I’m going to interpret this as a good omen

Bernard “Bernie” Marcus, the billionaire Home Depot cofounder and a Republican megadonor, who in recent years became an outspoken supporter of former President Donald Trump, has died, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN. He was 95.

The Home Depot didn’t immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Marcus, who had a net worth of about $7.4 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, gained his fortune from establishing The Home Depot with Arthur Blank in 1978. The duo grew the orange-clad hardware store into a retail behemoth that now has 2,300 stores and a stock market valuation of nearly $400 billion.

Born in 1929 in Newark, New Jersey, to Russian Jewish immigrants, Marcus was the youngest of four siblings. He earned his degree in merchandising and marketing at Rutgers University and went into the retailing industry working for various chains.

He met Blank when they worked at Handy Dan Home Improvement, a chain in California. They both were fired after new management came in, so the duo hatched a plan to start a new chain that was bigger than traditional hardware stores with better-trained staff. Then, the Home Depot was born.

Arthur Blank, who among other things owns the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, is apparently a Harris supporter.

Stephen Ross, who owns the Miami Dolphins — he’s the nephew of Max Fisher — is also on the Jewish billionaires who support Trump roster, along with the widow of that other guy whose name I have no wish to recall at the moment. Ross has given nearly half a billion dollars to my alma mater, and the whole athletic complex is named after him, along with the business school. (Michigan just announced a new seven-billion dollars fundraising campaign this week, and I’ll be interested to see how the administration handles the Stephen Ross question).

I taught Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism last week, and I keep thinking of this passage in particular:

“No dictator rules by himself. He must obtain the cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of the decisive agencies of rule — the military, the police, the judiciary, senior civil servants — and of powerful social and economic forces. In the special case of fascism, having depended upon conservative elites to open the gates to him, the new leaders could not shunt them casually aside. Some degree, at least, of obligatory power sharing with the preexisting conservative establishment made fascist dictatorships fundamentally different in their origins, development, and practice from that of Stalin. Consequently we have never known an ideologically pure fascist regime. Indeed, the thing hardly seems possible. Each generation of scholars of fascism has noted that the regimes rested upon some kind of pact or alliance between the fascist party and powerful conservative forces. In the early 1940s the social democratic refugee Franz Neumann argued in his classic Behemoth that a “cartel” of party, industry, army, and bureaucracy ruled Nazi Germany, held together only by ‘profit, power, prestige, and especially fear.’”