{"id":113920,"date":"2024-11-03T07:19:18","date_gmt":"2024-11-03T07:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/donald-trumps-freakshow-continues-unabated-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2024-11-03T07:19:18","modified_gmt":"2024-11-03T07:19:18","slug":"donald-trumps-freakshow-continues-unabated-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/donald-trumps-freakshow-continues-unabated-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump\u2019s freakshow continues unabated – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?
D<\/span>onald Trump\u2019s threat to execute Liz Cheney, \u201cwith a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her\u201d, is the apogee so far of his Hitlerian rhetoric. By his own words, Trump has proved her point that he is a \u201cdanger\u201d to the constitution and defied his apologists who insist he can be contained or that he doesn\u2019t really mean what he says. \u201cAnd let\u2019s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,\u201d he said. \u201cShoot Liz Cheney\u201d has replaced \u201cHang Mike Pence.\u201d
Hours after Trump declared his wish to kill Cheney, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, his reliable excuse maker for the executive collaborator class, published an editorial<\/a> stating, \u201cWe don\u2019t buy the fascism fears, and we doubt Democrats really do either.\u201d
Trump is hellbent to break through any \u201csane-washing\u201d of the media smoothing over his viciousness and vulgarity. His call for an elaborate execution of a pre-eminent political opponent, a conservative Republican of the most partisan pedigree, is his definitive and final answer to those who quibble about his intentions and his unmooring from all traditional politics.
His fascist-themed freakshow in Madison Square Garden followed by his firing squad fantasy are an augury of a second administration. His closing act has overwhelmed any media reflex for euphemism and both-siderism. He contemptuously stomps on every effort at normalization.
Time and again, day after day, event after event, Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election, certainly about the candidate himself: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?
Many of Trump\u2019s former White House staffers, cabinet secretaries and commanding generals are frantically attempting to warn against his madness, that he is \u201ca fascist to the core\u201d, as former chairman of the joint chiefs Gen Mark Milley has unequivocally stated. In private conversation, former staffers and others with intimate knowledge of Trump, all reliable people, talk about the real man as far viler than those who haven\u2019t seen him behind closed doors could possibly know.
Knowledge of Trump\u2019s vileness is widespread among top-level Republicans. \u201cThey all hate him,\u201d a former senior Trump adviser told me categorically. And they all have stories, some exhibiting his narcissism, others his malice: how, for example, the time two senators from one state were summoned to the Oval Office to listen to Trump say he would travel there to have a mountain named after him. As a rule, they agree with Senator Mitch McConnell that he is \u201cdespicable\u201d. Unlike those former Trump staffers waving their arms, they are silent and complicit.
Now, former staffers speculate about the hazy fine line between Trump\u2019s infantilism and his dementia. There is no responsible person left around Trump. He has learned the lesson, sealed by January 6, not to trust the \u201cnormies\u201d.
T<\/span>rump\u2019s night in the Garden on 27 October was early Hitler in style, not middle Hitler. The bellowing obscenities, racist sneers and violent threats were more reminiscent of the Munich beer hall phase of Hitler rousing the street gangs of Brownshirts than the Nuremberg rallies of disciplined ranks of storm troopers massed before his reviewing stand.
\u201cAn immense wave of eccentric barbarism \u2026 A primitive fairground brutality,\u201d wrote the great German novelist Thomas Mann in 1930 about the Nazi rallies he observed. \u201cThis fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style \u2026 hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.\u201d
\u201cA quarter-of-an-hour before the opening time I walked through the chief hall of the Hofbr\u00e4uhaus on the Platz in Munich and my heart was nearly bursting with joy,\u201d wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf.
\u201cThe love in that room,\u201d said Trump after his rally at Madison Square Garden. \u201cIt was breathtaking. It was like a love fest, an absolute love fest.\u201d
Trump\u2019s festival at the Garden was a fascist foreshadowing masquerading as a farce. As a screwball flying circus, it was a version of the Marx Brothers\u2019 Night at the Opera. Everything was turned upside down in a pandemonium. Trump\u2019s comedians, however, were no Groucho. It would have been better for Trump if his speakers had been equipped like the mute Harpo with a honking horn.
