Donald Trump’s thugs

When Donald Trump was asked, now that he’s pardoned many of them, if the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, whom Trump once asked to “stand back and stand by,” would have a place in politics, he replied, “We’ll have to see … I thought their sentences were ridiculous and excessive. One of the guys took down … an anti-American flag, and he was given years in jail. … At least the cases that we looked at. These were people that actually love our country.”
There are some problems with this answer. First, no one was sent to prison for years for taking down an anti-American flag. Second, Trump and his team didn’t look at any of the cases. They pardoned everybody without any consideration for the crimes they committed whatsoever. Third, these aren’t people who love America, they hate America, and they want to destroy its freedoms and replace them with a fascist dictatorship headed by Trump. Other than that, it was a perfectly reasonable reply.
But the truly worrisome part is Trump thinks “we’ll have to see” if the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers will have a place in American politics. The answer, of course, is they already do, now more than ever. Whether or not some of them will one day be appointed to formal federal employment is a moot point. They have already become emboldened by Donald Trump’s informal apparatus of stochastic extralegal terror. They will continue to be used — now more than ever.
Donald Trump has many weapons in his personal arsenal of hate. First, he has the power to commit any crime he wants to, up to and including murder, without fear of prosecution later. All he needs to do is make sure that the crime or murder in question is part of his official presidential duties, a terrifyingly vague requirement. Second, he has the power to corruptly pardon anyone guilty of a federal crime. Third, he will soon have his sycophants in place prepared to weaponize federal law enforcement.
Perhaps the scariest weapon he has is the one he’s wielded now for ten years. Trump’s weapon of stochastic terror is now more powerful than ever. It is made stronger by the tepid, compliant, corporate media. It is unfettered by weakling judges making timid threats of empty charges of contempt of court. It is buttressed by a Department of Justice headed by people who think the January 6 insurrectionists were “patriots.”
There is a historic precedent for this kind of corrupt power. Hitler employed it constantly. He gave tacit approval to thugs roaming the streets of Berlin and Munich committing crimes. If those crimes were deemed to be “patriotic,” that is, committed in the name of Hitler’s totalitarian racist agenda, they were overlooked.
Perhaps the most famous example of this was “Kristallnacht,” or the “night of broken glass,” which was a pogrom carried out by Hitler’s thugs against German Jews. Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked. Attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout the German Reich. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.
We have already seen what happens when the full power of a state is available to a madman. Hitler showed us what it looks like. We are about to find out what that power looks like in the hands of the MAGA toad-god.
The good news is America has obstructive resources that were lacking in Nazi Germany. We have more people who hate Trump than the entire population of Hitler’s Germany. We have anti-Trump activists on social media, podcasts and progressive online media. We have the underpinnings of democracy and the right to vote.
With these resources we can defeat the Trump toad-god and his Nazis. It’s up to us. We must never give up. We must do so before the American system crumbles to dust and they really do install a second Adolf Hitler.
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Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.