The Nation (Opinion)
By Sasha Abramsky
February 24, 2016
Let me introduce you to a few Donald Trump supporters, men and women
whom I met randomly, in line at the First Baptist Church, in Sparks,
Nevada, yesterday evening.
I wasn’t looking for cranks or fanatics. I was simply asking people to
talk to me about whom they were voting for in the caucus and why.
Meet
Gene A., retired supervisor at a sugar factory. (Gene was quite
comfortable advocating mass murder, but in true coward’s form he didn’t
want his last name used, in
case his words could be traced back to him.)
What did Gene think about Trump’s calls to “temporarily” bar Muslims from entering the country?
“They’d
be happier in their own country where they can pray the way they want.
They’re not here in America to do any good. They’re here to do evil.”
Would he expel all Muslims from America?
“Absolutely.
You can’t tell the good from the bad, so you have to throw the baby out
with the bathwater. I’d give ’em a choice—a trench on one side or a
ticket out of
here.”
Are you talking about execution?
“Absolutely. That’s what they do to us in their countries. I’d give ’em a choice: Get out of here or else.”
At his words, a lady sitting nearby gave a thumb’s up, and murmured her agreement.
* * *
Meet Gene and Margo Perkins. Gene is a retired carpenter.
Gene: “They ought to register all Muslims. The Muslims, or ISIS, or whatever you want to call them, they should be screened.”
Did Trump’s comments, last Friday, about executing terrorists by shooting them with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood bother him?
“Not
really. What are they doing over there? No difference. He’s giving them
mercy. Shooting them, not cutting their heads off, not killing women
and children. You fight
fire with fire. The Bible says if they don’t want to conform to what
society is like, get rid of them. What did God tell Joshua? Get rid of
every man, woman, child and beast. If the Lord says it’s okay, he has
the final say-so.”
Margo:
“I like what he stands for. I want to bring our country back. I want us
to honor and respect our country. I want us to love our country and be
proud of it. I want
to bring God back into our country. He loves our country so much. He
loves our country.”
What did she think of barring Muslims from America?
Before Margo can answer, Gene interrupts: “You’d be standing there cheering, just like I will.”
* * *
Meet
the 55-year-old, gray-bearded man, in a cap, jeans, and a long,
untucked, blue-flannel shirt, who owns a moving company and was
attending a caucus for the first time.
Did he approve of Trump’s comments on Muslims?
“I don’t believe he meant the Muslim religion. He just meant people from that country. Eastern countries.”
* * *
Meet 35-year-old Whitney Vaughan, elementary-school teacher.
Did she agree with the comments of some of her fellow Trump supporters at the caucus that Muslims should be killed?
No, she didn’t.
Did it bother her that they were saying this and that she was caucusing with them?
“Everyone
is entitled to their own opinion. A lot of people are very angry with
Muslims right now. That’s what it boils down to.”
* * *
Twenty
years ago, I covered the US Taxpayers Party convention, in San Diego,
held concurrently with the GOP convention that was then nominating Bob
Dole as presidential
candidate. I was a young journalist, attracted to fringe stories, and
there was nothing more fringe than the Taxpayers Party. At that
convention, one could find adherents to every conspiracy theory under
the sun; one could hobnob with racial bigots and shoot
the breeze with religious extremists.
Today
those views and, quite possibly, many of those same people, are
capturing the GOP from the inside. This is the bile now surging up out
of the Grand Old Party’s base,
drawn to a candidate who, with his venomous statements on Muslims,
Mexicans, demonstrators who speak out against him, and anyone else who
disagrees with him, gives a nod and a wink to their assorted bigotries.
This is the reductio ad absurdum end-point of
the party’s endless pandering to Tea Party bigots, to birthers, to
gun-toting militias, and other zealots.
When
Trump calls for the summary execution of terrorists using bullets
dipped in pigs’ blood, or when he says that he wants to punch a
protester in the face and longs
for the days when you could send a heckler out on a stretcher, he
speaks to this audience directly. They love him not despite his
over-the-top rhetoric but because of it.
Donald
Trump is bringing out of the woodwork every crank in the country, and,
in the process, racking up an extraordinary line of electoral victories.
His latest success,
in the Nevada caucus, takes him into the Super Tuesday elections with
vast momentum. Absent a huge political effort, there’s a
better-than-even chance he will now be the Republican Party’s
presidential nominee.
And
yet the GOP leaders, the grandees of one of the country’s two largest
political parties, and thus some of the most influential voices on the
planet, have remained
paralyzed in the face of this frontal assault on the universalist
democratic premises that this country supposedly revolves around.
