Month: October 2024

Howdy. We have one last Wednesday before election day, and then the turmoil that follows. I never know if this video will be an unintended harbinger of some sort, but one member of my family was drumming professionally in southern California back in the late 1980s up until about the mid-1990s, and Vinnie Colaiuta was one of her favorite drummers to watch perform live. We went and saw his band at the time play a gig at Catalina’s just days before the LA riots of 1992. Get past the tense atmosphere outside the club in that moment, Vinnie was in top form and was just amazing to watch. Here’s a video from 2006 at Catalina’s.

The bar is open and the jukebox is limited by your imagination. Hang in there everyone. Cheers.

Let’s talk about a very specific lie Donald Trump has been telling on the campaign trail. He says he loves clean air and clean water, and who doesn’t? But, as the New York Times reports, he’s not telling the truth about his record.

“During our four years, we had the cleanest air and the cleanest water,” Trump said during an interview with the podcast host Joe Rogan last week.

That statement is not accurate. As president, Trump rolled back reams of environmental regulations, leading to increases in harmful emissions from power plants and factories, and an uptick in pollutants flowing into public waterways.

This shouldn’t be complicated or even controversial. We can debate whether a specific policy or program aimed at protecting water and air quality is a good trade off or not if, for example, it might cost jobs or raise consumer prices. But it’s obvious that ending policies or cutting programs aimed at reducing pollution will increase pollution. During Trump’s presidency, the air and water of the country got dirtier because his policies made them dirtier.

When it comes to burning fossil fuels, we know that a lot of people make money in the oil and gas industries. We know that people want cheap energy and suffer when prices are high. We’d all like America to continue as an energy-independent country. But we also know that these industries are the main drivers of an increase in average global temperatures. We know that the year 2023 “was the hottest in recorded history by a wide margin.” And we know that higher temperatures lead to more wildfires, flooding, and hurricanes, among other problems like drought and crop loss.

Trump regularly repeats Sarah Palin’s old mantra that we should, “Drill, baby, drill,” and has courted oil and gas executives.  He asked them “to donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign while promising to roll back regulations.”

There’s research being done on how to take some of the carbon produced by fossil fuels out of the air, and hopefully we can find ways to make burning fossil fuels less harmful to the environment, but in general it is obvious that burning more fossil fuels will make temperatures rise higher and faster. Loosening regulations, including any plan to“tear down and rebuild” the Environmental Protection Agency, will encourage more carbon pollution while doing less to mitigate its effects. If you support this because you think your livelihood or your local economy depends on it, that may be shortsighted and selfish, but it’s at least a reason. Some people don’t feel they have the luxury to make sacrifices for the greater good, and I’m not here to disrespect them or dismiss their concerns. But I will dismiss and disrespect people who think Trump’s record or proposals produced or will produce clean air and clean water, or lower global temperatures.

They won’t because they’re designed to do the opposite.

Why does Trump promise more pollution with his policies while saying he loves clear air and clean water? It’s because he wants that $1 billion from the oil and gas industry, and he wants votes and political support from people and communities that work in those industries, but he wants to fool others that he cares about the environment and the future.

Don’t fall for it.

 

On Tuesday night, one week before Election Day, Kamala Harris drew an estimated crowd of 75,000 to the White House Ellipse to hear her give a closing argument for her campaign for the presidency. The location was symbolic, because it’s the same place Trump delivered his infamous January 6th speech asking his supporters to walk down to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to prevent the orderly transfer of power to Joe Biden and Harris.

In June 2022, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified before the congressional committee investigating the January 6 coup attempt. As part of her testimony, she swore that President Trump had grown annoyed just prior to his appearance at the Ellipse that there were long lines to get through security.

Minutes before Donald Trump took the stage at an Ellipse rally on Jan. 6, 2021, he urged the Secret Service to remove security magnetometers to let in people with weapons because “they’re not here to hurt me,” a former top White House aide told investigators on Tuesday.

