Well, he’s got the Hitler vote. The neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, was out and proud earlier this week: “Heil Donald Trump — the Ultimate Savior.” After endorsing the Republican presidential front-runner earlier this year for his call to deport 11 million Mexican immigrants, the fomenters of American fascism have now added an apt twist to his slogan, one not far from the truth of the campaign: “Make America White Again.”
That is the first paragraph of Timothy Egan’s Goose-Steppers in the G.O.P. in today’s New York Times. It is blunt, it is well worth your reading.
Consider this:
It’s a very ugly political moment, but there it is: The Republican Party is now home to millions of people who would throw out the Constitution, welcome a police state against Latinos and Muslims, and enforce a religious test for entry into a country built by people fleeing religious persecution. This stuff polls well in their party, even if the Bill of Rights does not.
And this:
Trump himself doesn’t seem to care about comparisons to the buffoonish (Mussolini), the truly scary (the evil one admired by the Daily Stormer) or the fictional — worse than Voldemort, as J. K. Rowling tweeted.
After reminding us how Trump justified his remarks by referring to the internment during WWII of those of Japanese background, Egan writes:
To review: He started with “the blacks,” through his smear campaign on the citizenship of the nation’s first African-American president. Moved on to Mexicans, war veterans, women who look less than flawless in middle age, the disabled, all Muslims and now people whose grandparents were rousted from their American homes and put in camps.
There is more. There is much more. Including questioning how Paul Ryan can criticize Trump’s remarks yet still say he would support him as the Republican nominee.
His ending is delicious. He quotes words from Jeff Flake, then reminds us that the Mormon Flake should be well familiar how Mormons were treated earlier in this nation’s history, including being considered anti-American and domestic terrorists. He then concludes:
That history is instructive, as we struggle with Trump’s hysteria and the millions fired up by his hate. But the only way to get rid of the goose-steppers drawn to the G.O.P. is to vow to never support the man giving them something to march to.
Of course, with a very few exceptions, that kind of vow does not seem likely.
Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork brigades from his speech at the 1992 Republican Convention, the one Molly Ivins said "probably sounded better in the original German" have taken over the party brought to prominence by Abraham Lincoln.
Read Egan.
Pass it on.