Trump is a delusional unhinged sadist living in a phallocentric manosphere, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

A few days Trump said he wants to, choose one: 1) put Liz Cheney in front a firing squad or 2) have her go into battle with one rifle facing nine gun barrels. Even if you accept that the second is what he meant, unless you're Donald "Rambo" Trump going into batttle against those odds this is a death sentence. 

Here's what he said:

“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump said of Cheney, following a tangent about his pardon in 2018 of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, her father. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

It really doesn't matter whether he was calling for her to be executed by a nine man firing squad or, as he claimed, that he was trying to say she doesn't know what it's like go to war against nine rifle wielding soldiers, what he said was a violent sadistic proposal. When someone says things like this it means they are thinking things like this, and when they think things like this they generally have a fantasy to go along with it.

Who the hell enjoys violent fantasies like this? The answer is simple. These people are called sadists. They don't have to act on the thoughts and fantasies to be sadists. They may never inflict pain on others, but they enjoy seeing pain inflicted on others. Of course Trump has inflicted pain on others. Consider, for example, his having children put in cages and torn from their families.

Today we have another story which provides insight into who Trump is. This was top of the page on HUFFPOST:

The article describes what he said:

Former President Donald Trump used apparent technical issues during a Friday rally to toy with the idea of attacking people working the event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“You’ve got to be kidding. Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?”

Who knows what Trump imagines he is capable of doing. Perhaps he's seen lots of movies when the hero takes down a dozen thugs with deadly kung fo moves.

Perchance Photo AI

The HUFFPOST article also reminds us of the following

Trump has a history of using such rhetoric at his rallies. He suggested that a protester could “get the hell knocked out of her” at an event in California last month.

In 2016, he told supporters in Iowa to “knock the crap” out of hecklers. Trump separately told a crowd in Nevada that year that he’d like to punch a protester “in the face.”

“You know what they used to do to a guy like that in a place like this?” he said. “They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”

The guy pictured below thinks he is going backstage to single-hangedly knock the hell out of people backstage. Ask yourself whether this is merely a fantasy or delusional.

I think this is as delusional as the fantasies he has that he actually looks like the characters depicted on the digital images he sold. It is downright nutso that people actually paid for images which they could see and print at home for free. Why they did this is a subject which may well be studied by psychologists in the future.

I've been writing about Trump's psychopathology and his dangerous malignant narcissism since 2017. By now most readers of this blog know that this is a "psychological syndrome comprising a mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, sadism, and a paranoid outlook on life. Malignant narcissists are grandiose and always ready to raise hostility levels, which undermines the families and organizations in which they are involved, and dehumanizes the people with whom they associate."

Only in the past few weeks have I thought about Trump in more sociological terms. I have concluded that Trump resides in a phallocentric (see Wikipedia) manosphhere (see Wikipedia).

His obsession with Arnold Palmer's equipment is an example of his being phallocentric, but his talking about it in public shows he is unhinged. Consider the lack of judgement demonstrated by his telling this story. Any rational (not unhinged) politician would know would lead to negative blowback like articles like these.

It earned him this rebuke from Arnold Palmer's daughter:

Arnold Palmer’s daughter says Donald Trump disrespected her late father’s memory by fawning over the size of the champion golfer’s penis at a campaign rally over the weekend.

“Hackneyed anecdotes from the locker room … seemed disrespectful and inappropriate to me,” Peg Palmer Wears told ABC News on Monday, two days after the former president publicly suggested her father was well endowed. (from The Guardian)

Consider the title of this Poltico article.

It is mind-boggling to me that women not only would vote for this man but that some would wear t-shirts like this:

Going back to my title, I wish I could ask undecided voters considering voting for Trump whether they want a delusional unhinged sadist who is living in a phallocentric manosphere to be their president.

Afterthought:

As regular readers know I always write my blogs with MSNBC on and sometimes end up adding what is being said on a show into a blog. Just now on Ali Velshi's show they were talking about Trump being a bully. I'm worn out, I'm hungry and haven't had breakfast yet. I just want to put this online so I'll just add that in addition to everything else I wrote today, Trump is also a bully.