This meant, of course, that he knew some of his supporters were armed and were there to hurt somebody prior to directing them to fight at the Capitol. Harris did not ask that magnetometers be removed on Tuesday night, nor is it possible to imagine her doing so. She didn’t direct an armed mob to commit violence, but asked a civil crowd to listen. She didn’t demand that the assembled crowd disregard the verdict of the American electorate, but rather invited the electorate to participate and “make a decision that directly impacts your life, the life of your family and the future of this country we love.”

And when she asked the people there to “fight,” it wasn’t against another branch of government but rather “for this beautiful country we love,” because “in seven days, we have the power, each of you has the power to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told. I thank you all.”

The extraordinary story wasn’t about America becoming a garbage heap of nonwhite immigrants but of a people who “nearly 250 years ago…wrested freedom from a petty tyrant,” and then “across the generations…preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing, proved to the world that a government of by and for the people is strong and can endure.”

I know which vision for the future I will choose. It’s time to vote for that future.

Annie Karni of the New York Times, took a crack at understanding what Donald Trump meant when he said at his Madison Square Garden rally that he and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson have a secret that will help them “do really well with the House.” Here is her set-up:

Speaker Mike Johnson was taking in former President Donald J. Trump’s grievance-fueled closing rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday afternoon when the main actor onstage turned to him and drew him into the drama.

“I think with our little secret we’re going to do really well with the House, right?” Mr. Trump said, addressing Mr. Johnson directly. “Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a little secret — we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

This aside, delivered with a small chuckle, set off a frenzy among frightened Democrats who have been living with something akin to post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the last two presidential election cycles, and who are now primed to fear the worst.

In this case, the worst is very bad: It is a scenario in which Mr. Johnson, who worked with Mr. Trump to undermine the 2020 election results, would again be in cahoots with the former president to steal the election and stop the certification of the results on Jan. 6, 2025, should Vice President Kamala Harris win.

The most innocuous interpretation of Trump’s remarks is that he was referring to maintaining majority control of the U.S. House of Representatives, but in context that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, which is why many people assumed he was referring to the House’s role in choosing or certifying the winner of the presidential election.

When asked about it, Mike Johnson got very prickly, and he confirmed that whatever the secret might be, its main feature is that it “might help Donald Trump.”

In a statement provided to The New York Times, the mild-mannered Mr. Johnson did nothing to alleviate those fears. Instead, he seemed to confirm that there was, in fact, a “little secret” — and that he planned to keep it that way.

“Speaking of secrets,” Mr. Johnson said, “Harris knew Biden was physically and mentally impaired and kept it a secret. The F.B.I. knew the Hunter Biden laptop was real and kept it secret. They also knew Russia collusion was fake and kept that a secret, too.”

Mr. Johnson added: “It appears that all those secrets didn’t matter to the media because they all helped Democrats. But this one might help Donald Trump, and now they care? By definition, a secret is not to be shared — and I don’t intend to share this one.”

Now, if Donald Trump wins the Electoral College, he won’t need any help from Mike Johnson. But if he loses the Electoral College and still wants to become president somehow, he most definitely will need Johnson’s help. And here is how they can pull off a coup.

Let’s start with what happened in 2020. Trump lost the Electoral College so he went to court to challenge the results and lost in state after state. When he couldn’t prevent the states from certifying the results, he set up “alternate electors” to certify phony results in a half dozen states, and asked Vice-President Mike Pence to use these fake electors on January 6, 2021 when Congress met in Joint Session to certify Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the winners. When this effort failed, he unleashed a violent mob on Congress to try to do by force what he could not do by persuasion. This coup attempt was deadly and destructive, but it ended in six hours or so with Trump defeated. But please keep in mind that he was prepared to try to serve out a second term in office using whatever force was necessary to stop the backlash against a nakedly stolen election. Remember this if you think what I’m about to say is outlandish.

