Fear and Loathing in Wisconsin
Donald Trump disgustingly attacked his rival and falsely stoked fear about 'migrant crime,' the day after Kamala Harris offered solutions to secure the border and address a broken immigration system
We knew it would get worse as we get closer to Nov. 5. We knew he has no bottom. We knew that his fear of losing and the intensifying desperation would motivate him to say anything, no matter how untethered from reality, no matter how vile and degrading. On Saturday, Donald Trump delivered an hour-long rant of lies and hate with Vice President Kamala Harris and immigrants as the target of his bile.
I always question how much to share his ravings here, recognizing that amplifying his words can be dispiriting to read, numbing by their scale of ugliness and an all-too-familiar reminder of the despicable poison that has penetrated the minds of far too many Americans. I try to be measured in how often to spotlight this danger, while recognizing that we cannot simply turn away as this hateful blight on the body politic spews hate and stokes violence.
Yesterday during a TV appearance, I was asked to watch a portion of Trump’s speech in Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin. It’s hard for me to overstate how angry and disgusted I was by the lies and hatefulness I heard this heinous human utter. It was a terrible reminder of how far we have fallen as a nation that a man like this could be so close to holding the highest office in our land again.
In a moment, I will share with you some of what I heard in those first ten minutes—saving you from having to listen to it yourself. This means I cannot afford sufficient space to detail VP Harris’ important speech delivered on Friday from the Arizona border, which expanded my growing confidence that she’s on track to win this election.
Her remarks were specific, forward-looking, solutions-oriented, fact-based and brimming with sober optimism that we are capable of confronting the continuing challenges of border security, a broken immigration system and the flow of deadly fentanyl. With expanded resources and a commitment to bipartisanship—including resurrecting and signing the border bill that Trump buried so that he could run on this issue—Harris insisted that it’s possible to secure the border and create a system that is “safe, orderly and humane.”
But first I want to share with you several of the insights of Yale Professor Timothy Snyder, who sees September as a particularly “Hitlerian month” in Trump’s effort to regain power. Snyder explores Trump’s attack on Jews who do not support him, a tiny segment of the overall American electorate who he’s already blaming for his possible loss in November. Snyder also spotlights Trump’s lie that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky (who is Jewish) is taking billions of U.S. dollars for his personal benefit rather than to defend democracy and his sovereign country’s survival.
At a time when we need to express the meaning of this reality clearly and its historical connections, Snyder explains, anyone who dares to recognize its similarity to 1930s Germany is condemned for doing so. “Somehow that ‘comparison’ rather than Trump's deeds becomes the problem,” Snyder writes in a new essay. “The outrage one feels about the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s is transferred from the person who resembles the criminal to the person who points out the resemblance.”
This outrage toward making the comparison is rooted in “the emotional logic of exceptionalism,” Snyder continues. “Americans are innocent and good (we would like to believe). We are not (we take for granted) like the Germans between the world wars. We would never (we imagine) tolerate the stereotypes German Nazis invoked. We have learned the lessons of the Holocaust. Since we are so innocent and good, since we know everything, it just cannot be true—so runs the emotional logic—that a leading American politician does Hitlerian things.”
In this way, too many journalists refuse to confront Trump honestly and then “sane-wash” what he says to normalize his words and make him appear more coherent and acceptable in reasonable society. As the conscious or unconscious attitude goes, we couldn’t possibly have a man this deranged, this untethered, this incoherent, this “Hitlerian” so close to winning the White House again, could we? Such a mindset says less about Trump and more about Americans—a thought that contradicts the vision of Americans as “innocent and good.”
Trump’s diatribe began with two lies—that there were 40,000 to 50,000 people who were denied the opportunity to hear his speech and that the Secret Service could not protect him outdoors because they were too busy protecting the Iranian president in New York. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he spat.
First, there is no reporting that anything close to that number was there to attend this rally. Second, the Secret Service was stretched thin—as they are every year—because they are responsible for protecting some 140 world leaders in New York for the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly. Trump was moved inside to a much smaller venue for his safety, but no deed goes unpunished by this endlessly aggrieved man.
But let’s go on. Then it was on to Kamala Harris who “committed one of the most heinous crimes ever committed by any administration in American history.” The crime: “allowing millions and millions of people to come through our border and make our civilization very unsafe.”
How great was the crime? “There is no greater act of disloyalty than to extinguish the sovereignty of your own nation right through your border. No matter what lies she tells Kamala Harris can never be forgiven for her erasing our border and she must never be allowed to become president of the United States…What she’s done is a total disqualifier.”
First is the lie that she’s responsible for “obliterating our border,” what he called “the heritage border,” then the lie that the arrival of undocumented immigrants endangers our civilization, then that migration “extinguishes” America’s sovereignty and finally that no act is of greater “disloyalty.”
He went on to discuss data newly released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which references over 13,000 convicted murderers. This report collects decades of information about immigrants, some with prior convictions, some in U.S. prisons now. But Trump pinned it all on Kamala Harris now—and demagogued the danger to stoke fear.
“So they are free to kill again. Oh, they’ll kill. These are killers,” he ranted. “These are killers that at a level nobody has ever seen…These are stone-cold killers, they’ll walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
But Trump made sure his rally goers knew who to blame. “Kamala is mentally impaired. If a Republican did what she did, that Republican would be impeached and removed from office and rightfully so for high crimes and misdemeanors.” First was the degrading attack on the sitting vice president—who demolished him at the debate earlier this month, by the way—then was the attempt to portray her “crimes” as worse than anything he’s ever done.
Trump was just warming up. Then came this degradation: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. Yeah, she was born there. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country. Anybody would know this.”
All this was in the first ten minutes of a rant against migrants and his so-called “migrant crime” that went on for over an hour. For any reasonable person who is not trapped in the Trump bubble, it was painful to hear.
But his despicable diatribe was a warning about the weeks ahead: He will get worse. It will get uglier. And this Wisconsin rally was a warning about what November will bring: Trump was employing misinformation, fear and anger to prepare his cult to reject the outcome of the presidential election if he doesn’t win.
As it turned out, Trump’s hatefest went on too long for me to comment on the air. That’s probably a good thing because I was so hopping mad. But I hope in the weeks ahead we can all channel our outrage into productive action by informing everyone we know why it’s so critical to defeat this disgusting man.
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The main stream media is complicit in this degradation of our country. They have lost any semblance of credibility and honest journalism.
We have had trump’s throughout history, but they had a limited following. The press certainly didn’t help their cause as much. I’m not saying they are the sole reason, but they are definitely not helping the situation.
You are correct in your assessment that he is getting worse as the election gets closer. The lies and misinformation are more fantastical. The more actual republicans openly say he is unfit, the more deranged he gets. The more he is going to be left with not much more than his base.
What we need to also be concerned about is the infiltration into the government counting and certification process. The state of Georgia is probably the most publicized case at the moment. However there counties throughout the country that are waiting to disrupt the election process.
If we manage to navigate through the states, we have a Congress that is filled with evil people who will attempt to overturn the will of the people. There is a supposed speaker of the House who takes his instructions from trump. He is a back bencher who laid in wait for his opportunity.
When we navigate our way through this nightmare, the hallowed chambers and corridors of our beautiful capital will need to be disinfected.
What passes for reporting on this subject is so grossly inadequate. It is pure evil spew, maniacal and deliberate. The corporate media sanitizes it, in effect polishing a toxic turd. Why?