Trump\u2019s master race of misfits found an authentic voice in the comic relief of Tony Hinchcliffe, who amid his slurs about Black people (\u201cWe carved watermelons together\u201d), Latinos, Jews and Palestinians, said, \u201cThere\u2019s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it\u2019s called Puerto Rico.\u201d
Hinchcliffe is the host of a podcast aptly called Kill Tony. With a dubious laugh line, as if on cue, the stage swiveled. Triumph of the Will turned into West Side Story. His performance fatally died like the character Tony in West Side Story, only this Tony died by suicide.
Life is all right in America
If you\u2019re all white in America
With his assent, Trump\u2019s night at the Garden was orchestrated by a malevolent crew of eternally stunted pranksters and gangsters who took control of his campaign\u2019s closing argument. They were brought together principally by Trump\u2019s son Don Jr, a pitiable figure who engages in abominable displays to gain his father\u2019s approbation, and who has become central to the organization of the entourage floating around the campaign.
\u201cPoor Don, he really got the brunt of everything,\u201d said Ivanka. Abandoned and abused, he was shipped off to Czechoslovakia after the divorce of his parents to be raised during the summers by his mother\u2019s grandparents \u2013 \u201cthe most memorable time in my life\u201d, he said<\/a>. He learned to speak fluent Czech. Back home, his new stepfather tried to choke him. His college roommates at the University of Pennsylvania recalled<\/a> Trump coming to visit and smashing Don Jr in the face in front of his friends, knocking him to the ground. When Trump was invited to give a formal speech at Penn, Don Jr refused to attend. He wouldn\u2019t speak with his brutal father for years. He drank heavily, \u201ca fall-down drunk\u201d, said a college friend. His first wife, Vanessa, once said<\/a> to him, \u201cYou\u2019re the one with the retarded father.\u201d Now, Don Jr does anything he can to win Trump\u2019s distracted attention and alienated affection. On the podium, he called out to his dad as \u201cthe king of New York\u201d.
Tony Hinchcliffe rose to the level of insult comedian as an opening club act for Joe Rogan. They both live in Austin. Rogan devoted three hours on his podcast on 26 October to a limp interview with Trump in which he failed to challenge Trump\u2019s dozens of flagrant lies. Rogan traffics in being conspiracy theory curious and science hostile to explain the world, which he punctuates with guffaws of jocular misogyny, the occasional racial inference, some gay bashing and tough-guy posturing. He is the faux regular bros\u2019 Alex Jones, the incels\u2019 Hugh Hefner.
Both Rogan and Hinchcliffe are pals of Tucker Carlson. Tucker lately warmed up<\/a> a Trump rally in Georgia with his sexual fantasy of a \u201chormone-addled 15-year-old daughter\u201d, when \u201cDad comes home and he\u2019s pissed \u2026 You\u2019ve been a bad girl. You\u2019ve been a bad little girl and you\u2019re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it\u2019s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it\u2019s not. I\u2019m not going to lie. It\u2019s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.\u201d A former colleague of Carlson\u2019s says he has been talking intently about his spanking obsession for years, though this was the first time in public.
Tucker would appear as the interviewer of Trump on 31 October at an Arizona rally, where he brought up<\/a> \u201cDick Cheney\u2019s repulsive little daughter\u201d, which triggered Trump to call her \u201cderanged\u201d and then call for her execution.
Tucker, Don Jr\u2019s buddy, was instrumental in the selection of JD Vance as Trump\u2019s running mate. JD, with his deep thoughts<\/a> on \u201cchildless cat ladies\u201d and \u201cthe whole purpose of the postmenopausal female\u201d, is a new addition to the boys\u2019 club. Except for Rogan, all of them, from comic to billionaire to VP candidate, appeared on the podium at the Garden. Tucker Carlson, taking his turn at standup, distinguished himself by slagging the woman who\u2019s been a bad girl: \u201cAs the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president \u2026\u201d
Then, Elon Musk, relocated to Austin. He has launched himself like one of his spaceships into Trump\u2019s orbit. The aspiring oligarch has donated tens of millions to a political action committee to support Trump, produced misleading TV spots to smear Harris, and used X to promote disinformation for Trump. He offers a million-dollar giveaway to register voters, cheap money, which has landed him in a Philadelphia court. He speaks secretly to Putin. Whenever Musk strays from his skill at hardware and software into the realm of human interaction, however, he falls flat on his face. His robo-taxi crashes through a shop window.