So, to begin, this plan will probably not work unless the Republicans maintain control of the House. They are not currently favored to stay in the majority, largely because they are expected to lose a bunch of seats in New York and California. If you’re wondering why Trump has been campaigning in New York and California when they are not considered competitive in the presidential race, you now have your answer.

So, in the event that the Republicans win the House but Trump loses the election, the coup will look like this:

The first step is to dispute the results and say he was robbed. This will again involve fruitless court cases and a firehose of lies. This is just to create a lack of consensus about the winner.

The second step comes on January 3rd, 2025, when the new Congress is sworn in. In the House, this will involve all 435 members. Their first order of business will be to elect a new Speaker. If the Republicans have a narrow majority, as would be almost inevitable, they may not be able to settle on a Speaker in one day, or two days, or even three weeks. That’s what happened in 2023 when both Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson struggled to win the Speakership. But dysfunction won’t be part of the secret plan. The plan is to intentionally fail to elect a Speaker on the third of January.

Then comes January 6th when, in this scenario, Vice-President Kamala Harris is to preside over a Joint Session of Congress to count and certify her victory with Tim Walz over Trump and J.D. Vance. This is when the House Republicans will use their lack of a Speaker to refuse to cooperate. They might not have a leader but they will have a majority, and they’ll be able to defeat any motion to force them into the Joint Session. They’ll throw a lot of arguments in the air. They’ll say the election was rigged but also that they need to settle on a Speaker first. And so they’ll go into private caucus meetings and pretend to be working on electing a Speaker. But they will not choose one.

And this will go on, day after day, as the country howls in outrage, until noon on January 20, 2025, when President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris will constitutionally no longer be in charge. Without a president or vice-president, the Speaker of the House becomes president. Since this will now be an emergency, the Republicans will quickly elect Trump as Speaker and immediately elevate him to the presidency.

This will again leave them without a Speaker. It will also mean that Harris, since she is no longer vice-president, could not preside over any resumption of the Joint Session to certify the November election results. They will argue that the November election is constitutionally mooted anyway because it wasn’t certified before noon on January 20, and Trump is the rightful and constitutional president.

Then they will challenge anyone to do something about it.

The Supreme Court will not likely be an eager participant in this process, but they are sympathetic to Trump and intimidated by his supporters, and most importantly, they will have to acknowledge that Trump assumed the presidency because of he was in the line of succession when the country found itself without a president or vice-president. In other words, they’d have to invent some theory for why none of this should have ever happened and is illegitimate.

At this point, the country will be in crisis. Somewhere around 80 million people will have voted for Harris and Walz and many of them will be willing to use violence in an effort to set things right. Trump and Johnson know this, but they’re prepared to do this anyway, just as they were prepared to do it four years ago.

Now, you probably have some objections. And I’m here to tell you that many of your objections are probably, hopefully correct. This is a hare-brained scheme that should not work, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be attempted.

What we know is that Trump and Johnson have a secret plan to help Trump get elected and that it involves the U.S. House of Representatives. There are very few ways that Trump can become president, even in theory, using the House of Representatives if he loses the Electoral College. The scheme I have laid out here is the only one I can think of that would work in theory.

But it depends on a lot more than the Republicans maintaining control of the House. It also will require near unanimity among the House Republicans to go along with the scheme. This is a multistep plan, that requires they stay united against any effort to force them into a Joint Session on January 6th, or any time before noon on January 20th. It requires them to agree to make Trump their Speaker with the intention of elevating him to the presidency.

It also must overcome efforts by the Democrats to thwart their plans. It’s unclear what Harris can do on January 6th in the face of House Republicans refusing to join the Joint Session. It’s unclear what the Supreme Court might do to intervene at that stage. It’s unclear what the Senate Republicans are prepared to do whether or not they are in the majority, although the only thing they’d really need to do is acquiesce to Speaker Trump assuming the vacant office of the presidency. Finally, this wouldn’t be unfolding in a normal or peaceful environment. Washington DC is an overwhelmingly Democratic city and the people will revolt.