Update:

HUFFPOST now has a top of website new story  (in red) which again demonstrates his unhinged poor judgment:

Trump Mocks Black Greek Basketball Player Giannis Antetokounmpo's Heritage

If you missed my podcast with Chauncey DeVega click here.

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Ben Franklin's wise words for facing the prospect of a Trump presidency, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

There are two different often used definitions of the word hang. One is to hang something or someone. You can hang a picture on the wall or you can hang someone on a gallows. The most recent time the word came into politics was the hanging chads in the 2000 election. Now when you refer to hanging it evokes memories of the Jan. 6th insurrectionist yelling "hang Mike Pence" and the gallows constructed in from of the U. S. Capitol.

The other meaning is more colloquial even though it goes back to something Ben Franklin said. It is the word as used in the modern context of hanging out with your friends. In this sense you are hanging together. You can also hang loose or you can hang tight. These have opposite meanings.

At the official signing of the parchment copy on August 2, John Hancock, the president of the Congress, penned his name with flourish. “There must be no pulling different ways,” he declared. “We must all hang together.” According to the historian Jared Sparks, Franklin replied: “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” (Smithsonian Magazine)

Who among our wise and daring patriotic Founders could have predicted that after a hard fought battle with the British where the Americans truly hung together a new free nation would be born. It would go on to survive a civil war intact and triumph over its foes in two world wars. Could they ever have imagined that it would reach a perilous point where a more incompetent leader than King George IV was having a 50/50 chance of ruling the country like a king. 

Consider: George's rule was tarnished by scandal and financial extravagance. His ministers found his behaviour selfish, unreliable and irresponsible and he was strongly influenced by favourites. Wikipedia.

Could Hamilton, Adams, Washington, and Franklin ever have predicted that this man would have lost an earlier election, claimed falsely that he really won, tried to overtune the following election, incite an attack on the Capitol, and then not disavowing the insurrectionists during the attack building a gallows and calling for the hanging his vice president?

I'm not partiuclarly superstitious. Even so I am hesitant to outright say that I think Kamala Harris will win lest I have some kind of supernatural power to jinx it. I expect that Kamala and her advisors don't want to project any kind of overconfidence lest voters who put off voting until election day decide that the weather is lousy and they have to do the laundry so since she doesn't really need their vote they stay home. I do think she will win.  Perhaps I have to think this because I am horrified at the propsect of Trump winning. 

I want to believe that enough American people will see Trump for who he is and reject his vision of America. I want to believe that they will see that he and his most committed supporters are evil. I know this is a loaded term. If calling Trump's supporters the D-word, deplorables, or the G-word, garbage, evil is the apropos E-word.

In 1996 Daniel Goldhagen wrote "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust." I see many of Trump's supporters as being poised, like those ordinary Germans, to follow his orders no matter how evil. They will round up the people from other countries who he has demonized and send them to internment camps so they can eventually be sent out of the country. They will  wholeheartedly yet heartlessly follow the blueprint laid out in Project 2025. I can see no other word to use for this than evil.

This is the first election where democracy loving American people have to prepare for surviving an election, literally surviving with their way of life intact and for some civil servants, their livelihood at stake, should one particular candidate win. 

I have said this before but it has particular relevance because Trump didn't care about the chants of "hang Mike Pence" and that a gallows for him was contsructed in front of the Capitol on Jan. 6th. Considering his sadistic fantasies like putting alligators in the Rio Grande and having soldiers shoot migrants in the legs, it would be in character for him to visualize Pence on the gallows.

Many of us are justified in fearing that if Trump becomes president he wants to hang us, not merely metaphorically, but in any way that he can. He wants to censor the press, purge federal agencies of people who aren't loyal to him, and even turn the Justice Department against his enemies. 

Truly, as one of our greatest and wisest patriots, Ben Franklin, said when the country was about to declare independence and face a war with England "we must all hang together or we will all hang separately."

Then after the Americans won The War for Independence and drafted the Constitution  Franklin was asked "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" His response was "a republic, if you can keep it." Of course he was describing the constitutional democratic republic which the United States has been up until now.