Musk\u2019s acquisition of Twitter and its transformation into X was doomed to fail because it is about his greatest weakness: human expression. He treats human relationships as a horror show. He is the father of 12 children, some of whom he\u2019s given the names of software programs and he has savagely disowned his trans daughter. He bought an enclosed compound in Texas to contain former wives and children. \u201cHe has even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances,\u201d the New York Times has reported<\/a>. He seeks life on Mars because he\u2019s an alien on Earth. Techno authoritarianism is the only comfortable spot on his political spectrum. He calls himself \u201cTechno-King\u201d. Trump has promised<\/a> him that he will be put in charge of the federal workforce \u201cto start from scratch\u201d. Musk was sanctioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission in September. His regulatory troubles will all go away with Trump. The Nasa and defense contracts will flow. If anything might befall Trump, Musk and his fellow techno authoritarians have Vance positioned a heartbeat away. At the rally, Musk introduced himself, \u201cI am dark Gothic Maga.\u201d
Among the other speakers in the Garden, David Rem, a 60-year-old New York sanitation worker, mounted the podium to hex Harris as \u201cthe antichrist\u201d and \u201cthe devil\u201d. He claimed to be a childhood friend of Trump\u2019s from his Queens neighborhood, but, in fact, had only recently met him. In 1991, he pleaded guilty<\/a> to acting as a courier to distribute cocaine and was sentenced to 151 months\u2019 imprisonment.
Grant Cardone, a real estate operator from Florida, is a longtime Scientologist<\/a> and major donor to its slush fund used to harass critics. He told the Maga faithful that Harris and \u201cher pimp handlers will destroy our country\u201d. To great applause, he flipped his middle finger.
A local New York radio broadcaster, Sid Rosenberg, who had called<\/a> Harris\u2019s husband, Doug Emhoff, \u201ca crappy Jew\u201d, to Trump\u2019s approval in April, told the crowd, \u201cShe is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton, huh? What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters and lowlives. Every one of them. Every one of them.\u201d
The obscenities echoing in the Garden embroidered the vulgar vision of the great replacement theory. \u201cAmerica is for Americans and Americans only,\u201d declared Stephen Miller, a former Trump aide. If Trump were to be elected, Miller would play a large role in implementing what Trump boasted would be \u201cthe largest deportation program in American history\u201d.
Trump came on stage to shout threats to the rafters. \u201cThe United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t have the same country any more.\u201d He stated he would restore the country to what it was by reaching backwards in history. \u201cI will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Think of that. That\u2019s how far back. That\u2019s when they had law and order. They had some tough ones. Think of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.\u201d
Undoubtedly, Trump had no clue he was referring to the political period that Thomas Jefferson described as \u201cthe reign of witches\u201d. President John Adams enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts to harass and imprison his critics and opponents, the Democratic-Republicans organized by Jefferson and James Madison, a grouping that was the origin of the Democratic party. Adams lost the election of 1800 to Jefferson. Adams was bitter, but freely and peacefully gave up the presidency, and transferred power in the first election after Washington. The acts expired, except for the Alien Enemies Act, which is invoked now by Trump. Yet, that act is only operative during wartime.
