~ The Traitor Is The Plague ~
Leading Civil Rights Lawyer Shows 20 Ways Trump Is Copying Hitler’s Early Rhetoric, Policies
In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America’s constitutional foundation in 2019–an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority–is not positioned to withstand Trump’s extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, “Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?,” extensively details Trump’s mimicry of Hitler’s pre-war rhetoric and strategies.
Neuborne doesn’t make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU’s national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.
“Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?” he writes. “Partly it’s just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it’s hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln’s house. But that’s not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play.”
A younger Trump, according to his first wife’s divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches’ impact on his era’s press and politics. “Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation,” Neuborne says.
Via Common Dreams.org (Story including the list of 20)
20 Common Themes, Rhetorical Tactics and Dangerous Policies
20 serious points of comparison between the early Hitler and Trump:
1. Neither was elected by a majority.
2. Both found direct communication channels to their base.
3. Both blame others and divide on racial lines.
4. Both relentlessly demonize opponents.
5. They unceasingly attack objective truth.
6. They relentlessly attack mainstream media.
7. Their attacks on truth include science.
8. Their lies blur reality–and supporters spread them.
9. Both orchestrated mass rallies to show status.
10. They embrace extreme nationalism.
11. Both made closing borders a centerpiece.
12. They embraced mass detention and deportations.
13. Both used borders to protect selected industries.
14. They cemented their rule by enriching elites.
15. Both rejected international norms.
16. They attack domestic democratic processes.
17. Both attack the judiciary and rule of law.
18. Both glorify the military and demand loyalty oaths.
19. They proclaim unchecked power.
20. Both relegate women to subordinate roles.
Rat Race / Bob Marley & The Wailers