Donald Trump’s threat to execute Liz Cheney, “with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her”, is the apogee so far of his Hitlerian rhetoric. By his own words, Trump has proved her point that he is a “danger” to the constitution and defied his apologists who insist he can be contained or that he doesn’t really mean what he says. “And let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” he said. “Shoot Liz Cheney” has replaced “Hang Mike Pence.”
Hours after Trump declared his wish to kill Cheney, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, his reliable excuse maker for the executive collaborator class, published an editorial stating, “We don’t buy the fascism fears, and we doubt Democrats really do either.”
Trump is hellbent to break through any “sane-washing” of the media smoothing over his viciousness and vulgarity. His call for an elaborate execution of a pre-eminent political opponent, a conservative Republican of the most partisan pedigree, is his definitive and final answer to those who quibble about his intentions and his unmooring from all traditional politics.
His fascist-themed freakshow in Madison Square Garden followed by his firing squad fantasy are an augury of a second administration. His closing act has overwhelmed any media reflex for euphemism and both-siderism. He contemptuously stomps on every effort at normalization.
Time and again, day after day, event after event, Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election, certainly about the candidate himself: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?
Many of Trump’s former White House staffers, cabinet secretaries and commanding generals are frantically attempting to warn against his madness, that he is “a fascist to the core”, as former chairman of the joint chiefs Gen Mark Milley has unequivocally stated. In private conversation, former staffers and others with intimate knowledge of Trump, all reliable people, talk about the real man as far viler than those who haven’t seen him behind closed doors could possibly know.
Knowledge of Trump’s vileness is widespread among top-level Republicans. “They all hate him,” a former senior Trump adviser told me categorically. And they all have stories, some exhibiting his narcissism, others his malice: how, for example, the time two senators from one state were summoned to the Oval Office to listen to Trump say he would travel there to have a mountain named after him. As a rule, they agree with Senator Mitch McConnell that he is “despicable”. Unlike those former Trump staffers waving their arms, they are silent and complicit.
Now, former staffers speculate about the hazy fine line between Trump’s infantilism and his dementia. There is no responsible person left around Trump. He has learned the lesson, sealed by January 6, not to trust the “normies”.
***
Trump’s night in the Garden on 27 October was early Hitler in style, not middle Hitler. The bellowing obscenities, racist sneers and violent threats were more reminiscent of the Munich beer hall phase of Hitler rousing the street gangs of Brownshirts than the Nuremberg rallies of disciplined ranks of storm troopers massed before his reviewing stand.
“An immense wave of eccentric barbarism … A primitive fairground brutality,” wrote the great German novelist Thomas Mann in 1930 about the Nazi rallies he observed. “This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style … hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.”
“A quarter-of-an-hour before the opening time I walked through the chief hall of the Hofbräuhaus on the Platz in Munich and my heart was nearly bursting with joy,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf.
“The love in that room,” said Trump after his rally at Madison Square Garden. “It was breathtaking. It was like a love fest, an absolute love fest.”
Trump’s festival at the Garden was a fascist foreshadowing masquerading as a farce. As a screwball flying circus, it was a version of the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. Everything was turned upside down in a pandemonium. Trump’s comedians, however, were no Groucho. It would have been better for Trump if his speakers had been equipped like the mute Harpo with a honking horn.
Trump’s master race of misfits found an authentic voice in the comic relief of Tony Hinchcliffe, who amid his slurs about Black people (“We carved watermelons together”), Latinos, Jews and Palestinians, said, “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Hinchcliffe is the host of a podcast aptly called Kill Tony. With a dubious laugh line, as if on cue, the stage swiveled. Triumph of the Will turned into West Side Story. His performance fatally died like the character Tony in West Side Story, only this Tony died by suicide.
Life is all right in America
If you’re all white in America
With his assent, Trump’s night at the Garden was orchestrated by a malevolent crew of eternally stunted pranksters and gangsters who took control of his campaign’s closing argument. They were brought together principally by Trump’s son Don Jr, a pitiable figure who engages in abominable displays to gain his father’s approbation, and who has become central to the organization of the entourage floating around the campaign.
