The news media is obsessed with the Epstein files and the Trump administration’s obvious cover-up to protect Trump.
But I want to suggest the media, as usual, has taken the bait and swallowed the hook thrown out by the mindless, conspiracy prone, right wing Trump supporters who feel betrayed because Trump promised them the heads of prominent Democrats on a platter when he released the Epstein files, all the while knowing his own was the one in jeopardy.
And that is the real distraction instead of Trump trying to change the subject. In fact, the Epstein story may be exactly what Trump wants in the headlines in order to hide the real scandal that is taking place.
The real story that should be in the headlines every day is Trump’s abuse of presidential power.
It’s all a part of Project 2025 that Heather Cox Richardson says needed “a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.”
Trump has become their man, undermining the rule of law in order to establish an imperial presidency with him sitting on the throne.
This is the story the news media is missing. In point of fact, the Epstein files can’t tell us anything we don’t already know about Trump. The man has already been convicted of the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll., with other women claiming he abused them as well. If he had sex with minors, or didn’t mind being friends with someone else who did, that only adds to the sordid story of who he is that we already know.
No, the real story is his abuse of power, and it’s happening daily, from withholding government funding to force states, school systems, universities, businesses, law firms to conform to Trump’s political agenda to making judicial appointments of people whose loyalty is to him rather than the Constitution to his pardoning of January 6 insurrectionists to his claiming he has the power to take over the governing of Washington, D. C. and New York City.
Just as astounding is the fact that a Republican Congress and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court have joined forces to aid and abet whatever Trump wants to do.
I confess that I don’t understand why they have, nor do I understand how any American voter is doing the same. But what I do understand is that they are betrayers of their country the same way every German who supported Hitler betrayed their country.
I realize saying that will upset Trump supporters, but that is exactly what I want to do. They need to be upset. We have reached the point in Trump’s presidency where his intentions are clear and they represent a raw betrayal of his oath of office that has become cruel and mean.
It is this significant cruelty and meanness that makes the Hitler comparison appropriate and necessary. We see this most clearly in the way he is treating every immigrant living on American soil. He is doing everything he can to make them be seen as “the other,” as “vermin,” as he once called them, people who he says are “poisoning the blood of America.” His policies are proving that he was serious about his view of them.
Trump claims, of course, that he is weeding out criminals, but we know for a fact that is not true. Best estimates based on those who have been harassed, arrested, imprisoned, and already deported is that the majority of them (67% to 72%) have no criminal record at all.
Worse, the harassment tactics ICE agents are using against them is gratuitous, arresting children, tearing families apart, deporting mothers with children undergoing cancer treatment.
The truth about Trump’s ICE agents is that they are the American equivalent of the German Gestapo that served as Hitler’s secret police. Trump is using them to expel every immigrant ICE can arrest from America the way Hitler initially wanted the Jews expelled from Europe before he devised “the final solution.”
That’s as Hitler-like as it gets, and that is how we should see Trump. He is even spending billions of dollars building the Trump version of Hitler’s concentration camps. The name “Alligator Alcatraz” should offend every American because it should not and I believe does not represent the kind of people we are.
Instead of seeing that phrase and what it represents as dehumanizing, Trump makes jokes about it. That’s the kind of man he is, someone who jokes about the suffering of others.
It’s past time to stop playing nice with Trump, his co-insurrectionists, and every American who willfully and unwittingly support him. Resisting Trump requires telling the truth about him and them.
I wish none of this were true, but it is and we know it is. Compare Trump to Hitler and Republicans go off the deep end, but the real shame is that they refuse to see it. Neither did the German voters and politicians who supported Hitler until it was too late.
In 1867 economist John Stewart Mills said, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” (A paraphrase of this statement is often mistakenly attributed to philosopher Edmund Burke).
We cannot be the good men and women who look on and do nothing. We must speak. We must act. We must not stay silent when anyone dares to bring up Trump’s name.
If that means we lose friends, become alienated from family, upset a church, it’s the price we have to pay for living at this time in history. German families and German friendships were torn apart because of Hitler, and now it is happening here in America.
We wish it were not the case, but it is, and naivete about it will make it worse rather than better. Donald Trump is America’s Adolph Hitler. He doesn’t have to do everything Hitler did to earn the comparison.
The point is, he is tearing down our country with the same kind of ego-centric cruelty and callousness that drove Hitler to do what he did. This is a new experience for all of us. We have never faced such a moment just as Germany had not faced the rise of Nazism before it happened.
Too many Germans looked on and did nothing, failing to understand the threat Hitler posed. Reading the American news media right now, it is clear that the same thing is happening to us. Many Americans disapprove of what Trump is doing, but they don’t see him for the evil person he is.
At the moment the only thing going for those of us who oppose him are the judges – conservative and liberal – who are trying to hold the line of defense for the sake of democracy.
They need to know because of our words and actions that they have our support, that we stand with them, not with Trump. And even though they are more than a year away, we must prepare for the mid-term elections in order to defeat every Republican running for office, every – single – one.
That will send a message to Trump and everyone who is supporting him that his dream of being a king, and a despotic one at that, is never going to become a reality because we, the people, will not stand for it.
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