Will Bunch: America needs to confront its 'Mussolini moment'

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/columnists/attytood/cpac-trump-hitler-mussolini-transgender-daniel-ellsberg-20230307.html?outputType=default

No paywall
https://archive.is/7hYji


Hitler is the Wagner of oratory, a master in repeating the leitmotiv in many varied forms, and the leitmotiv is “The Republican régime in Germany has betrayed you. Our day of retribution has come.” His use of the brass instruments of oratory is Wagnerian, and he thunders out his resounding blows against Bolshevism and against democracy.

— Legendary Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, writing after attending an Adolf Hitler rally in Germany, March 2, 1933

There have been so many wild stories about Donald Trump during the years he’s been riding America’s down escalator — a shocking number of them confirmed, but some still in the “not proven ... yet” file. On top the second pile of rumors is the story that ran in 1990 in Vanity Fair that the future 45th president’s first wife Ivana told her lawyer “that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.”

It did seem hard to believe: Donald Trump, reading a book? But after listening to Trump’s New Order — Saturday’s grievance-filled, one-hour-and-forty-four minute fascism-on-barbiturates speech to the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC — I’m starting to think The Donald must have at least skimmed Der Fuhrer, or had his aides whip up a two-pager about him.

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Trump told the CPAC auditorium just outside D.C., in a room of largely Trump cultists, albeit not enough to fill the back rows. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

Trump’s pledge, with its nearly century-old echoes of the very worst movements that modern humankind has produced, was the low point of a weekend of red flags and flashing sirens for American democracy, just when you thought that it couldn’t get any worse.

*snip*

[kimbutgar]

1. I watch these history channel documentaries and the more I watch the more I see the similarities

As to what is going on today with the orange Mussolini. The only thing positive is he is old and not in the greatest of health. A good indictment and losing much money from libel lawsuits might be his undoing. But this white grievance stuff he’s pushing is hideous.

[Captain Zero]

2. I knew it. The retribution shit came from Hitler.

The minute I heard. And I posted here somewhere on DU that it had to come from a Hitler speech or Mein Kampf.

[lees1975]

3. Most everything Trump says comes from Hitler

He's the god that American white supremacists worship.

[Grasswire2]

4. excellent, thank you

Shared to twitter, where I didn't see it come up!