I hope these two articles are right but I am still scared. How scared am I and how scared are you? By Hal M. Brown, MSW

Image by Perchance AI Photos

I was perusing the internet this morning and among the first few articles that caught my attention there were two that gave me some guarded feelings of optimism. Still, I am scared. How scared am I? There's one English idiom that some may consider vulgar but it describes better than any I can think of: I am almost, but not quite literally

The first article was:

Will Trump try to end democracy? Yes — but these scholars claim he can't pull it off

The second article was:

Former Trump lawyer punches major hole in plan to contest the 2024 election

Like millions of Americans I am almost, but not quite literally, scared shitless. Consider this video:

I wrote the other day (here ) about how words often fail to describe feelings.  

"Adding together what may become of the United States under Trump and what may happen in Israel there aren't words to describe the horror"

The evocative phase "scared shitless" comes close as long as it isn't used casually and you think of the times you had really bad diarrhea.

The two articles I cite address different situations but both offer an optimistic take. The first suggests that even if Trump wins democracy is not doomed. It explains how it may survive despite Trump and his MAGA minions attempts to dismantle and destroy it. The second, by former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb (one of the well known political mustache men), explains that if Trump loses the election he is likely to fail in his legal efforts to overturn the results.

People handle the possiblity of impending doom differently. Some engage in denial and avoidance. They just manage to turn off bad thoughts. They don't follow the news and try not to associate with people who want to talk about it. 

With the exception of thrill seeking junkies like sky divers and bungee jumpers most people don't seek out anxiety. Some avoid anything that provides it and other develop mechanisms to deal with things that trigger it.

Others are like me. While I let myself dwell on worse case scenarios I manage not to become overwhelmed by my fears. I think that no matter what happens poltically I and both those I love and other like-minded people will survive. If the worst comes to pass I will do what I can to fight the good fight. I will give emotional support to my friends. I will participate in the protests described in the first article. I will write my blogs. I will donate to pro-democracy causes.

In the meantime, when my anxiety provoking thoughts threaten to overwhelm me I am able to distract myself and put them out of my mind and I do and think about pleasant things.

Unfortunately others through no fault of their own can't strike this balance or have a lot of trouble doing this. They feel swamped by worry and anxiety. Sometimes this is to the point that it effects them physically and their health is jeopardized. Insomnia, eating too much or too little, overdoing alcohol or drugs, experiencing debilitating depression or anxiety are examples of what can happen. To get back to how I began this blog, they can literally have digestive problems.

Recent blogs:

It can happen here, right? RIGHT!!! Start by asking what kind of monsters put children in cages and go from there. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

Let's say the new $100,000 Trump watch is worth $100,000, why the hell does Trump think it is a good idea to sell it now? By Hal M. Brown, MSW

It happened in Germany and Russia. If Trump wins It could happen here, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

Read all blogs here.

It can happen here, right? RIGHT!!! Start by asking what kind of monsters put children in cages and go from there. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

Thinking of this, which I often do, evokes a feeling of horrow beyond words. I see in my mind the well known photos of the the entrance to Auschwitz. (Photos and captions from Wikipedia)

Above: A doctor, center, with the 322nd Rifle Division of the Red Army, walks with a group of survivors at the entrance to the newly liberated Auschwitz I concentration camp in January 1945. The Red Army liberated the camp on January 27, 1945. Above the gate is the motto "Arbeit macht frei," which translates to "Work sets you free."

I think of pictures like these:

Above: Jews are deported from Würzburg, 25 April 1942. Deportation occurred in public and was witnessed by many Germans.

Below: I think of Heinrich Himmler (second left)  visiting Auschwitz where he witnessed the gassing of Jews:

I think of these happy looking NAZI officers:

Who are they? The are three SS officers socializing on the grounds of the SS retreat outside of Auschwitz, at “Solahütte”, 1944. From left to right they are: Richard Baer (Commandant of Auschwitz), Dr. Josef Mengele and Rudolf Hoess (the former Auschwitz Commandant).

