Gene Collier: Donald Trump is the real enemy within
Gene Collier / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The doomsday clock on American democracy just struck three weeks, unless of course Trump changed it Monday night near Philadelphia when he reminded a roomful of supporters to be sure to vote on Jan. 5.
Oh that Donald! What a hoot!
He meant Nov. 5. Isn’t that funny?
Well sorry, but just as has been universally clear for at least the past half century, nothing about Trump is funny. Especially unfunny are the shamefully low standards we’re now applying to presidential candidates at the approach of a fledgling dictatorship.
His slurring nonsense
If Kamala Harris or Joe Biden ended a “town hall” with 40 minutes of preening and swaying to canned music rather than answering questions, the corporate media would have twisted itself into a giant Philadelphia pretzel of hot indignation.
Perhaps you’ve become aware (and equally likely, perhaps not) of this particular spasm of pathetic, slurring nonsense – Trump saying, “Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?”
Not him.
Questions from 60 Minutes, questions in another debate forum, questions about his mental competence, questions about his general health, questions about his conceptual health plan, questions about his 34 felonies, questions about the 88 other charges unconscionably delayed, questions about classified documents, questions about an alleged $10 billion bribe from Egypt that might have helped launch his first presidential campaign, questions like, “You know Hannibal Lecter is a fictional character, right?”, and, perhaps most topically, questions about how he managed to get COVID testing machines to Vladimir Putin while Americans were dying for want of COVID testing machines, an allegation detailed in Bob Woodward’s latest book that Russia confirmed through Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov only last week.
Who the hell wants to hear that, right? What’s funny is there might actually be something in one or all of those answers that serious people would consider disqualifying. It would be dismissive to say that Trump’s “beautiful MAGA” movement is powered mainly by unserious people, but not because it isn’t true. It would be dismissive because unserious people can do serious damage.
No serious person would believe that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is doing anything but trying to assist hurricane victims in North Carolina, but a 44-year-old man got himself arrested in Rutherford county for carrying a rifle and a handgun and threatening FEMA workers who had to stop what they were doing over the weekend, which was distributing nearly $100 million in relief supplies and assisting thousands of people with temporary housing.
Trump said FEMA had spent all its money helping illegal immigrants, and Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor-Nutbag helped to further poison the information well by claiming the government, which controls the weather (uh-huh), sent the hurricane to North Carolina to disrupt Trump voters in advance of the election.
Feeding the movement
Such is the real beauty Trump finds in the MAGA movement. The movement thinks first responders, in this case FEMA, can’t be trusted. Experts can’t be trusted. Scientists, scholars, doctors, epidemiologists, journalists, historians, meteorologists, and anyone else who has devoted their professional lives edifying and serving the public, can’t be trusted. But a convicted former reality TV star’s inane ravings are THE WORD.
When you’re a star, as he once explained, they let you do it.
As the election nears, Trump has just about totally stopped trying to win this thing. He’s appeared in Colorado, in California, and plans a major show at Madison Square Garden in New York, all places he cannot win, but instead uses as backdrops to feed the roiling movement more of what it wants.
He goes to Aurora, Colo., where some Venezuelan gang members have been arrested and local police described the situation as under control, and calls immigrants animals, barbaric thugs, sadistic monsters, and claims the city is “infested,” a term straight from the Nazi glossary.
“We have to live with the animals,” Trump said, “but we won’t live with them for long.”
At that point, someone in the Friday night MAGA crowd shouted, “Kill them!”
With the Harris campaign now showing clips of Trump’s mad self at its own candidate’s rallies, the question has turned to whom Trump sees as his target animals in the moment. Immigrants are his go-to, but his hatred is highly portable, and he’s begun to emphasize the point.
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump told Fox friend Maria Bartiromo when she asked if there’d be chaos on election day from undocumented immigrants. “We have some very bad people, some sick people, radical left lunatics. … And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Fascist propaganda
Yeah, keep that Nazi glossary within reach. The enemy within is straight from out from the fascist propaganda that turned Germany into a powder keg the ’30s and ’40s.
“He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” Woodward was told by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Donald Trump. Milley also used the phrase “fascist to the core.”
Three weeks. This isn’t hard.
Gene Collier’s previous column was “The MAGA man who never goes to jail.”