My guess is that the plan would falter because of House Republican defections. The effort to prevent this will be frightening, but I hope unsuccessful. I hope that the plan is exactly as fanciful as it sounds and that will fail on launch. But I have little doubt that this, or something very much like it, is what Johnson and Trump are calling their “secret plan.”

There’s just nothing else it really could be. It exploits weaknesses in our constitutional system and built-in advantages the Republicans enjoy to ensure Trump cannot lose, and it addresses a problem Trump did not have four years ago. Four years ago, Trump was already in the White House and he wanted to stay. This time, he has to find a way to get back in, and the only way is if he is elevated from the Speaker’s position.

Anyone who tells you what is motivating voters is lying. The best-informed people are the ones in charge of making ads because they’re constantly testing to see what messages resonate, but it’s hard to know if even they have a clue. The Trump campaign seems to think the best message for Pennsylvanians is about biological men playing girl’s sports and Kamala Harris wanting to pay for inmates getting sex changes. Maybe they’re right, but it seems like this anti-trans effort was tried in the 2022 midterms and bombed.

The Harris campaign is less singularly focused. They’re rotating through four main messages. The first features regular folks who say Trump is for the super-rich but they’re not super-rich and support Harris because she’ll protect Social Security and Medicare. The second features former Republicans expressing support for Harris. The third focuses on the unique danger presented by Trump. The final one focuses on women’s reproductive rights. Some of these messages overlap.

Here I just want to go back to October 2020 when the Access Hollywood “Grab’ em by the pussy” video became the biggest story in the campaign. I didn’t think Trump was going to win before that video, but I definitely thought he was toast after it. And I wasn’t alone, at all. We were all wrong.

So, I am never going to forget that error or the hubris and overconfidence that went along with it. It was my first thought when I saw that former National Security Council member David Rothkopf wrote that Sunday’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden was “political suicide.” He was referring specifically to some of the jokes made by right-wing comedian Tony Hinchcliffe who was part of the warm-up act for Elon Musk and Trump.

To date, getting upset about racist or sexist jokes has not been a way of beating back Trump or Trumpism. If anything, that kind of “Woke” complaining is fuel for the MAGA movement and their love of giving offense. Bitching about politically incorrect behavior is definitely ineffective at winning the white vote, but this time it might not matter. Almost everyone’s mind is already made up, so the only likely meaningful backlash against Hinchcliff’s jokes is going to come from the targets of those jokes.

That would be Jews, who are supposedly so un-athletic that they cannot throw a piece of paper, Palestinians who don’t know how to do anything but throw rocks, Puerto Ricans whose home island is a “floating garbage dump,” Blacks who do nothing but eat watermelon, and Latinos who breed like rabbits because they “cum” in their partners just like they “come” in the country.

The biggest impact appears to be in the Puerto Rican community. As Markos Moulitsas points out, the backlash was immediate:

The holy trinity of Puerto Rican stardom—Bad Bunny, J-Lo, and Ricky Martin, with over 315 million combined followers on Instagram alone—have been on a tear, sharing Vice President Kamala Harris’ plan for Puerto Rico side-by-side with the comedian’s racist tirade against the island.

There are substantial Puerto Rican populations in several swing states, including Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where the polls are tick-tight. And I think a lot of the people who follow Bad Bunny, J-Lo, and Ricky Martin on Instagram are probably not high-propensity voters who were paying close attention to the campaign. These hard-to-reach folks are exactly who the campaigns are trying persuade in the final days, and this was a big gift to Harris because it’s so disrespectful and the messengers are normally non-political.

Having said that, precisely because the anti-woke bullshit works so well for Trump with white voters, I don’t think Harris should want the national narrative to stay on this story. She needs to stick with the messages she’s been working with, on reproductive rights, Republicans who support her, protecting entitlements and the middle class, and the unique dangers of Trump.

Leave the speech-shaming to surrogates on Instagram.