I was think of trying to write about this as I fell asleep last night. This morning I read this essay by S.V. Date who is the senior White House correspondent for HuffPost (bio). The article says much of what I planned to write about.

It Can’t Happen Here, Right? RIGHT???

Jan. 6... Terminating the Constitution... Rounding up 21 million people.... America, we’ve got some bad news.

It begins:

Nine decades later, that “it” is also what dozens of Republican donors, campaign consultants, pollsters and others interviewed by HuffPost say cannot possibly happen. They scoff at any analogy between former President Donald Trump, a man they support with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and the infamous dictators of the past. They insist that worries about Trump remaking the country as an autocracy are overwrought and designed solely to keep a Democrat in the White House.

“This will be a short period in history and we will swing right back to the middle,” said Hugh Culverhouse, a Miami lawyer who so far has given $500,000 toward Trump’s reelection effort.

While authoritarianism experts and democracy advocates hope Culverhouse is right, they worry – deeply – that he is not.

It is, of course, impossible to know for certain what a second Trump presidency might bring or whether, should he manage to seize absolute power, his rule would come anywhere close to the depravity of the tyrants of the last century.

Still, no other presidential nominee in United States history has behaved with the contempt for democracy that Trump has already demonstrated or even hinted at the sorts of autocratic actions Trump promises if he is returned to power. 

Could the predictions laid out in this article come to pass if Trump wins? Consider this Axios article:

Excerpt: 

Former President Trump, if elected, would build a Cabinet and White House staff based mainly on two imperatives: pre-vetted loyalty to him and a commitment to stretch legal and governance boundaries, sources who talk often with the leading GOP presidential candidate tell Axios.

Why it matters: Trump would fill the most powerful jobs in government with men like Stephen Miller, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Kash Patel — with the possible return of Steve Bannon. If Trump won in 2024, he'd turn to loyalists who share his zeal to punish critics, purge non-believers, and take controversial legal and military action, the sources tell us.

Trump and his prospective top officials don't mince words about their plans:

• They want to target and jail critics, including government officials and journalists; deport undocumented immigrants or put them in detainment camps, and unleash the military to target drug cartels in Mexico, or possibly crack down on criminals or protesters at home. 
• They want to scrap rules that limit their ability to purge government workers deemed disloyal. 

Hitler had his inner circle of 10 top lieutenants including Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, Bormann, and Speer, and Trump will have others you've heard of and others who are just as evil who most of you aren't familair with. 

Is there be a difference between them?

You say tomato, I say tomahto... let's hope the title and verse from the song holds true for the United States: 

Addendum:

Do Trump and his MAGA minions who want a lily white colored Christian country welcome the following people?

There were about 47.8 million immigrants in 2023. This represents approximately 14.3% of the population, or about 1 in 7 residents in the United States. Immigrants are defined as foreign-born residents. As of 2022 there were nearly 731,000 Haitian immigrants residing in the United States, comprising the country's 15th largest foreign-born population. There are about 3.5 million Muslims residing in the United States.

The most recent census (here) shows that the United States is becoming a multi-ethnic country.

The pale skinned MAGAs may put up with Jews, Black, and Asian people being part of society, but clearly they would like to see the others disappear.

Yesterday's blog.

Thursday blog is related to today's blog:

Read previous blogs.

Let's say the new $100,000 Trump watch is worth $100,000, why the hell does Trump think it is a good idea to sell it now? By Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

In case you haven't heard it being discussed on MSNBC (read'$100,000 for that?" MSNBC's Morning Joe panel loses it over Trump's watch offer)
 or elsewhere, Trump is now selling the Trump watch for $100,000.

This is from Wired:

If you read RawStory there are two articles about it: 

and

There are other $100,000 watches semi-rich watch aficionados can buy or already have in their collections. For example, these are from 

Five of the Top Watches That Cost Around $100,000

Of course they don't have Trump's name on the front and "fight, fight, fight" engraved on the back.