Can we keep it? Incredibly the answer to this depends on who you mean by the word "we."

Illustrations by Perchance Photo AI.

Addendum: This is from Dana Milbank's Washington Post column today, Who Are We, America?

Americans have heard what Trump has said in his own words. He believes he has the authority to implement “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He’ll implement the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” He would give those who attacked the Capitol in the deadly Jan. 6 riot “pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.” He would tell Vladimir Putin’s Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that, in Trump’s view, don’t pull their weight. He wouldn’t “give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate,” which virtually all schools have in place to prevent deadly childhood diseases. He’ll send a message to criminals with “one rough hour, and I mean real rough,” of vigilante attacks. He speaks about his political opponents as “the enemy from within” and believes they “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military.” He has suggested that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s top soldier, deserves to be executed.

Previous blogs here.

You've read my opinions but unless you've talked to me you've never them in heard my voice. Now, thanks to Salon's Chauncey Dega you can in his podcast. By Hal M. Brown,

 

Chauncey DeVega is a senior politics writer for Salon. (You can read about Salon on Wikipedia.) His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts two weekly podcasts, The Chauncey DeVega Show and The Truth Report. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter.

I've been quoted in three of Chauncey DeVega's columns 

You can listen to his podcasts at The Chauncey DeVega Show. I recorded a podcast with him a few days ago. This is his most recent podcast can easily be heard in here on Libsyn and as an Apple iTunes podcast. (It's listed as being on Stitcher but this link goes to Pandora and I can't find it on their list.) 

If you want to read the transcript click on iTunes and go here (clicking below enlarges image):

Chauncey humbles me by noting that on this pre-election podcast he could have had some "heavy hitters" like well known historians and others who most people have heard of on the podcast. Indeed he could have. A recent podcast was with psychoanalyst and author Justin Frank (Wiki). On Oct. 23rd he talked to M. Steven Fish (Wiki profile), a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His new book is Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge. He's interviewed Noble Prize winning economist Robert Reich and MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid.

His podcast interview today begins after a long impassioned monologue where he sings part of Mister Roger's "It's a Wonderful Day in the Neighborhood" two times and talks about his mother and the actual Chicago neighborhood where he lives.

Read a very brief summary of the two hour  interview here.

You'll have to scroll through towards the end of this podcast (I used Lisyn here) when he concludes his talk with Eddie Kingston to hear his unedited 40 minute talk with me. 

My conversation begins at 1:40:

After his monologue he talks with a well known professional wrestler named Eddie Kingston:

This is from the podcast website:

Eddie Kingston (see Wikipedia profile) is an American professional wrestler currently signed with AEW (All Elite Wrestling). Kingston is a twenty-year veteran who has wrestled for and held championships in leading promotions all around the world including New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) and Ring of Honor (ROH).

Eddie Kingston reflects on his life journey and decision to be open and vulnerable about his struggles to be a more mentally and emotionally healthy man as shown by his widely-read and viewed essays, social media posts, and videos in support of mental health and suicide prevention.

After that you can hear our conversation where we talked mostly about mental health rather than politics. He describes this as me reflecting on my four decades of experience as a clinician and sharing some advice and insights about managing our emotions, trying to be healthy, and doing the things that make us happy as a way of fighting back against despair and surrender when our society (and personal lives) often feel so dark and dire.

I can't find a way to post a link to Chauncey's interview just with me. If you want to hear it you have to go to the last 40 minutes after he concludes his talk with Eddie Kingston.

 You can read an automatically generated transcript of it. Here's how it begins:

“Next segment, the one, the only Hal Brown here on The Chauncey DeVega Show. Brother Hal Brown, we have been emailing for years, and we got two weeks left, and I said, you and I finally got to talk, but I just wanted to hear your voice and to tell you thank you for all that you've been doing all these years, regardless what may happen, because this is going to be a long fight no matter what happens in two weeks. I just want to thank you.

You're very welcome, and I am humbled that I could help. In this way, what can I do? I was a therapist for 40 years, it's hard to believe.