“Poor Don, he really got the brunt of everything,” said Ivanka. Abandoned and abused, he was shipped off to Czechoslovakia after the divorce of his parents to be raised during the summers by his mother’s grandparents – “the most memorable time in my life”, he said. He learned to speak fluent Czech. Back home, his new stepfather tried to choke him. His college roommates at the University of Pennsylvania recalled Trump coming to visit and smashing Don Jr in the face in front of his friends, knocking him to the ground. When Trump was invited to give a formal speech at Penn, Don Jr refused to attend. He wouldn’t speak with his brutal father for years. He drank heavily, “a fall-down drunk”, said a college friend. His first wife, Vanessa, once said to him, “You’re the one with the retarded father.” Now, Don Jr does anything he can to win Trump’s distracted attention and alienated affection. On the podium, he called out to his dad as “the king of New York”.
Tony Hinchcliffe rose to the level of insult comedian as an opening club act for Joe Rogan. They both live in Austin. Rogan devoted three hours on his podcast on 26 October to a limp interview with Trump in which he failed to challenge Trump’s dozens of flagrant lies. Rogan traffics in being conspiracy theory curious and science hostile to explain the world, which he punctuates with guffaws of jocular misogyny, the occasional racial inference, some gay bashing and tough-guy posturing. He is the faux regular bros’ Alex Jones, the incels’ Hugh Hefner.
Both Rogan and Hinchcliffe are pals of Tucker Carlson. Tucker lately warmed up a Trump rally in Georgia with his sexual fantasy of a “hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter”, when “Dad comes home and he’s pissed … You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.” A former colleague of Carlson’s says he has been talking intently about his spanking obsession for years, though this was the first time in public.
Tucker would appear as the interviewer of Trump on 31 October at an Arizona rally, where he brought up “Dick Cheney’s repulsive little daughter”, which triggered Trump to call her “deranged” and then call for her execution.
Tucker, Don Jr’s buddy, was instrumental in the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. JD, with his deep thoughts on “childless cat ladies” and “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female”, is a new addition to the boys’ club. Except for Rogan, all of them, from comic to billionaire to VP candidate, appeared on the podium at the Garden. Tucker Carlson, taking his turn at standup, distinguished himself by slagging the woman who’s been a bad girl: “As the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president …”
Then, Elon Musk, relocated to Austin. He has launched himself like one of his spaceships into Trump’s orbit. The aspiring oligarch has donated tens of millions to a political action committee to support Trump, produced misleading TV spots to smear Harris, and used X to promote disinformation for Trump. He offers a million-dollar giveaway to register voters, cheap money, which has landed him in a Philadelphia court. He speaks secretly to Putin. Whenever Musk strays from his skill at hardware and software into the realm of human interaction, however, he falls flat on his face. His robo-taxi crashes through a shop window.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and its transformation into X was doomed to fail because it is about his greatest weakness: human expression. He treats human relationships as a horror show. He is the father of 12 children, some of whom he’s given the names of software programs and he has savagely disowned his trans daughter. He bought an enclosed compound in Texas to contain former wives and children. “He has even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances,” the New York Times has reported. He seeks life on Mars because he’s an alien on Earth. Techno authoritarianism is the only comfortable spot on his political spectrum. He calls himself “Techno-King”. Trump has promised him that he will be put in charge of the federal workforce “to start from scratch”. Musk was sanctioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission in September. His regulatory troubles will all go away with Trump. The Nasa and defense contracts will flow. If anything might befall Trump, Musk and his fellow techno authoritarians have Vance positioned a heartbeat away. At the rally, Musk introduced himself, “I am dark Gothic Maga.”
Among the other speakers in the Garden, David Rem, a 60-year-old New York sanitation worker, mounted the podium to hex Harris as “the antichrist” and “the devil”. He claimed to be a childhood friend of Trump’s from his Queens neighborhood, but, in fact, had only recently met him. In 1991, he pleaded guilty to acting as a courier to distribute cocaine and was sentenced to 151 months’ imprisonment.
Grant Cardone, a real estate operator from Florida, is a longtime Scientologist and major donor to its slush fund used to harass critics. He told the Maga faithful that Harris and “her pimp handlers will destroy our country”. To great applause, he flipped his middle finger.
A local New York radio broadcaster, Sid Rosenberg, who had called Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew”, to Trump’s approval in April, told the crowd, “She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton, huh? What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters and lowlives. Every one of them. Every one of them.”
The obscenities echoing in the Garden embroidered the vulgar vision of the great replacement theory. “America is for Americans and Americans only,” declared Stephen Miller, a former Trump aide. If Trump were to be elected, Miller would play a large role in implementing what Trump boasted would be “the largest deportation program in American history”.