I say semi-rich because the rich rich can buy watches like these that cost millions.

Here's a dandy example. 

Nothing screams "I'm filthy rich" more than wearing a watch that costs as much as this golden super yacht. (Article)

As this is going on we have Melania making the news this way: 

Trump Sells $100K Gold Watches on Same Day Melania Insists People Can’t Afford Basic Necessities

Excerpt:

On the same morning (as Trump introduced his watch), Melania Trump appeared on Fox & Friends to promote her new memoir. Speaking with Ainsley Earhardt about Vice President Kamala Harris replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic Party ticket, Melania Trump said people are not able to buy “usual necessities” due to high inflation and her husband was “great for the country.”

“How I see it is, the record speaks for itself. The country is suffering. People are not able to buy the usual necessities for their families,” Melania Trump said. “We have wars going on around the world. Soldiers are dying. They were dying under this administration because of weak leadership. The border is open and dangerous.”

She added that people were “prospering” more under her husband’s administration and argued that everything is “great” when it comes to Donald Trump, but that you’ll have to accept some “strong tweets.”

“I think the American people need to decide what they really want. Maybe some strong tweets, but everything else great for this country,” she said. “SoHe' it’s all in the American people’s hands on November 5.”

It isn't that there aren't a few people who want to curry favor with Trump who will buy these watches. After all, it costs $200,000 to join Mar-a-Lago. This is about narcisstic messaging. However, Trump is supposed to be a master of messaging. 

Trump said "It has almost 200 grams of gold and more than 100 real diamonds. That's a lot of diamonds. I love gold. I love diamonds. We all do. Owning one puts you in a very exclusive club."  Who can relate to this?

Come on numbnuts, really, who is this message aimed at? How many of these watches does he need to sell to even make it worth his while? He'd need to sell 10 to make a million dollars minus the cost of the watch. The world of Trump is crazy but are there even 10 people willing to shell out 100 grand for.. well... for what exactly?

There may actually by a few MAGA cultists who, for example,  bought the golden sneakers or stock in Truth Social who learn about this and realize that they were suckers and that Trump cares about as much for them and their well-being as he cares for a kale salad.

This grift could backfire on Trump like some piece of crap junker car:

Yesterday's blog:

Read prevous blogs.

 

It happened in Germany and Russia. If Trump wins It could happen here, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

It is fitting that the photo I used as a background shows people giving what could be decribed as a Heil Trump salute. It was used to illustrate an article in The Atlantic. Here's the full photo.

Here are the covers of two books that I've been thinking about:

Why did I use the two books aboout ordinary Germans in the above illustration? Chauncey DeVega lays it out in detail here:

He begins his column:

Donald Trump and his surrogates are continuing to channel and amplify Nazism and Adolf Hitler. This is not random or happenstance. It is part of a strategy. “Feral politics” made even more explosive and toxic by adding blatant white supremacy, racism, and antisemitism. Occam’s razor, as it often does, provides the most simple and compelling proof of how Trump and his campaign’s feral hate politics strategy is very intentional: He and they have increased their antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy (and misogyny and hostile sexism) greatly in the last few weeks as the polls and other metrics show him tied with if not behind Kamala Harris, a Black South Asian woman, in the presidential election.

Adolf Hitler is one of the most evil leaders in recorded human history. Hitler and his Nazi regime are responsible for the systematic, industrial-scale mass murder of six million Jewish people and millions of others (including Black Germans). World War II, the deadliest in human history, resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world (estimates range from 50 million to 70 million or more). Almost 80 years after the end of World War II, Nazism and the various forms of racial fascism, and the other antidemocratic and illiberal political belief systems and ideologies in its orbit have not been fully vanquished. They are resurgent in the form of Trumpism, American fascism, and the larger global antidemocracy movement.

