President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” while chastising Democrats for expecting Trump to “accept preliminary election results”. Trump may have the right to legally challenge election results, but he does not have the right to press on in a court of law without absolutely no proof and just lying that the election was rigged.
Trump still has a strangle hold on the Republican party that will play into his thirst to regain power after he leaves office. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 52% of Republicans believe Trump “rightfully won” the U.S. election and that the election was stolen from him by widespread voter fraud. The poll found that just 26% of Republicans said they thought Biden’s win was “legitimate.”
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/world/2020/11/18/half-of-republicans-say-biden-won-because-of-a-039rigged039-election-reutersipsos-poll
Whether or not Trump actually runs in 2024 is not what is dangerous. What is dangerous are his supporters and the Republican Senators that they intend do over the next 4 years to undermine President Joe Biden. Least anyone forget, it was Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnel that said his intent was to make sure President Barack Obama was a one term President. It was McConnel who made sure in 2016 that the President Obama’s last nomination for Supreme Court never was given a hearing 11 months before a Presidential election, yet he made sure Trump’s last nominee was crammed down the Senate Democrats throats.
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz put it this way:
[Imagine]a counter-government, administered by tweets, propped up by Fox News or whatever alternative outlet Trump might construct for himself — a kind of Trumpian government-in-exile … telling his tens of millions of supporters as well as his congressional backers to reject Biden’s presidency … Trump would be trying to establish a center of power distinct from and antagonistic to the legitimately elected national government — not formally a separate government like the Confederacy but a virtual one, operating not just out in the country but inside the government, above all in Congress. … Two things could stop Trump: either his legal troubles become so severe that he can’t continue, or the Republican Party decides he’s hurting more than helping. … I would not bet on either one of these coming to pass.”
FINAL COMMENT
Hilter’s end came when he committed suicide in a bunker. Now that the election is over, it is hoped that our criminal justice system works just as well as our democracy. There is a good chance that Trump will be forced to move his residence from the State of Florida back to the State of New York. If our criminal justice system indeed works as it should, Trump will be residing in the gated community known as the “Attica State Corrections Facility” to live out his remaining years with members of his family.
The link to a related blog article is here:
Trump’s Big Lie: “The Election Is Being Rigged!”