Trump came on stage to shout threats to the rafters. “The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer,” he said. “We don’t have the same country any more.” He stated he would restore the country to what it was by reaching backwards in history. “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Think of that. That’s how far back. That’s when they had law and order. They had some tough ones. Think of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”
Undoubtedly, Trump had no clue he was referring to the political period that Thomas Jefferson described as “the reign of witches”. President John Adams enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts to harass and imprison his critics and opponents, the Democratic-Republicans organized by Jefferson and James Madison, a grouping that was the origin of the Democratic party. Adams lost the election of 1800 to Jefferson. Adams was bitter, but freely and peacefully gave up the presidency, and transferred power in the first election after Washington. The acts expired, except for the Alien Enemies Act, which is invoked now by Trump. Yet, that act is only operative during wartime.
“And when I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy, becomes a sound hole,” Trump barked. “How can he say now they’ve done very bad things to this country? They are indeed the enemy from within. But this is who we’re fighting.”
Trump’s vision of America was also Hitler’s understanding of the country. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and chief of war production, became his confidant. He participated in hundreds of dinner table conversations with Hitler. “In general, no such thing as an American people existed as a unit,” Speer wrote in his memoir of Hitler’s view. “They were nothing but a mass of immigrants from many nations and races.”
***
After the disastrous show at the Garden, Rogan, keen on his commercial viability, separated himself from his sinking sidekick, Hinchcliffe, while at the same time winking at his bro base with a couple of little racially tinged asides. “I’ve gotta tell you, that joke kills at comedy clubs. I don’t like the joke, [but] it kills,” Rogan said on his podcast. “It’s just like, if you’re Puerto Rican and you hear that in the audience, you’re like [groans]. But it’s a funny joke. The joke does well. But I said to him, I go, ‘Dude, that’s the one that’s gonna get you stabbed.’ And he used to talk about it on stage, saying, ‘Joe Rogan always says that’s the one that’s gonna get me stabbed.’” After creating some distance between himself and Hinchcliffe, he singled out Barack Obama for criticizing the “joke” as “really fucked up. You know that’s a joke. That’s like going to a Quentin Tarantino movie [and saying], ‘And then the man killed that woman.’ Like, he didn’t really kill that woman … this is a movie.” But “Kill Tony” really did make himself roadkill and in the process “stabbed” Trump in what was not a movie or a comedy club.
Dancing around having Harris as a guest, Rogan decided that if she would not drop her schedule to see him he would not deign to travel to interview her. Instead, he hosted JD Vance for three hours on Halloween, in which Vance held forth on how young men with more testosterone are more conservative, liberal women are “celebrating” their abortions with “birthday cakes”, and that the surefire way to gain admission to an Ivy League university “is to be trans”. Then, after confidently predicting Trump would win “the normal gay guy”, Vance pronounced the Emily In Paris Netflix series a “masterpiece”.
***
Conspicuously missing from the cabal that staged the Garden fiasco was the most diligent student of Hitler of all the minions swirling around Trump. Steve Bannon, imprisoned for defying a congressional subpoena to testify on his role on January 6, was still behind bars.
When Bannon saw Trump descend down the Trump Tower escalator to launch his campaign in 2015, he thought, “That’s Hitler!” Bannon was ecstatic, he told New York Times correspondent Jeremy Peters in his book Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted. Trump was the demagogue he was waiting for.
After a career on Wall Street, Bannon spent years failing as a film producer; then, radicalized as a rightwinger, he announced his ambition to become “the Leni Riefenstahl of the GOP”. Promoting his dreadful documentary in 2011 on Sarah Palin, The Undefeated, he said, “People have said I’m like Leni Riefenstahl.” Riefenstahl was the leading film-maker of the Third Reich, mistress of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, and auteur of Triumph of the Will, a brilliant, innovative account of Hitler’s 1935 Nazi rally in Nuremberg. Bannon, who became Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and White House senior adviser, saw himself staging Trump as Riefenstahl filmed Hitler. He boasted that he asked himself, “What would Leni Riefenstahl do?”
Bannon walked out of federal prison on 29 October. He still faces New York state charges of financial fraud in a scheme to fleece donors to build Trump’s wall along the Mexican border. He declared that he would resume where he left off. He was on to the coup of 2024. He picked up once again on the big lie of “election integrity”, that the 2024 election might be stolen from Trump just like in 2020. “If people think American politics have been divisive before,” said Bannon, “you haven’t seen anything.”
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