This very brief history lesson about the evils of Hitler and Nazi Germany is necessary given the broken state of America’s schools and a society where amnesia and organized forgetting are the norm. For many Americans of a certain age (and older,) Hitler and the Nazis have been reduced to the stuff of internet and social media memes from the movie “Downfall,” generic characters to kill in video games, or perhaps in their most real and frightening form as outliers in American society who rampaged in Charlottesville or commit hate crimes.  

Trump, with Vance ready to step in should he no longer be able to serve, may be the leader of ordinary Americans about whom books may be written five decades from now. Hitler's Willing Executioners was published in 1996. Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis was published in 2021.

Like me, some of you won't be around 50 years from now if books like "Trump's Willing Executioners" and "Trump's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became MAGAs" are published. Even if Trump wins there's no way to know that he'll be able to achieve his Project 2025 goals which will turn us into a modern day version of Nazi Germany or post-revolution Russia. There's no way to predict whether these books could even be published in the United States. Similar books could never be published in Russia.

After World War II  half of Germany became a democracy (technically a  democratic and federal parliamentary republic) and the other half was socialist and closely allied with Russia. It was only unified as a democracy in 1990. 

On the other hand, consider that the Soviet Union was formed as a result of the 1917 Russian Revolution with Lenin as its leader. Stalin led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1954. Then there were a series of dictators:

Click above to enlarge image.

Who knows what a list of American leaders will look like 100 years from now? Will we have a list of dictators or of fairly elected democratic leaders? 

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Adding together what may become of the United States under Trump and what may happen in Israel there aren't words to describe the horror.

Will Trump go down like Gotti?

Cluck, cluck, cluck: Trump has to suffer the consequences of his refusal to debate Harris a second time

Ethnonational fascism or Nazism, Trump and Vance have made it clear this is the America they want and many are hatefully happy about this

Trump and his Elvis obsession shows he is delusional and possibly demented

Sarah Huckabee Sanders vying with Vance for publicity in stand against childless cat ladies

It's naive young voters who may either make the country into a dictatorship or keep our democracy

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Adding together what may become of the United States under Trump and what may happen in Israel there aren't words to describe the horror, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

After I check my email I usually look at HuffPost first thing just to see their top story and this is what I saw today:

This was the lead story in both The NY Times and The Washington Post. With MSNBC's Richard Engle reporting from a bomb-safe hospital...

 ... I looked at RawStory, the next website I go to, which summarizes breaking news in American politics being reported on in other media:

The English langauge is replete with words to describe horrible things. One of the definitions of replete, by chance, is "filled or well-supplied with something: sensational popular fiction, replete with adultery and sudden death."

I recall President Biden using the phrase "that's not hyperbole when I say..." In fact, as this and other articles has said, this has been one of his most used sayings:

Hyperbole is another way to say sensationalization. How do we describe something real that is so beyond the pale ordinary words don't suffice to descibe it? There are prefaces like calling something "mega-" which means "extremely" but there is no single word. There is no word to describe a unique in history event like the Holocaust. 

There are times when images rather than words convey the awfulness of a situation. Here's another example this clip from Apocalypse Now"

If someone is equally horrified both by what may happen in the United States and what may happen in Israel there are no English words to describe what a doubled horror is or what it feels like.

Sometimes we may need images like Guernica by Picasso and the most reproduced part of Jan van Eyck's Crucifixion and Last Judgement diptych.

Most recent blogs:

Will Trump go down like Gotti?

Cluck, cluck, cluck: Trump has to suffer the consequences of his refusal to debate Harris a second time

Ethnonational fascism or Nazism, Trump and Vance have made it clear this is the America they want and many are hatefully happy about this

Trump and his Elvis obsession shows he is delusional and possibly demented

Sarah Huckabee Sanders vying with Vance for publicity in stand against childless cat ladies

It's naive young voters who may either make the country into a dictatorship or keep our democracy

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