I'm like the old man here, and it's like I see people like us, we're just struggling with our emotions, with our fears, trying to think, okay, if things go really well, you know what I think is, what the hell am I going to do with my time if things go really well? I was (inaudible) Donald Trump, just 2017, and now with what are we? Am I good enough to write a science fiction short story?”

The automatic transcription above and below isn't entirely accurate. 

Click above to enlarge image.

 

Addendum:

When I talked to Chauncy I was on my way to a dinner engagement where my partner Ann and another couple were waiting for me. I was 40 minutes late but they were all forgiving when I explained that I was caught up in the podcast which had a technical glitch in the middle where we had to pause for 10 minutes. I mentioned as an aside to Chauncey at the end of our conversation that at the continuing care retirement community where we live residents often wear simple name tags but I make my own which are more elaborate (see bottom of page for example). I told him that the one I made most recently reflects how I currently feel. You'll recognize the man from Evard Munch's "The Scream."

I designed a new one and ordered it from Zazzle which I hope to wear when Kamala wins. It is due to arrive on Nov. 7th. I don't want to jinx anything by previewing it here. If she wins I'll post it on a blog. Below is Dali's famous Perservence of Memory, or melting clocks, painting. My new name tag also has a Dali image.

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Here are a few of the blogs I posted about Trump in 2016, By Hal M. Brown, MSW

I didn't have time to write a new blog so am posting these from June of 2016. I haven't edited it. Looking back at the Trump of 2016 he seems almost quaint becuse he has morphed into a monster. The illustration is new. It was made by using Perchance Image AI.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Hillary’s terrorism creds: you got them, use them.

Comments on Daily Kos

With pundits and pollsters asking whether in view of the Orlando attacks voters will be asking themselves which candidate will most effectively handle terrorism, it’s good to remind us that only one has a track record of actually doing something to fight terrorism.

However, Hillary is, after all a woman and we know how Donald Trump feels about women. Heather “Digby” Parton wonders whether her being a woman could work against her:  

And secondly, a woman was likely running for president for the first time and despite everyone’s assumption that she is some kind of bloodthirsty Boudica (the Celtic war queen who slaughtered a Roman army), the fact is that there were some good reasons to worry  that Americans would turn to the traditional party and the traditional (male) candidate if national security came front and center. It was entirely predictable that the Republicans  would play “the man card” if they could  find an opening.  Salon

While we don’t know what else she did as Secretary of State addressing terrorism (likely a lot), we do know that she was closely involved with the attack that took out Osama binLaden.

We've seen the photo of Obama, Biden, and Clinton in the situation room with top members of the national security team is known worldwide.

 I enlarged Hillary to make a point:

• She is the only one in the room sitting with stacks of information in front of her and on her lap, including the photo that had to be blurred out because it was top secret.

I expect that the powerful photo will be used in Hillary’s campaign ads. I think it would be effective to start with the full photo and zoom to this close-up of Hillary.

My advice to her on her anti-terrorism credentials: “Hill, you got them, use them.”

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Breaking News:

Russian government hackers penetrated Democratic National Committee’s database and stole research on Donald Trump, according to a report published by the Washington Post.

DNC officials and security experts say the hackers were able to read all e-mail and chats in the DNC system.

Some of the hackers had been in the DNC system for a year, the Washington Post reports. They were expelled from the computer system this past weekend.

Russian spies also targeted the computers of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and several GOP political action committees. Further details of those attacks were not immediately available.

The NRA is doing a Trump, counter-punching with wild, stupid claims. Whether or not banning assault-rifles will absolutely prevent such shootings is irrelevent. If such a ban prevents one in the future since there's no sensible reason NOT to ban them, they should be banned. They are a dangerous "toy" for anyone not in the military or law enforcement.

Now then, to talk about dangerous, here's what's more dangerous that keeping the sale of these killing machines legal. It is promulgating the politically expedient idea that the Obama adminstration isn't doing enough to stop ISIS inspired terrorism. This does nothing but inspire fear and unwarranted anger at our government. Homeland Security along with its international partners is doing all that is feasible to prevent such terror acts. To say otherwise is denying what we know about the apparatus that has grown exponentially since 9-11. 

