Godwin’s Law, established by Mike Godwin in 1990, is: In any political discussion that lasts long enough, someone will eventually invoke Hitler as a worst-case scenario. Lumping Trump, fascism and Hitler together used to be hyperbole. But no longer.
Mormon folklore about the Constitution hanging by a thread seems more real than mythic. Hanging by the same thread now is truth, democracy and the rule of law. If Mitt Romney was supposed to be the one to ride in on a white horse and save us in 2012, it was eight years too soon.
Joe Biden has called Trump a “climate arsonist.” He is also a Bill of Rights arsonist. Trump and his top lawman, William Barr, publicly boasted that police were justified in bypassing the courts. And Trump seemed to excuse the extrajudicial killing of a murder suspect who had claimed self-defense.
Simultaneously, he excused the murder of Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisc., by one of his own admirers, who also claimed self-defense. In other words, Trump supporters are above the law, but his opponents don’t deserve it.
He tried to re-create his own Reichstag fire moment, sending his version of anonymous storm troopers into American cities to create violence, not to quell it. He hugs the flag and wants people who burn it to go to prison, yet he burns everything for which it stands.
Trump’s hand-picked postmaster general sabotaged the U.S. Postal Service because far more Democrats plan to vote by mail than Republicans. He sent a former Putin hatchet man into our most venerable scientific agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to cleanse it of the imaginary deep state and suppress the real pandemic data.
Donald thinks his face should be on Mount Rushmore. That would make sense if Mount Rushmore had the carved faces of David Duke, Hitler, P.T. Barnum and Putin. Our “Law and Order” president is a living monument of lawlessness and disorder. He eats the Hatch Act for breakfast, snacks on the Foreign Emoluments Clause, and throws the red meat to his base that elections can’t be trusted, only he can be trusted, and the constitutional two-term limit won’t apply to him.
While the West Coast is seeing and breathing the doomsday machine of the climate crisis, Trump claims “science doesn’t know,” “it’ll start getting cooler,” and the problem is insufficient raking of the forest.
But the oxygen that keeps all the Trump malevolence alive, that flows through the Trump umbilical cord to right-wing media, congressional enablers, and the 40% of the country that remains hypnotized, is the same essential ingredient that kept Nazi Germany and other fascist regimes alive. And that is, truth is whatever Dear Leader says it is. Donald Trump alone dictates reality.
Chico Marx in “Duck Soup” said, “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” In “1984,” George Orwell prophetically wrote, “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.”
Down the Trump rabbit hole, anything critical of him, or insufficiently flattering, is “fake news.” The corollary of Trump being the judge and jury of truth is that no one else can be. Not doctors or scientists, not established institutions, not the non-Fox media, not empirical evidence, not even your lying eyes or ears. All non-Trump sources of information are illegitimate. Journalists, especially, are the “enemy of the people.”
Perhaps the most fundamental element of fascism is the complete erosion of even the concept of facts, or verifiable, agreed upon reality. The QAnon conspiracy theories swirling through the conservative universe, nurtured by Trump, are the play toys of fascists, because they fertilize paranoia, and distrust of objective facts and reality itself.
Channeling Orwell, Trump said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” Trump has learned what Joseph Goebbels knew, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
No, Trump is not loading Democrats into boxcars, yet. But his systematic destruction of truth is the foundation of fascism.
Goebbels also said, “Truth is the greatest enemy of the [Nazi] State.” Voting to defend the truth is the greatest enemy of Donald Trump.
Dr. Brian Moench
Brian Moench, M.D., is a Salt Lake City physician.
