This is America

Here’s the lede of the ABC News story reporting on the fact that Donald Trump’s campaign posted Nazi rhetoric on his campaign web site yesterday:

Former President Donald Trump on Monday posted a video on his social media platform that uses a language that appears to mirror that of Nazi Germany, suggesting there will be a “Unified Reich” if he wins the 2024 election.

No, it doesn’t APPEAR to mirror Nazi rhetoric, it SIMPLY DOES mirror Nazi rhetoric. Nobody else in American political history has gotten this consistently sanitizing treatment, where the candidate or elected official says something explicitly, right out in the open, and the media report it in the most equivocal way possible.

And they’ve been doing it now for nine years, including an entire presidency, and an attempted coup, and the shambolic nightmare of the Biden administration’s attempts to sort of maybe prosecute Trump for trying to overthrow the government, again right out in the open, as if that had to be “investigated” for a couple of years before we could figure out who exactly was behind the events of January 6, 2021.

Indeed, Merrick Garland’s slow-walking of the legal proceedings against Trump himself following the autogolpe is part and parcel of the same cultural phenomena that produce things like that ABC News headline.

The message in both cases is, “We’re not that kind of country.” Thus Donald Trump only appears to be a fascist, because he’s not really a fascist, because if he were really a fascist that would mean that one of the nation’s two major parties has gone fascist, which means America is on the verge of going fascist, which is impossible, because this is America, and we’re not that kind of country. And Trump only appeared to try to overthrow the government by staying in power after losing an election, because come on there’s not even a word in American for that, you have to use a Spanish word, because that’s what happens in banana republics, not in America.

“American exceptionalism” is simply denial.

Relatedly, nobody is even talking about how the same ad featuring something that “appeared” to sound better in the original German also featured a banner headline announcing that the new Trump administration had deported 15 million people, i.e. about one out of every twenty residents of this country. Every Republican should be asked, repeatedly, “Do you support Donald Trump’s plan to deport 15 million people as soon as he becomes president again?” And is Stephen Miller going to organize the train schedules?

Oh right, this is America, we don’t do that kind of thing (except for the other times when we did).

History is a nightmare from which this country has never awoken.