If you say I am wrong, I will beat you down. If you say it again, I will have my people kill you. I have millions of people that follow me, all willing to die and kill for me, so I can do whatever I want to you and nobody can stop me.
This is the basic premise of fascism, it’s a strict hierarchy in which all authority flows from the will of the dictator. Followers of the dictator, empowered to enforce his will, get to dominate everyone below them in the hierarchy. That’s just how society is supposed to run, in the fascist worldview. The strongest person rules and everybody else accommodates themselves to the will of the strongest person.
Donald Trump‘s niece Mary, daughter of Donald’s ill-fated older brother, has called her uncle the weakest man she ever met. She said his amazing talent is his ability to find people even weaker than he is and getting them to do his bidding. Trump the unapologetic bully exerts great appeal to the people who follow him, because he’s projects being strong and he doesn’t take any crap from anybody, and even when he’s wrong, he demands to be recognized as being right. This is inspiring to a certain type of person, who identifies with and admires someone able to live that way, to take what they want, grab women by the pussy and so on. The laws that apply to the rest of us don’t apply to him, because he’s a winner in a way that nobody else has ever been.
A bully like Trump is able to collect weak and useful people who were bullied earlier in their life and developed a driving need for domination and revenge. They’re drawn to a bully like Trump as a source of power that will allow them not to feel weak anymore, as they derive their own power from someone as powerful as he is. They are forced to constantly compete for his favor, stay in his good graces, and avoid the humiliation that he has forced on virtually all of their predecessors. Think of creatures like Kashyap Pramod “Kash” Patel, or Pete Hegseth, Emil Bove, Caroline Leavitt, Little Marco, Stephen Miller, Laura Loomer, Pam Bondi or any of Trump’s current lie-embracing myrmidons. Loyalty and proximity to Trump, who craves and demands absolute loyalty and obedience, no matter what (hang that asslicking traitor Mike Pence!) is literally a license to kill, as long as your loyalty, flattery and actions are pleasing to the boss.
Young Donald Trump [1], the second youngest child in a wealthy family run by a psychopathic father and a distant, born very poor, immigrant mother, became a bully when his baby brother was born. Mom had been gone when Donald was at that formative age when children most need their mothers, she was in the hospital for a prolonged stay. His father being a driven and ruthless man obsessed with amassing wealth, was unable to give his youngest son much by way of anything except his annual $200,000 a year tax-free allowance. With the arrival of the smallest, weakest little Trump, young Donald finally had someone to take out his feelings on. With a helpless sibling he could dominate from day one, Donald began to show his now famous sadistic ‘pleasure’ in tormenting and humiliating people weaker than him.
Trump, who was disrespectful to his mother at home, became a bully in school. When his parents discovered he’d purchased a cache of switchblades to give out to a gang he was planning to arm at his exclusive private school, they yanked him out of that school and sent him off to a military academy. They sent him there to teach him discipline, to make him a man, as they used to say (back when America was great). While Trump, who enjoyed the sadism of military academy life, was there his parents drove up every visiting day with different beautiful young women they’d pay to come to hang out with their son. This made him look good to his classmates. He was voted the “ladies’ man” of the military school by his peers, who couldn’t believe how many good looking chicks he kept pulling to come up and visit him, pose for photos with him.
When his smart, charismatic older brother Fred Jr., the heir apparent to the Trump empire, revealed that he lacked the ruthlessness their father demanded of his heir, the father decided to break and destroy his oldest son. He reluctantly groomed young Donald to take over the business. Donald was soon in the tender embrace of the father he never had, ruthless, demonically brilliant Roy Cohn, homophobic closeted promiscuous homosexual, rabid anti-communist, and high functioning antisocial psychopath. Cohn taught young Donald how to use the media and law to bully, as he’d always done in his personal life. When somebody comes at you, come at them twice as hard. You never admit fault, and if somebody accuses you of something accuse him of something ten times worse. If the government sues you for longtime racist housing discrimination, now illegal under the Fair Housing Act, sue the government for defaming you — demand a hundred million dollars. The Department of Justice lawyers will literally shit themselves.
And so it came to pass, eventually, that this narcissistic bully who enjoys nothing in life but “winning”, that is, dominating everybody else in the zero sum world in which such stunted souls live, became president of the United States. Russia’s dictator had a strong interest in seeing him elected in 2016, as Marco Rubio’s Senate committee detailed in a multivolume report after Special Counsel Robert Mueller documented 140 cases of Russia and the Trump campaign working together to get Donald elected. No criminal conspiracy was charged, because Trump’s people were no rats (and they lied and destroyed evidence, one reason Mueller hurried to collect and include as much evidence as he could in the report) but Mueller could not exonerate Trump for ten counts of obstruction of justice. None of this stopped Trump and Christofascist Bill Barr from announcing Trump’s complete and total exoneration from the Mueller “witch hunt”.
When Trump lost reelection in 2020, after a chaotic term that broke all records for cabinet firings and personnel changes, he went insane. His team launched a multi-pronged attempt to reverse Trump’s electoral loss. They’d sent lawyers to every state in an effort to suppress voting before the election, then hatched several schemes to contest the outcome and do everything imaginable to overturn the election results. Revenge against a “rigged election” became his rallying cry. He fomented a riot by whipping up a crowd he’d primed for months with claims of a stolen election, an election stolen from THEM, and sent them to take out his rage on the joint session of Congress.
He watched on TV for hours as they overran police and ransacked the Capitol (a “day of love.”). The DOJ had four years to bring him to justice for multiple heavy duty felonies, but in their meticulous institutional devotion to “norms”, DOJ shat the bed. In 2024 the only thing we know for sure that Russia did to get Trump back into power was to call in voting day bomb threats to key Democratic precincts in swing states.
Bullies only understand one thing, force. They are intimidated when people they mean to terrify don’t flinch. We must not flinch, there is no compelling reason to flinch right now.
Bullies bully and lie for the same reason people always do those things — fear. Only while being more scary than the people they bully do they feel safe. Meanwhile, anyone subject to the bully’s need to feel powerful has to defend herself, himself, themself, ourselves. As a society, we can only protect ourselves from bullying by an insane dictator and his minions by organizing, standing up for our rights, doing whatever it takes to assert our rights as citizens of a constitutional democracy.
The forces of American fascism, racism and misogyny have been working hard for decades, and spending a fortune organizing and influencing, to bring about this dark moment in history. The rest of us, a large majority of our citizenry, need to not flinch from doing whatever needs to be done to resist American fascism. That the “opposition” party is so spineless, due to corporate interests controlling most of its leaders, is a grim fucking tragedy. No time to weep about that. It is on us not to be bullied by an insane movement of enraged toddlers wielding government power. Don’t be intimidated by an insane bully’s ranting threats to illegally deploy the military to lock us all up in privatized torture prisons, this guy’s rowing with one oar. He is panicking. He wants us to panic. Do not panic.
[1] This short biography of Trump is no doubt one reason the ever vengeful DJT defunded PBS.
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