\u201cAnd when I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy, becomes a sound hole,\u201d Trump barked. \u201cHow can he say now they\u2019ve done very bad things to this country? They are indeed the enemy from within. But this is who we\u2019re fighting.\u201d
Trump\u2019s vision of America was also Hitler\u2019s understanding of the country. Albert Speer, Hitler\u2019s architect and chief of war production, became his confidant. He participated in hundreds of dinner table conversations with Hitler. \u201cIn general, no such thing as an American people existed as a unit,\u201d Speer wrote in his memoir of Hitler\u2019s view. \u201cThey were nothing but a mass of immigrants from many nations and races.\u201d
A<\/span>fter the disastrous show at the Garden, Rogan, keen on his commercial viability, separated himself from his sinking sidekick, Hinchcliffe, while at the same time winking at his bro base with a couple of little racially tinged asides. \u201cI\u2019ve gotta tell you, that joke kills at comedy clubs. I don\u2019t like the joke, [but] it kills,\u201d Rogan said on his podcast. \u201cIt\u2019s just like, if you\u2019re Puerto Rican and you hear that in the audience, you\u2019re like [groans]. But it\u2019s a funny joke. The joke does well. But I said to him, I go, \u2018Dude, that\u2019s the one that\u2019s gonna get you stabbed.\u2019 And he used to talk about it on stage, saying, \u2018Joe Rogan always says that\u2019s the one that\u2019s gonna get me stabbed.\u2019\u201d After creating some distance between himself and Hinchcliffe, he singled out Barack Obama for criticizing the \u201cjoke\u201d as \u201creally fucked up. You know that\u2019s a joke. That\u2019s like going to a Quentin Tarantino movie [and saying], \u2018And then the man killed that woman.\u2019 Like, he didn\u2019t really kill that woman \u2026 this is a movie.\u201d But \u201cKill Tony\u201d really did make himself roadkill and in the process \u201cstabbed\u201d Trump in what was not a movie or a comedy club.
Dancing around having Harris as a guest, Rogan decided that if she would not drop her schedule to see him he would not deign to travel to interview her. Instead, he hosted JD Vance for three hours on Halloween, in which Vance held forth<\/a> on how young men with more testosterone are more conservative, liberal women are \u201ccelebrating\u201d their abortions with \u201cbirthday cakes\u201d, and that the surefire way to gain admission to an Ivy League university \u201cis to be trans\u201d. Then, after confidently predicting Trump would win \u201cthe normal gay guy\u201d, Vance pronounced the Emily In Paris Netflix series a \u201cmasterpiece\u201d.
C<\/span>onspicuously missing from the cabal that staged the Garden fiasco was the most diligent student of Hitler of all the minions swirling around Trump. Steve Bannon, imprisoned for defying a congressional subpoena to testify on his role on January 6, was still behind bars.
When Bannon saw Trump descend down the Trump Tower escalator to launch his campaign in 2015, he thought, \u201cThat\u2019s Hitler!\u201d Bannon was ecstatic, he told New York Times correspondent Jeremy Peters in his book Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted. Trump was the demagogue he was waiting for.
After a career on Wall Street, Bannon spent years failing as a film producer; then, radicalized as a rightwinger, he announced his ambition to become \u201cthe Leni Riefenstahl of the GOP\u201d. Promoting his dreadful documentary in 2011 on Sarah Palin, The Undefeated, he said, \u201cPeople have said I\u2019m like Leni Riefenstahl.\u201d Riefenstahl was the leading film-maker of the Third Reich, mistress of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, and auteur of Triumph of the Will, a brilliant, innovative account of Hitler\u2019s 1935 Nazi rally in Nuremberg. Bannon, who became Trump\u2019s campaign manager in 2016 and White House senior adviser, saw himself staging Trump as Riefenstahl filmed Hitler. He boasted that he asked himself, \u201cWhat would Leni Riefenstahl do?\u201d
Bannon walked out of federal prison on 29 October. He still faces New York state charges of financial fraud in a scheme to fleece donors to build Trump\u2019s wall along the Mexican border. He declared that he would resume where he left off. He was on to the coup of 2024. He picked up once again on the big lie of \u201celection integrity\u201d, that the 2024 election might be stolen from Trump just like in 2020. \u201cIf people think American politics have been divisive before,\u201d said<\/a> Bannon, \u201cyou haven\u2019t seen anything.\u201d
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man<\/a>, Wrestling With His Angel<\/a> and All the Powers of Earth<\/a><\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?Donald Trump\u2019s threat to execute Liz Cheney, \u201cwith a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her\u201d, is the apogee so far of his Hitlerian rhetoric. By his own words, Trump has proved her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":113921,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-113920","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}