But what do I know? As I told you, anyone who says they know what is motivating voters is lying.

Also, I visited Puerto Rico for the first time earlier this year, and it’s breathtakingly gorgeous.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Grand Canyon scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below. Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

Slow going for this week’s cycle. However, I’ve filled in empty space at the bottom and started the sky.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

If a meteor were about to hit the earth in under two weeks, at least we’d know. We wouldn’t need the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to tell us that this is a bad thing. During the presidency of Donald Trump, the Washington Post placed a permanent box on their front page that reads: “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” but it could also die in a giant civilization-ending fireball, too. Or it could die because billionaires who own our media are too afraid of the coming fascist regime to stand up to it before it comes to power.

The Los Angeles Times is owned by the extremely impressive Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is a brilliant medical researcher and businessman. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Their respective editorial boards both wanted to endorse Kamala Harris and Tim Walz but were thwarted by their owners.

I don’t actually think this will have any discernible effect on the outcome of the election, although in a close election, who knows? What makes it worth discussing is simply the motivation. Dr. Soon-Shiong says “the Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation” and that “instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”

By way of history, the L.A. Times was a Republican-endorsing paper from its founding until Watergate. Thereafter, it stopped endorsing in presidential races until 2008, when it backed Barack Obama. It has endorsed the Democrat in every presidential election since. The Washington Post has endorsed the Democrat in  every presidential cycle over the last 36 years. The last time they abstained was in 1988. Prior to that, they endorsed Carter and Mondale.

There used to be a real split in how newspapers endorsed between Republicans and Democrats, but that ended in 2016, when almost no editorial boards endorsed Trump, including papers like the Chicago Tribune that had endorsed Republicans for more than century. In fact, the Florida Times-Union and the Las Vegas Review-Journal are the only papers I see on this comprehensive list that backed Trump in 2016. Three boards refused to back Hillary Clinton, but took a “not Trump” position. This collective nationwide, non-ideological or partisan rejection of Trump was unprecedented, but it has certainly been vindicated. In 2020, the results were largely the same, although Trump gathered a handful of new endorsements from outlets like the New York Post, Toledo Blade, and Boston Herald. 

One obvious reason for a newspaper not to endorse an opponent of Trump is if it will alienate its readership. But that didn’t prevent many papers (e.g., the San Diego Union-Tribune, Columbus Dispatch, and Omaha World-Herald) with heavily conservative readerships from endorsing Hillary and Biden, or at least saying “not Trump”(e.g. the Fort Worth Star-Telegram). Some papers with an uninterrupted pattern of endorsing GOP presidential candidates, like the Tulsa World and Albuquerque Journal, simply sat out the 2016 and 2020 elections.

The point is, there has been widespread willingness by editorial boards of every stripe during the Trump Era to oppose Trumpism irrespective of risk. But now, suddenly, two major newspapers are cowering. And the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times did not have to worry that their readers would cancel their subscriptions if they endorsed Harris and Walz. In fact, they have to worry that subscriptions will be lost because they didn’t.

Of course, both Bezos and Soon-Shiong know their papers’ respective editorial boards don’t have much prospect of changing votes in places like Green Bay or Grand Rapids, where the election will be decided. And neither of them are considered Republicans or Republican ideologues. Bezos is on the record as being pleased with Biden’s victory in 2020. So, no, their reticence can’t be explained by partisan preference. And it’s highly doubtful that they took these decisions for some perceived financial benefits from Trump’s proposals, which most economists ridicule. Rather, the clear explanation is that they want to avoid punishment from a second Trump administration. In Bezos’ case this could include the Trump administration using antitrust powers to go after Amazon or, if he loses, Republicans in Congress not  defending Amazon from antitrust measures brought by a Harris administration.

There are reasons Bezos and Soon-Shiong might be less than thrilled with the prospect of a Harris presidency, and that’s true of everyone in their income bracket, but my strong guess is that both will vote for her. They’re not allowing their papers to endorse her to protect their businesses from retribution. But the same considerations are present for all the other paper owners.

