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    Trump slams John Kelly for calling him a ‘fascist’ after Harris lauds comments

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    Donald Trump has denounced his own former chief of staff, John Kelly, as a “degenerate” and a “low life” after the former US Marine Corps general gained the backing of Kamala Harris for calling his ex-boss a fascist.With Kelly’s intervention in effect propelling the debate over fascism firmly to the centre of the US presidential election, the Republican nominee also turned his fire on his Democratic opponent. He inaccurately accused Harris of calling him Adolf Hitler after the vice-president amplified Kelly’s comments in a televised address before endorsing them in a CNN town hall meeting.Trump’s angry fusillade came in social media posts amid the fallout from Kelly’s comments in a New York Times interview in which he recalled the former US president repeatedly lauding Hitler’s achievements when he was in the White House.In a separate interview with the Atlantic, Kelly described Trump lamenting that he did not have generals who were loyal in the way he believed German military commanders had been to Hitler.Trump responded on his Truth Social platform, calling Kelly – who was his White House chief of staff for 18 months – a “degenerate…..who made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred.“This guy had two qualities, which don’t work well together,” he wrote. “He was tough and dumb. John Kelly is a low life.”Kelly told the Times that Trump “fitted the general definition of a fascist” and said he would rule as a dictator if elected again.In Wednesday’s statement, Harris – who had been issuing increasingly strident warnings on the campaign trail about Trump’s authoritarian outlook in the face of his increasingly threatening rhetoric – said the interview showed that he sought “unchecked power”.She added that it was “deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous” that he would “invoke” Hitler. She later told the CNN moderator Anderson Cooper that she agreed that Trump was a fascist and praised Kelly for sending a “911 call” to the nation.Trump responded with a post on X that received more than 20m views and 292,000 likes, accusing Harris of “going so far as to call me Adolf Hitler, and anything else that comes to her warped mind”, because, he claimed, polls indicated she was losing.Trump’s campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, accused Harris of “dangerous rhetoric” which he said was “directly to blame for the multiple assassination attempts against President Trump”.

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    However, Kelly’s depiction of Trump as an undemocratic authoritarian was backed up by Elizabeth Neumann, a former deputy chief of staff in the homeland security department in his administration, who told Politico that he “does not operate by the rule of law”.“Does he have authoritarian tendencies? Yes,” she said. “Is he kind of leaning towards that ultra-nationalism component? Absolutely.”Trump’s Republican supporters belittled Kelly’s intervention. Chris Sununu, the Republican governor of New Hampshire, called his portrayal of the former president “an outrageous statement” and said Trump’s own record of extreme statements was “baked in” to the electorate’s assessment.“I respect John Kelly a lot, but obviously, everyone knows there’s a huge personal relationship divide,” Sununu told NewsNation.The row overshadowed other developments on the campaign trail, where the Republican nominee extended his catalogue of recent threats to Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the justice department to investigate allegations that he tried to overturn the 2020 election and hide classified documents.Asked by the conservative broadcaster Hugh Hewitt whether he would grant himself a presidential pardon or fire Smith if elected, Trump said: “It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds.”He also noted that “we got immunity from the supreme court,” a reference to a ruling by the court’s conservative majority last June that presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts carried out in the line of duty. More

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      Kamala Harris denounces Trump as ‘fascist’ who wants ‘unchecked power’

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      Kamala Harris has denounced Donald Trump as a “fascist” who wants “unchecked power” and a military personally loyal to himself after allegations emerged about the former president’s repeatedly-voiced admiration for Hitler.On Wednesday, the vice-president gave a surprise speech from her Washington DC residence, doing so in the aftermath of reports that John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, recalled how Trump lamented not having generals who swore loyalty to him in the same manner as military commanders served Hitler in Nazi Germany.“Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there and no longer be there to rein him in,” Harris said.Harris said that the remarks relayed by Kelly showed that Trump “does not want a military that is loyal to the United States constitution”.“He wants a military who will be loyal to him, personally, one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the constitution of the United States,” she said.Posing the question as a stark choice for US voters going to the polls for the presidential election on 5 November, she added: “We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be what do the American people want.”

