Well, when your campaign starts demanding that we crack down on a religious minority, stop them from entering the country, and institute a registry for them, the comparisons kind of write themselves. Not like this ever happened for Obama, mind you, except for the many times it did - the comparisons are at least somewhat apt this time. Hitler wasn’t Hitler until he was, and when people start going down that path, it does nobody favors to pretend that there’s nothing there and shut down the discussion with Godwin’s Law.
I’m sure if you look hard enough you can find any number of extreme opinions but treating them as representative is misleading. Leaving aside hyperbole, it is probably correct to say that right out of the gate Trump was accused of doing things that had the whiff of fascism about them.
But bear in mind that (a) Trump began making bold pronouncements before he had even been sworn in and (b) he moved very fast in his first few weeks.
Because right out of the gate, he started with the shit.
Remember “Lock her up!” after saying if he were President, she would be in jail? That’s pretty much banana republic right there.
Registering Muslims? What color crescent should they wear?
Except he didn’t…did he??? I mean he’s done so much evil shit, I may have missed it.
I thought his travel ban was to crack down on Muslims NOT in countries that he has holdings in. That’s not genocide. It’s evil as fuck but its not genocide.
But i do agree with the ‘somewhat apt’ statement. Closer for sure than Obama.
The travel ban was well-publicized. The registry was more implied, and it seems to have dropped off the agenda. Either way, the fact the GOP wouldn’t rule it out at the time should be pretty scary.
It’s an overblown comparison. The better comparison is to people like Erdogan or Órban, which is already pretty fucking scary. But that said, I didn’t see nearly as many comparisons to Hitler from the intelligentsia of the left as I saw under Obama from noteworthy right-wing pundits and politicians. What I did see were articles like these:
http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/interviews/trump-no-hitler-–-he’s-mussolini-says-oxford-historian
i.e. reasoned, measured articles citing actual historians (who, by the way, were generally freaked right the fuck out over Trump), rather than complete asspulls by loony pundits. It’s the difference between a knee-jerk “He likes dogs - THAT’S JUST LIKE HITLER!” and an actual rational analysis of what’s really going on.
The travel ban he called for when campaigning was for Muslims, period. All Muslims. When it came to actual implementation he tried to moderate his bigotry to accommodate his greed, but I don’t really see that as much of a defence against a charge of fascism.
Hilary got just as much hyperbole as Trump–and for substantially less significant actions.
I always got a kick out of this twitter exchange:
Trump:What is our country coming to when a judge can halt a Homeland Security travel ban and anyone, even with bad intentions, can come into U.S.?
Thomas Drake: because you took @POTUS oath to preserve, protect & defend Constitution & that includes 3rd branch of gov’t: the Judiciary
As for the hyperbole, has there been a president (or at least one in recent history) where the opposition didn’t present their case against the standing (or running) POTUS that were full of examples that were either cherry picked, taken out of context, entirely made up or deliberately twisted to make the president look awful?
And what I’ve always found amusing is more often than not, when someone tears into a president or other politician, there’s usually someone on their side that’s done something pretty similar. Pointing it out usually results in a No True Scotsman type argument.
A while back Obama was stepping off a helicopter and did a kind of half assed salute at the guards. Even though the guards said they were fine with it, it was an honor just to be there. Even though military code says the commander in cheif is not required to salute to the guards (but they are required to salute to him), even though he apologized…every republican I know, used that as a chance to fling every possible insult they could thing of at him including accusing him of breaking the law and calling for him to be impeached (and many of them are lawyers).
While digging up the links I just found this.
When I pointed out that Bush did the same half assed salute just a few years earlier…well that was different.
Moral of the story, if it’s not your president, he can do no right, if it is your president, he can do no wrong. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if the right opposed defunding planned parenthood if a dem president was pushing for it.