You better believe those who know how many attacks have been prevented, and how many investigations are currently active, would LIKE to share this information. But anyone with a fully functioning brain SHOULD understand this.

Monday, June 13, 2016

Breaking News: Trump just delivered a speech read off a teleprompter so obviously written by someone else that it is pathetic. Nothing new except doubling down on immigration policy. He also lied saying Mateen was born in Afghanistan. Below: Quote without comment:

Ask yourself, who is really the friend of women and the LGBT community, Donald Trump with his actions, or Hillary Clinton with her words? Clinton wants to allow Radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country—they enslave women, and murder gays.

Trump is now proving one of two things, which are really mutually exclusive. This is getting a lot of media attention:

Donald Trump Suggests Obama May Be Sympathetic To Islamic Terrorism

“[Obama] doesn’t get it, or he gets it better than anybody understands,” Trump said.

I’m writing this now and getting it posted while everything is fresh. I know I should write a  really well-researched diary on this. I keep hoping an expert with real bona fides — i.e. having published books and academic papers on psychiatric diagnosis — will do the work for me. I’m just a clinical social worker psychotherapist who was a mental health center director. I’ve made some tough diagnoses that other therapists missed but compared to Trump they were easy. This wouldn’t be like writing my typical blog which is a morning 1-2 hour exercise since it is just opinion. It would be more like work! I’d actually have to do a lot of research.

It won’t matter to Trump when we learn, as I think we will, that Omar Mateen was motivated primarily or exclusively by homophobia. He will keep insisting that he was a radical Islamist and that his murder spree was ISIS terrorism. His supporters of course will believe him. The hell with evidence! Not only is this the most horrible mass shooting in the United States, but it is many times over the worst LGBT hate crime ever. To ignore that for political purposes is a punch in the face to all LGBT people. 

If Trump is just stoking the fears of anti-Obama conspiracy theorists (and not mentally ill) then he has stooped possibly to his lowest low since his birther claims. If he actually believes this, we have to add yet another psychiatric diagnosis to those which he has demonstrated symptoms of. So add another diagnosis to narcissistic personality disorder, anti-social personality disorder, and impulse control disorder. I’ve highlighted the symptoms of paranoid personality disorder that apply to Trump.

Paranoid personality disorder (PPD) is a mental disorder characterized by paranoia and a pervasive, long-standing suspiciousness and generalized mistrust of others. Individuals with this personality disorder may be hypersensitive, easily insulted, and habitually relate to the world by vigilant scanning of the environment for clues or suggestions that may validate their fears or biases. Paranoid individuals are eager observers. They think they are in danger and look for signs and threats of that danger, potentially not appreciating other evidence.[1]

They tend to be guarded and suspicious and have quite constricted emotional lives. Their reduced capacity for meaningful emotional involvement and the general pattern of isolated withdrawal often lend a quality of schizoid isolation to their life experience.[2][verification needed]People with PPD may have a tendency to bear grudges, suspiciousness, tendency to interpret others' actions as hostile, persistent tendency to self-reference, or a tenacious sense of personal right.[3] Patients with this disorder can also have significant comorbidity with other personality disorders. Wikipedia

Most of my therapist friends and acquaintances have chosen to work with patients who are highly motivated to get better, and for whom there is a high chance of success. Even those who treat the chronically mentally ill, developmentally disabled, or with substance abuse problems (and part of my program had a unit where we did that) we know that with smart, compassionate treatment the lives of these people can be drastically improved. 

The bane of therapists are patients or clients who have personality disorders. It is the exception rather than the rule that they come into therapy on their own. This is because most people with personality disorders lack insight into themselves. They don’t generally think they have a problem.  They tend to come in because their spouse has issued an ultimatum or they are court ordered. 

Trump would be a nightmare client. I assume there would be a psychotherapist somewhere who would agree to treat him for enough money. I’m not rich, and it would be nice to buy that Tesla,* but no amount of money would induce me to treat him.

* (Updated today, there's no way I would enrich Elon Musk by buying a Tesa.)