This is an early sign of fascism. The fascists don’t have to actually be in power to chill the free press. The mere prospect of that meteor hitting is enough to start the process.

Hi photo lovers.

I am seeing if I can post just a bit more frequently. The featured photograph this time is of some of the fall colors I have finally begun to encounter this season as I make my usual rounds. It’s kind of surreal to take a photo of vivid orange leaves near the typical end of the growing season while the daytime temperature is in the low 90s (Fahrenheit) and breaking records that stood for decades. Actually, given the persistent summer-like heat and the lack of rain for nearly a couple months, I wasn’t expecting much to photograph this fall. Thankfully the season isn’t a total loss. Given our changing climate, there may well come a time when the fall foliage season is a total loss in my neck of the woods. That’s not something I look forward to. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this photo as much as I do.

I am still using my same equipment, and am no professional. If you are an avid photographer, regardless of your skills and professional experience, you are in good company here. Booman Tribune was blessed with very talented photographers in the past. At Progress Pond, we seem to have a few talented photographers now, a few of whom seem to be lurking I suppose.

I have been using an LG v40 ThinQ for almost six years. My original LG v40 ThinQ is gone. The back of the phone came off. Apparently the battery began to burst. My initial replacement had a similar fate. I bought yet another version of the same phone about a year and a half ago for hardly anything, as I simply didn’t have the time to really research a good permanent replacement. We will see how long this one lasts. I need more time to research smart phones, especially at the high end. I prefer to get a device and keep it for four or five years. Most of my family seems to be gravitating toward iPhones, but I am determined to avoid going that route. The newer Samsung phones look really promising. Given the times we live in, my default is to delay any major purchases as long as possible. So, unless something really goes wrong with my current phone, I’ll stick to the status quo for as long as possible. Keep in mind that my last Samsung kept going for over four years (although the last year was a bit touch and go). Once I do have to make a new smart phone purchase, the camera feature is the one I consider most important. So any advice on such matters is always appreciated. Occasionally I get to use my old 35 mm, but one of my daughters commandeered it. Presumably she’ll return it before she moves out. So it goes.

This series of posts is in honor of a number of our ancestors. At one point, there were some seriously great photographers who graced Booman Tribune with their work. They are all now long gone. I am the one who carries the torch. I keep this going because I know that one day I too will be gone, and I really want the work that was started long ago to continue, rather than fade away with me. If I see that I am able to incite a few others to fill posts like these with photos, then I will be truly grateful. In the meantime, enjoy the photos, and I am sure between Booman and myself we can pass along quite a bit of knowledge about the photo flog series from its inception back during the Booman Tribune days.

Since this post usually runs only a day, I will likely keep it up for a while. Please share your work. I am convinced that us amateurs are extremely talented. You will get nothing but love and support here. I mean that. Also, when I say that you don’t have to be a photography pro, I mean that as well. I am an amateur. This is my hobby. This is my passion. I keep these posts going only because they are a passion. If they were not, I would have given up a long time ago. My preference is to never give up.

Howdy. It has been one heck of a week, and I imagine things are only going to be more hectic and tense. I have some theme music from David Bowie’s Scary Monsters LP:

It’s No Game is the same song with the vocals changed and some facets of the instrumentation (including who plays the guitar solo – Fripp for Pt. 1 and Alomar for Pt. 2). Parts 1 and 2 serve as bookends for the album. The intensity that you feel in Part 1 is replaced with an air of resignation in Part 2. In some ways, that makes Part 2 the more disturbing version.

I know – we probably don’t need any more nightmares right now, but the truth is that it’s no game and we’d best not pretend otherwise.

Cheers.