Only the imaginary left in your head is saying things like that. Real people in the real world are saying things like Trump is incompetent at administering the federal government, that he is a thin-skinned man who wastes time complaining about personal slights, that he knowingly allows people subject to foreign influence set government policy, that there’s good evidence that he’s obstructing investigations into his associates and himself, that he’s creating diplomatic problems and damaging America’s reputation around the world, that he’s got conflict on interest issues between his businesses and his office, that he condones bigotry, that he’s uninformed and shows no signs of caring about it or making efforts to become better informed, and that he’s promoting an anti-science agenda. What this makes the left look like is people who are informed and aware of what’s happening outside the bubble.
OP is a loaded question, ISTM, as much of the hyperbole surrounding Trump concerns him being a fucking idiot with no sense of honesty, intellectual curiosity or moral scruples, and a narcissistic personality disorder.
No problem finding countless examples of all this.
In terms of the fascism thing, yeah we see some signs of that, as conceded in the OP.
We talk about it a lot, as it’s a dangerous road the US might be going down. But it doesn’t yet make up the bulk of outrage against the pres.
I really wish more of my Republican friends had read John Dean’s 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience, where he documented the rise of “conservative authoritarians” in his beloved party. The title of course is a play on his hero Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience Of A Conservative.
I honestly believed that Trump couldn’t possibly get elected as none of my Republican friends could stand the man - and these folks include wealthy business owners. The retired Marine Colonel was particularly annoyed by “…I know more than the Generals.”
Ehhhh… I’d be very hesitant to call this a bipartisan issue.
except you lot were doing the same thing when Obama got elected, with your “Brownshirts” and “FEMA concentration camps” bullshit.
It’s really amazing how tone deaf people can be.
I don’t think hyperbole is much of an issue outside of the hardcore activist groups.
The pervasive issue I’ve seen is too many people hear something negative about Trump and rather than being thoughtful and doing the research about whether it makes him aberrant or mostly aberrant, to what degree as well as how verifiable the news is, they jump to conclusions. It’s crazy to me how a man who’s never had principles in his life gets interpreted by so much of the public through a lens of ideology.
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” - Garry Kasparov
My favorite bit of Trump hyperbole is the part about how he’s a Muslim socialist that was born in Kenya and is going to take your guns from your cold dead fingers.
:smack:
The information age is the age of hyperbole. Nothing is mediocre nowdays, it has to be the worst thing ever. No one listens if you say a bad movie remake was poorly executed, you say it shit in your mouth and raped your childhood. Combine this with political polarization and watch the fireworks. Both Bush and Obama critics made CTs that said they’d refuse to step down and instead institute a dictatorship. Lots of protest signs for both with Hitler 'staches on them. Like Orwell said, fascism doesn’t mean anything anymore.
Into this environment walks Trump, a ridiculous person by any measure, someone who openly admires dictators and brings all the racist kooks out of the woodwork, someone who says things out loud that no one else would. The more you read about Trump the man the more disgusted you’ll become. So any exaggerations will have to be wild stuff.
One could ask a similar question regarding Hillary, someone who puts Gore and Kerry to sleep, yet her opponents gave us Pizzagate, multiple assassination CTs, Benghazi, smelling of sulfur…what’cha gonna do? There’s too much money in it.
Put simply, he’s not a Puritan and doesn’t pretend to be. He does not want to bring the world to salvation through state action, pretty much the opposite of all modern presidents. He is from the leisure class. He flaunts wealth. Puritanical progressives preach that wealth is shameful and sordid, therefore one dresses like Bill Gates and drives a Prius. He talks about women in a way that only the lower class talks about women.
Oh, and he might not be willing to escalate a regional conflict into an apocalyptic world war with nuclear weapons.
To put it in terms the president might use: WRONG!
Trump is a rube-rousing pathological liar who isn’t fit to shovel shit from one place to another.
I challenge you to prove otherwise.
I see it’s too late to put up a “Do not drink, this well is poisoned”-sign.