Snapshot: Fascism Day One

Nazi salutes, pardons for violent criminals, threats of foreign invasion

This is who he is. (Photo by Angela Weiss via Getty Images)

This photograph of Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute while standing behind the seal of the President of the United States summarizes the reprehensible first day of the second Trump regime. This gesture was no accident. The richest man in the world gave Hitler’s sieg heil not once, but twice in rapid succession.

“Some elections are important, some are not. But this one, this one really mattered and I just want to say thank you for making it happen,” Musk said. Then he clapped his hand on his chest and aggressively, enthusiastically raised the Nazi salute. “It is thanks to you,” he told the Trump supporters at the post-inaugural event at Washington’s Capitol One Arena, “that the future of civilization is assured.”

While some legacy media minimized this act as a Roman salute or an “uncertain” gesture, let’s remember that this despicable man recently expressed his backing of Germany’s far-right, neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany party. Let’s not forget that his salute makes a mockery of the deaths of over 400,000 Americans who fought and died to defend democracy against these fascists in WWII, in addition to over 6 million Jews who were exterminated by Hitler and his monstrous regime.

Musk’s Nazi salute put an exclamation point on a number of related activities by his freshly inaugurated buddy Donald Trump. It was awful to watch him mouth the words of the oath of office— “to protect and defend the Constitution”—a charade meant to indicate that he gives a damn about that once-sacred document. He did that mouthing, by the way, without putting his hand on any Bible. And his backdrop in the warm and cozy Capitol rotunda where his insurrectionists gleefully paraded four years earlier was now comprised of tech-bro billionaires who’ve demonstrated their fealty to him since the election with their dollars and their kowtowing visits to Mar-a-Lago.

There was no inaugural parade outside in the cold, but there were Proud Boy militia men marching in the street like conquering heroes. Trump took little time to extract America from both the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization. As a subdued press corps looked on in the Oval Office, he also signed an executive order intended to end birthright citizenship which is enshrined in the 14th amendment of the Constitution (and which likely will eventually be assessed by the Supreme Court).

And the first day’s coup de grâce: Trump pardoned over 1,500 felons convicted for their participation in the Jan. 6 attacks at our Capitol. That includes several hundred convicted criminals who beat up police officers with deadly or dangerous weapons, who will now be among the violent felons released from prison and available to serve as paramilitary shock troops for the lawless Trump regime.

These insurrectionists, who all were at the Capitol to support Trump’s efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election, will surely now be held up as heroes. We can only imagine how many still-traumatized and physically wounded police officers and good Americans who turned in to the authorities some of these angry, violent thugs must now worry for their personal safety.

There’s no sense in sugarcoating the nature of this vengeful, hateful, aggressive first day, intended to stoke fear and let Trump’s enemies know that he will ignore the rule of law and the Constitution to get what he wants.

In his inaugural address soon after noon—with Presidents Biden, Obama and Clinton looking on—Trump claimed that he wanted to be a peacemaker while also proudly threatening to invade Panama to reclaim the Panama Canal. He insisted America is “seemingly in complete disrepair,” then pledged that “all of this will change starting today” and “America's decline is over.”

This follows his pattern of claiming things are broken and in crisis—which, if true, is likely of his own making—and then presenting himself as the only one who can fix it. But this time he went further with the messianic claim that he was “saved by God” from an assassin’s bullet “to make America great again.”

Our response cannot be to simply express outrage over every transgression. We will have to pick our battles and decide where we will focus and expend our energies for maximum impact. I know, for example, that the deportation efforts will be high on my list. I hope you will let me know both where your priorities are and what you’d like me to spotlight in the weeks and months ahead.

This is a marathon, not a sprint. We have to calibrate our actions and our emotions to be in this battle for the long haul. There are already lawyers armed with lawsuits and other advocacy groups gearing up to oppose the hateful onslaught intended to intimidate and silence the opposition. We can count on this regime’s overreach and incompetence to minimize at least some of the damage.

But let’s not doubt that we are facing, as Martin Luther King, Jr. described it, “the fierce urgency of now.” As he put it from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial over six decades ago, “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” Our renewed defense of democracy starts now.

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