A new way to describe Trump: he's a dangerous, despotic, and demented demagogue, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

I am keeping my Washington Post subscription despite the outrage I share with the some 200,000 people who canceled their subscriptions in protest of what owner Jeff Bezos did. While I can read news articles elsewhere, in The New York Times for example, I can't read the Post opinions without a subscription. 

Today in the opinion section two down from the top column of the page position (when I read it), which had the attempt by Bezos to justify his decision to not let the paper endorse a candidate, is a column by Eli Merritt, a research assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, is the author of “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution.”

This is how he begins his column Opinion: There’s a better term for Trump than ‘fascist’ as follows:

As we approach the culmination of Donald Trump’s third bid for the presidency, I continue to be struck by how bumbling most Americans are at properly naming a breed of politicians that has bedeviled democracies since the time of the ancient Greeks.

The latest example of this linguistic disorder is the designation of the ex-president as a “fascist” by John F. Kelly, former Marine general and former chief of staff to Trump, as well as by Vice President Kamala Harris a day later.

It is not wrong to identify fascist tendencies in Trump, such as ultranationalism, ethnocentrism, cronyism, persecution of internal enemies and comfort with violence. But these traits also qualify him for classification as a dictator, despot, autocrat and authoritarian.

So why single out “fascist,” an inflammatory charge conjuring images of 20th-century mass murderers?

A far better designation, one that sums up Trump with precision, is “demagogue.”

He concludes by adding yet another word, one even more chilling than demagogue: tyrant.

What we know with confidence is that the ex-president is a demagogue par excellence, and in light of the history of demagogues transforming into tyrants, it’s indisputably ill-advised to restore him to the presidency.

But such matters are not for professors of political science to decide. If Trump prevails in the election, the question of what kind of leader he is will be put to a high-stakes test. We shall see with our own eyes.

I've thought that the word "fascist" applied to Trump wasn't having as much of an effect as it ought to. This was not only because too many Americans didn't know it's precise meaning, which I think is true, but because it didn't have an ominous enough ring to it. It seemed to me to be a soft sounding word. It didn't evoke the horrors of Hitler the way the word Nazi does. 

I hadn't thought of the word "demagogue" until now. While its meaning may be more obscure than "fascist" and everyone knows what a dictator is, "demagogue" not only sounds ominous but it lends itself to alterations like "Trump is a dangerous, despotic, and demented, demagogue." 

Trump, who I and other therapists, have called a malignant narcissist could also be correctly called a "malignant demagogue." Malignant is one of the most frightening word in the English language when a doctor uses it about yourself and a loved one. Everyone knows that  malignant cells (like those shown below in the AI picture of Trump sitting in front of a portrait of his favorite person) can spread and kill someone. 

Trump uses his attack words to demonize his enemies like he's swinging a cudgel. He's been successful in spewing lies doused in rheotical gasoline designed to inflame and incite his audience. He did this on Jan. 6th and was successful.

The Democrats have not been able to do this with their words. You'd think that their wordsmiths run whatever descriptions they think of applying to Trump by Miss Manners, who at 86 is still writing advice, columns before using them.

In the same Washington Post edition Jennifer Rubin uses the term fascism in her column: "The U.S. can learn from other countries’ encounters with fascism."

She begins her column this way:

The mainstream media — spurred by the disturbing outpouring of racism at Donald Trump’s rally on Sunday at Madison Square Garden — has finally zeroed in on the stakes of this election: the preservation of our democracy against a fascist threat. (As historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat pointed out: “He knows that everyone watching and attending knows that he is reenacting a Nazi show.”)

As retired general and former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly confirmed for the New York Times, Trump certainly meets the definition of a fascist: “It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.” The public has begun to catch on. (ABC News reports that half the country views Trump as a fascist.)

In the last week before the election let's see if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz can begin to make the case that Trump is a demagogue aspiring to be a tyrant.

Bonus:

Here's Trump assuring us that he's not a Nazi.

Yesterday's blog 

Trump's garden party was a wicked carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism but also a preview of what the country would be if he's elected

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