Sixty percent or so of Americans recognize that Donald Trump is a disastrous president. His regime is wholly a product of his own mind, and operates as his mind does: without regard for evidence, law, decency, common sense, or competence, concerning itself solely, and megalomaniacally, with appearances and “loyalty.”
Three things made his regime possible. First, the cultural and economic desperation felt by right-wing voters (a product of the money-grubbing bottom-dwellers of right-wing media and their relentless onslaught of wildly cherry-picked divisiveness and vitriol).
Second, Republican lawmakers’ reluctance to cross Trump, whom they deeply disrespect, lest they lose the votes of his fanatical supporters (whom they also, by extension, disrespect).
But third and most frustratingly, Trump has also been helped immensely by the failures of the Democrats: not only by their nomination of three jaw-droppingly weak challengers in a row, but also by their rhetorical disorganization and ineptitude. There are a couple of C-words, and one F-word, that perfectly illustrate this point.
The F-word is “fascist.” The United States is not a Poli Sci 101 classroom. Most Americans haven’t spent much time reading up on fascism’s advocacy of cartels or the corporatist control of labor. People equate fascism with one thing and one thing only, and that is Nazism. And while Trump’s demagoguery, megalomania, and demonization of critics and the press are shocking, and come straight out of the totalitarian playbook, you’re doing him a big, unintended favor when you call him a fascist, which equates, for most people, to calling him Hitler. You’re sending a loud signal to his supporters that you are desperately reaching for a lazy, blunt rhetorical instrument to use against him — and by extension against them — because you can’t think of any specific, substantive criticisms.
I can think of lots of specific and substantive criticisms. I’m sure that the Democratic leadership can too. It would be nice if they would put together a list of the three or four most massive and inarguable criticisms, and hammer on them, with unity, simplicity, and clarity, day and night. Instead of calling Donald Trump names. Like fascist.
Then there are the C-words: One that is used and shouldn’t be, and another that isn’t used and should be. The one that should be used is “coward.” The GOP has put gerrymandering into overdrive (a move Democrats have now self-defensively imitated) despite Republicans’ already massive structural advantages in the Senate and Electoral College. They’ve done this because Trump told them to, and he told them to because he is afraid of any fight that comes within a million miles of being fair.
Trump has made the GOP into a reflection of himself, meaning that he has turned it into a party that is, even by Washington standards, exceptionally craven. Donald Trump, in broad daylight, has led a life of extraordinary cowardice, hiding behind his parents’ money, frivolous and aggressive lawsuits, fixers, bankruptcy protection, loan forgiveness, creative accounting, bone spurs, NDAs, and oceans of secrets and lies. And now hyper-gerrymandering.
Finally, the C-word that should not be used: conservative. Today’s GOP is radical and reckless: the opposite of conservative. Republicans are recklessly endangering our future by playing fast and loose with vaccines, the health of the planet, deficits, foreign interventions, tariffs, divisive rhetoric, and the separation of powers, and they’re sitting on their hands while a greedy, vicious, inept reality TV star turns our government into a gold-leafed kleptocracy arrayed with bootlicking courtiers and masked shock troops.
Not that the Democrats are immune to irresponsibility. But we’ve never seen a wholesale abandonment of democratic norms, constitutional principles, or reality itself, like we’re seeing now: not from any Democrat or Republican in our nation’s history. No one who opposes Republicans in their present state should ever do them the favor of calling them “conservative.”
One F-word, two C-words. There’s an election coming up in November, and rhetoric matters. Let’s focus, and try not to hand a dangerously degraded and radicalized Republican Party another victory.