Back in 2019, I became internet famous in India for a piece on fascism I wrote on January 31, 2017. That was only eleven days into Donald Trump’s presidency. The article was called The 12 Early Warning Signs of Fascism. Here is the list I used:

EARLY WARNING SIGNS OF FASCISM

1. Powerful and continuing nationalism
2. Disdain for human rights
3. Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
4. Rampant sexism
5. Controlled mass media
6. Obsession with national security
7. Religion and government intertwined
8. Corporate power protected
9. Labor power suppressed
10. Disdain for intellectual and the arts
11. Obsession with crime and punishment
12. Rampant cronyism and corruption

I asked how many items on the list Trump had already ticked off.  I acknowledged that, while he was violating the Emoluments Clause to the Constitution “by using his position as president to attract foreign patronage to his hotels,” is was too early to accuse his cronyism and corruption of being rampant. Still, even at that early stage of his presidency, the answer was “all of them.”

So, I’ve been at the forefront of warning that Trumpism would lead to fascism.

As we enter the final two weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, the biggest story in the news is that one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff has his own definition of fascism.

The former general [John Kelly] held nothing back, arguing that Trump could fit the bill of a “fascist.”

“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he told The Times.

“So, certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” he added.

He’s joined by Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military under Trump:

“[Trump]  is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” he said.

Milley reportedly told Watergate reporter Bob Woodward that Trump “fascist to the core.”

Concerns about Trump’s autocratic inclinations have also been shared by James Mattis and Mark Esper who both served as Secretary of Defense during Trump’s presidency. Esper, in particular, believes Trump is telling the truth when he threatens to use the military to attack Americans citizens who voice opposition to him.

Maybe these warnings will resonate with enough people to help Kamala Harris win the presidency. If not, we’re going to find out what it’s like to live in a fascist state. But even if Harris wins, it won’t change that her political opposition, which will constitute nearly half the voting public, now wants fascism.

In the event that Trump loses and Harris assumes office, his active political career will probably be over. I don’t see him running again in four years, although it’s certainly a possibility. He’ll be in his 80’s by then, and possibly in prison. And maybe the thirst for fascism will abate somewhat without a charismatic leader to galvanize it. But my suspicion is that this fascist impulse won’t go away on the right, at least in the opposition to a Harris administration.

The thing is, and I’ve written this many times over the last eight years, that right-wing populism always takes the form of fascism. It flourishes especially when left-wing populism is weak. And I’m no fan of left-wing populism when it takes the form of Marxism or petulant socialism. But there needs to be a hard left that makes demands on the center-left, and serves as a pressure outlet for the frustrations and deprivations of the underclasses and struggling working classes of the country. This used to the province of labor unions, which when effective always straddled the line between radicalism and pragmatism. As they’ve weakened, right-wing populism has filled the vacuum. This is how oligarchs get their way, and it’s why Trump’s only major accomplishment in office was a giant tax cut for the super wealthy.

My point is that we can’t diffuse the fascist impulse of half the country without a left-wing populist alternative, and if that isn’t going to be done by labor unions, or labor unions alone, then there needs to be something else.

Left-wing populism shares some commonalities with right-wing populism, chiefly the “identification of enemies as a unifying cause.” Traditionally, this has been Wall Street or capitalists or bankers. At the extremes it can threaten people’s civil or human rights. But the point isn’t to give power to the far left. The point is to provide a non-fascist alternative to fascism so we don’t lose our country’s commitment to representative governance and its commitment to a pluralism and inclusivity or its protections for the weak and oppressed.

Do we want an all-powerful executive ordering millions into camps, suppressing the free press, and attacking dissent with the military?

That’s what Trump promises, but it’s also apparently what half the country is ready to sign up for. If Trump wins, dissent is going to be hard and much of it may have to go underground. But if he loses, governing is going to be hard, and eventually we will lose. The biggest part of the job is going to be preparing the country to survive when it happens. And that means that somehow, people need to be peeled away from Trumpism as the only alternative to center-left rule.

With respect to warnings about fascism, I’m not a Johnny-come-lately. Hopefully, I have some credibility on this issue. It may arrive in full flower in under two weeks, or it may come in four years. But if nothing changes, it will come.