I
have, in recent weeks, as I have covered Trump’s rise, been thinking
frequently about history. In particular, I have been pondering the story
of Julius Caesar, the Roman
populist and demagogue, who appealed to the resentments of the
downtrodden, who sought to make a dictatorship backed by popular will
and the fury of the mob, and who eventually crossed a Rubicon—a point of
no return, beyond which he posed a fundamental challenge
to the political system out of which he had emerged. Realizing the
danger he posed, the political leadership decided he had to be
destroyed. Decimus Brutus, Servilius Casca, Cassius Longinus, Minocius,
Marcus Brutus, all finally turned on him. Caesar was eventually
taken down, in the most brutal of manners, on the Ides of March, the
bloodied body of the would-be tyrant left lying in the streets of Rome.
Of
course, despite the Trumpian rhetoric about bullets in pigs’ blood and
smashing the faces of opponents, we like to think we are more civilized
today. In place of daggers,
we destroy our political opponents with the finely honed speech, the
sweeping analysis, the withdrawal of party funds and institutional
access. We write damning editorials and organize protests and acts of
non-cooperation. There are many ways a political party
can shut down an upstart.
And
yet, within the GOP today, as one Rubicon after another is crossed by
Trump and his nascent movement of thugs and fanatics, none of that is
happening.
Where
are the GOP’s Brutuses, the Cascas, the Longinuses, the Minociuses
today? Where are Senators John McCain or Lindsay Graham or Susan
Collins? Where is ex-president
George W. Bush? Where is ex–presidential candidate Mitt Romney? Where
is New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez, or California’s ex-governors
Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger?
These
men and women know what Trump is. They have to understand what is at
stake here. They have to see that Trump and his followers have now
crossed fundamental Rubicons,
embracing such antidemocratic, such thuggish views—the mindset of the
pogrom, the death squad, the race-and-religion war—that they now
represent an absolute and existential threat to the Republic.
And
yet not one of these political figures have come out and said they will
dissociate themselves from a Trump candidacy—that they will vote for,
and campaign for, anyone
but Trump. Not one of them has said that democracy comes before party.
Not one of them has dared to use the “F” word, calling Trump out for the
fascist that he so clearly is.
The
Republicans use historical imagery and historical references liberally.
They trot out the text of the Second Amendment, for example, whenever
anyone posits even minimal
forms of gun control. They wax poetic about the Constitution when it
comes to arguing against universal healthcare or for the rights of
states to set their own votin-access requirements, leading to the mass
disenfranchisement of poor African-American voters.
Yet in the 2016 electoral season, none of them have mentioned the
crossing of the Rubicon. It is an historical allusion that seems,
entirely, to have escaped their attention. Not one of them has said that
Trump and his supporters are using the language of
the early Nazis, conditioning the public to think of race- and
religion-baiting as the norm, and casual violence as the default
response to disagreement.
In
his victory speech yesterday evening, Trump announced that “we’re going
to get greedy for the United States. We’re going to grab and grab and
grab. We’re going to make
America great again.” It is the language of Lebensraum. “You know, I
love the country. I love the country. We’re going to have our borders
nice and strong. We’re going to build the wall. Mexico is going to pay
for the wall. It’s going to happen. They’ll be
very happy about it. They’re going to be thrilled to be paying for the
wall.” It is the language of the arm-twister, the gangster-extortionist.
Perhaps
this is the moment of the fools and the vipers, when dumb and harmful
ideas take center stage. Perhaps this is the moment of men such as Gene
A., at the First
Baptist Church in Sparks, glorying in the triumph of his political
hero.
“I’ve
got the perfect solution for peace between Jews and Palestinians,” Gene
told me, shortly after asking me if I was Jewish, and shortly before he
told me that Hitler
was wrong to kill the Jews, because they were intelligent, but that it
wouldn’t have been that bad if he had chosen to focus his killing
impulses on Muslims instead. “We bring all the Jews to America and all
the Muslims to Israel. And if they don’t like that,
let them kill each other.”
What
did Gene Perkins think about Trump’s idea of beating up protesters? He,
personally, wasn’t about to beat someone up, but if the nonviolent
heckler did end up getting
harmed, well, it was probably his own fault. “Does he have
responsibility for incitement? It’s a two-way street, guy.”
The
Ides of March are fast approaching. The greatest question facing the
Republic today is that of whether the GOP can find a way to take down
their Rubicon crosser.
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