While on the subject of Google, Donald Trump has accused Google of being fake news by not playing up his yellow press following. This normalization of crazy is very similar to the effect of boiling a lobster: throw the lobster into cold water, turn on the heat, and the lobster never notices a change in temperature because it is so gradual.
What other president in modern history has ever threatened the press, let alone a third party, about not receiving sufficient accolades? None comes to mind. Nixon complained about the press, but he never claimed there was an alternative source of information that played up his good side. Trump is not so sui generis, if we’re willing to look further in history.
We must not forget that Trump famously defended Nazis on American soil. This of course was not coincidental, as Trump has always had a soft side for white nationalists, like his own father.
An example of the very lukewarm water that boils the lobster is Trump’s effort to load the judiciary with right-wing judges with lifetime appointments. McConnel’s theft of the Supreme court seat is another example of how the once unthinkable becomes the normal.
What exactly is the endgame of the Republican effort to pack the courts, suppress votes and steal elections? Is there an example in history as to what the end goal might be? Could it be that the Tea Party/Trumpeteers really have a chance of becoming the party in permanence?
Here’s a quote that might prove instructive about those who claim there should be civility with Republicans. Remember, it was a drug addicted Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice who decided there would be no Florida recount in Bush v. Gore. Remember too that it was McConnel who said the sitting President of the United States could not appoint a justice to the Supreme Court.
The quote comes from Joseph Goebbels, who was Hitler’s minister of propaganda:
“We enter [government] in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear’s work, that is its affair … We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.”
This is very much the argument made by Republicans who want to enter government in order to reduce it in size so that it can be drowned in a bathtub. Why else does Trump give cover to Nazis and anti-government terrorists?
In reality, Trump is too stupid and too lazy to oversee a takeover of the country by neo-fascists. But in his laziness and eagerness to please the white-nationalist right, he has given voice to American Nazis. It is worth repeating again, the President of the United States–the country that rid the world of fascism in World War II–has given political cover to individuals whose goal is a fascist government in the United States.
It is not enough for Republican Senator Orrin Hatch to exclaim that his brother did not die fighting Nazis, for homegrown Nazis to then rise up in America. The heating up of the water that eventually kills the lobster is imperceptible. The heating up of the political discourse ends when Americans stand up and tell Trump that his courting of Nazism makes him unfit for office.