Watching Trump recently taunt a CNN cameraman at a Mississippi rally, demanding that he "turn the camera around" to show Trump's adoring hoard of supporters -- Trump kept hounding the cameraman, and his adoring hoard of supporters kept upping the cheers and joining in the demand to "turn the camera around....
At any point -- the taunting and the bullying went on for more than a minute -- Trump could have said "sic 'im, boys," and that cameraman would have been beaten to a pulp, his camera smashed, the whole hated media given its violent comeuppance by the jingoism that Trump has unleashed and which the Republican establishment can't now control. Trumpism is now the Republican brand.
Perilous times.
The unreason and the hatred are on full display -- as if we needed more evidence -- at the bottom of the Scott Huler essay linked above.
Amazing how many people can be duped by emotional propaganda when they have been convinced their government is ineffectual, weak, corrupt, or otherwise not on their side, and when their livelihoods have been continually under threat from an economy they vaguely but clearly understand is rigged against them. After a generation of Fox News, Rush, and other rightist media outlets indoctrinating them, and with two terms of anti-Obama hatred continually stirred by his political opponents, many perfectly ordinary people are being swept into the Trump camp. The evil this portends is not really so hard to predict: Trump is a Mussolini, able to mobilize millions around issues and ideas only a bit different from the Fascism of the 1920s but with similar dangers to democracy.
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