Former White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly has written a book of his experiences in the Donald Schickelgruber Trump White House. According to an excerpt in the New Yorker Trump expressed to Kelly his admiration of "German generals" and wished that American generals were more like them.
"Do you mean Bismarck's generals?" Kelly told the Atlantic he'd asked Trump. He added, "I mean, I knew he didn't know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, 'Do you mean the Kaiser's generals? Surely you can't mean Hitler's generals?' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, Hitler's generals.'"
Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the last sixteen months of Trump's presidency, is quoted in Bob Woodward's latest book as calling Trump "fascist to the core." Two of Trump's Secretaries of Defense, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis and Army Lt. Col. Mark Esper, and one of his National Security Advisers, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, swell the chorus that Trump must never again be Commander In Chief of the U.S. military.
The White House and cabinet officials letting it be known that Trump is a fascist wannabe dictator who holds up Adolph Hitler as a role model only confirm what we've seen from the outside. Anyone who has been paying the slightest scrap of attention these past eight years knows that he worships the ground Vlad the Defenestrator Putin walks on, wants to be BFFs with Kim Jong Il, and adores what Viktor Orbán has done to Hungarian democracy.
Once upon a time, being exposed by that much military brass as Adolph Hitler's biggest fan would have been enough to send Trump slinking off in ignominy to Mar-a-Lagoon and thence to Argentina. But apparently, half the population of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina (and overwhelming majorities elsewhere in Dixie and the great plains) just don't care.
For reasons that defy rational analysis, they enthusiastically plan to vote for an actual, literal, bona fide Nazi sympathizer for President of the United States.
Anything to get transgender folks out of the nation's rest rooms and defend the nation's aryan purity of essence. To Trump basest base, nothing else matters.
My cartoon today updates one by the great Australian-British editorial cartoonist, David Low. "Rendez-vous 1939" depicted Hitler and Joseph Stalin greeting each other: "The scum of the earth, I believe?" "The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?" At their feet lay Poland, slain under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact partitioning the country that had separated them.
President Putin's policy since assuming power at the turn of the millennium has been to reconquer the nations that declared their independence from Moscow in 1989-1991. Trump will pull the rug out from under the government of Ukraine, which has been trying to fend off Russian aggression since 2008. Just as he pulled the rug out from under the government of Afghanistan.
If Trump is returned to the White House, no country in Eastern Europe will be safe from Russian lebensraum. No country anywhere else will be able to trust in United States assurances of friendship. There will be a new Axis of Evil, and we will be a junior member of it.
Dammit, this matters.
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