Trump's Metamorphosis Into America's Hitler Is Just About Complete
Boy, JD Vance was right when he said that.
Another day, another revelation about what somebody who worked closely with Donald Trump really thinks about him. This one is particularly timely, though, as Trump enters the homestretch of the campaign by fully completing his transition into America’s Hitler.
It’s no secret that Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, can’t stand Trump, or that he thinks Trump is dangerously unfit. Trump has been lashing out at Milley and accusing him of treason for years now. In Milley’s retirement speech, he called Trump a “tyrant or dictator or wannabe dictator,” without using his name.
Now, in Bob Woodward’s new book War, Milley has some of his most unreserved words for Trump yet, about how rotten and evil the man trying to regain power in America really is.
Retired Gen. Mark A. Milley warned that former president Donald Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” in new comments voicing his mounting alarm at the prospect of the Republican nominee’s election to another term, according to a forthcoming book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.
“A fascist to the core.”
“The most dangerous person to this country.”
Here’s a fuller version of that:
“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” the general told Woodward. “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”
Milley told Trump that he has legitimate fears that if Trump wins, Trump will recall him to uniform to be court-martialed for “disloyalty,” based on previous threats he witnessed Trump make about doing that to former Gen. Stanley McChrystal and former Admiral William McRaven, who had spoken out against Trump. (We first learned about those in former Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s book.)
“I will order them back to active duty and then I will court-martial them!” Trump yelled, according to Woodward. Esper wrote a similar account of the meeting in his own 2022 book.
“He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him,” Milley told colleagues.
What would Trump want Milley court-martialed for? Among other disloyalties, Trump is still steaming over the fact that after January 6, Milley reassured his counterpart in China that no, the outgoing loser president was not going to try to start a nuke war with them. It unfortunately had to be said, because China was actually getting worried.
Milley’s warning comes against a backdrop of a Donald Trump who has, as we said above, almost completed his full turning into America’s Hitler.
He sent this tweet Friday, vowing to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target “vicious and bloodthirsty criminals” — don’t fool yourself, this is just a pretext, he means immigrants in general — to jail them and/or remove them from this country. (Would that include immigrants who are American citizens? Yes. Did he likely get this idea from his Nazi poolboy Stephen Miller? Yes.)
He added, “No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become President of the United States.” Does he think Kamala Harris is part of the criminal gangs? Unclear.
Trump repeated the promise at his rally in Aurora, Colorado, that day — all his rallies in the final stretch are in states he’ll never win in a million years — to invoke this wartime authority to target immigrants for deportation, without hearings, based on their nationality/race. We guess this would mean that all countries where the populations aren’t white would now be enemy nations with whom we’re at war, according to the Hitler-in-Chief.
Moreover, in Trump’s sick pudding brain, the lines have disappeared between “everybody who opposes me” and the alleged criminal gangs Trump believes are taking over all the American cities and eating the cats and occupying America and causing all its white women to be both murdered AND mortally wounded. (He’s so breathtakingly stupid.)
He told Fox Business rage muppet Maria Bartiromo yesterday that the true threat to America’s election on November is “sick people, radical-left lunatics,” AKA the enemies “from within.”
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within, not even the people that have come in and destroying our country, by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated, but I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of Election Day, I think the bigger problem are the people from within, we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical-left lunatics. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
It sounds to us like he’s saying that people who don’t support him are the enemies “from within,” and that they should be “handled” by the military.
A number of articles are out the past few days about how sharply Trump’s eliminationist Hitler rhetoric toward all his enemies, real, perceived or hallucinated, has risen in recent weeks. Politico had this headline this weekend: “We watched 20 Trump rallies. His racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.”
An example, from his Aurora speech:
“Kamala [Harris] has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world … from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens,” he said.
A new article from NBC News shows how much more prone Trump is these days to declaring that any words uttered against him are, or should be, illegal. On Friday, he called Kamala Harris a “criminal” during his Aurora rally. (He in fact has been convicted of 34 felonies, so far.) He wants CBS News put in jail for editing one of Harris’s answers in a way he feels made her look better than she deserved.
He wants to criminalize people criticizing the (illegitimate partisan hack fucking loser) Supreme Court justices he installed.
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat put it in context:
“This is out of the autocratic playbook. As autocrats consolidate their power once they’re in office, anything that threatens their power, or exposes their corruption, or releases information that’s harmful to them in any way becomes illegal,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and professor at New York University who wrote the 2020 book “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.”
“He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state, which is what Orban does, Modi is doing, Putin has long done,” she said, referring to the leaders of Hungary, India and Russia, respectively. “Just as there’s a divide now because of this brainwashing about who is a patriot and who is a criminal about Jan. 6, right? In the same way, telling the truth in any area — journalists, scientists, even people like me, anybody who is engaged in objective inquiry, prosecutors, of course — they become criminal elements and they need to be shut down.”
Heather Cox Richardson has more in her column today about how this is all Authoritarianism 101. He’s even doing a rally in a couple weeks at Madison Square Garden, which Cox Richardson explains is “an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday.”
So this is Trump in the final few weeks of the 2024 campaign. If he wins, it’s almost certainly a preview of the dictator he wants to be on day one.
People have been freaking out the past week about the polls, but it’s entirely possible that part of what we’re watching right now is a Trump who is absolutely panicking because Republican internal polling shows him in deep fucking shit, so he’s lashing out and betting it all on driving up turnout from the most easily frightened elements of his pantshitting Nazi MAGA base.
Either way, he has to be stopped in his tracks by voters on November 5, so, as Kamala Harris likes to say, we can “turn the page” on this motherfucker once and for all.
[Washington Post / NBC News / video via Aaron Rupar]
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In line for early voting in Ohio and it is packed! Hard to tell who’s for who but this group does seem more diverse, younger and more female than what I’ve seen in the past. Last 3 elections I haven’t had to wait for more than 3 people. It’s so busy they have Sheriffs directing traffic. Also seeing a lot of Moms and daughters. Has to be a good sign considering I’m in a pretty red county.
I'm a foreign-born citizen. My dad was KIA in 1968.
Trump tried this last time with military families - tried to rescind automatic citizenship for military kids born/adopted overseas like me. There were too many non-white families coming back from overseas postings for their tastes. Guess I'll pack a bag, hug my boy and pray that it doesn't happen.
Turns out that MAGAs aren't quite as pro-military or pro-family as they pretend to be. Who knew!