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      Harris’s address came after she had spent more than a week highlighting Trump’s earlier branding of his political opponents as “the enemy within” and demands for the military to be deployed those who cause election “chaos”.In on-the-record taped conversations with the New York Times, Kelly – who was White House chief of staff for 18 months during Trump’s presidency – said his former boss repeatedly praised Hitler, even when contradicted, and fitted the dictionary definition of a fascist.“He commented more than once that: ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” said Kelly, who also said that Trump would rule as a dictator if elected again.Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, made similar remarks in an interview with the Atlantic.Referencing the various reporting, Harris said: “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. This is a window into who Donald Trump really is, from the people who know him best.”She added: “It is clear from John Kelly’s words that Donald Trump is someone who, I quote, certainly falls into the general definition of fascists, who, in fact, vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas.”It was the second time in a week that Harris had, in effect, labelled the Republican nominee a fascist. Last week, she answered affirmatively when a Detroit radio interviewer who asked if Trump’s vision amounted to fascism – although she did not utter the word directly.Trump’s spokesperson has denied Kelly’s claims that Trump said this, calling it “absolutely false”.Harris’s remarks on Wednesday were the clearest sign yet that she had changed tactics from a previous approach initially adopted after becoming her party’s nominee, when she and her surrogates attempted to play down and belittle Trump. In one example, by mocking his obsession with crowd sizes at his rallies.Theories abound as to what Harris could do to turn voters away from Trump’s appeal, which has centered on vows to lower prices that rose during Joe Biden’s presidency and throw immigrants out of the country.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an interview earlier today on CNN, the noted Republican pollster Frank Luntz said that the very sort of message Harris pushed this afternoon was not working.“What’s interesting is that [when] Harris focused on why she should be elected president, that’s when the numbers grew,” Luntz said.“And then the moment that she turned anti-Trump and focused onto him and said, don’t vote for me, vote against him, that’s when everything froze.”Kelly’s characterisation of Trump as a fascist echoes that of Gen Mark Milley, the retired former chair of the armed services joint chiefs of staff. Milley, who Trump has said should be executed, is quoted by the journalist Bob Woodward in a recently published book as calling Trump “a total fascist” and “fascist to the core”.Later on Wednesday, it was reported that Harris told NBC News that she was preparing for the possibility that Donald Trump will declare victory before the election is complete, saying: “We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that.”Also, at the White House daily media briefing, the press secretary. Karine Jean-Pierre, acknowledged that Biden agreed with those who say Trump is a fascist.“I mean, yes,” Jean-Pierre replied, when a reporter put the question to her in the White House briefing room. She went on to argue that Trump himself has made no secret of how he would like to govern, saying: “The former president has said he is going to be a dictator on day one. We cannot ignore that … we cannot ignore or forget what happened on January 6 2021.”Cecilia Nowell contributed reporting More

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      Trump and his allies are whipping up a whirlwind of lies about the hurricanes | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Whipping up hurricanes to merge with great replacement theory took hardly a week, about the time it takes for hurricanes themselves to form. The overheated atmosphere warmed the waters that were drawn up into the winds to churn them into a menacing storm.After Hurricane Helene hit, Donald Trump unleashed a whirlwind of humid lies: the federal government was deliberately preventing aid and even water from reaching areas that held Republican voters, “not getting anything”; Kamala Harris “spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants”; and Fema was offering only $750 in disaster relief – all false, all debunked by the Republican governors in the affected states. The Republican congressman Chuck Edwards of North Carolina felt compelled to issue a statement to his constituents not to listen to “untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and hearsay about hurricane response efforts” and the “outrageous rumors spread online”.Undoubtedly, he had in mind Elon Musk, who accelerated the circulation of the lies on his platform X: Fema “actively blocked” aid and “used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.” The Fema administrator, Deanne Criswell, called the calculated spread of disinformation “absolutely the worst I have ever seen”, and announced that Fema for the first time had established a webpage for “Hurricane Rumor Response”.“No money is being diverted from disaster response needs,” Fema stated. “Fema’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”“Yes, they are literally using YOUR tax dollars to import voters and disenfranchise you!” Musk tweeted.Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right representative from Georgia, leaped in to tweet: “Yes they can control the weather.” She added: “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”In 2018, she infamously blamed a California wildfire on “space lasers” controlled by “Rothschild Inc, international investment banking firm”, a classic antisemitic trope. Now, on 5 October, following up on how “they can control the weather”, she tweeted: “CBS, 9 years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather.”Republican leaders instantly fell into line in a demonstration of Trump fealty. The congressman Steve Scalise, of Louisiana, the number two in the Republican leadership of the House, campaigning for Trump on 8 October, repeated his lie: “They use that money helping illegals here that they brought into America.”By now, Trump’s lies were a typhoon. JD Vance, his running mate, was sent out to stir it up further with an op-ed planted in the Wall Street Journal on 9 October – Rupert Murdoch again predictably handing over his paper to Trump – to echo that Fema funds were being diverted to help illegal immigrants. Vance added a new wrinkle to the conspiracy theory, suggesting that Fema was giving “special treatment” to gay and trans people over ordinary Americans because it held a seminar in 2023 on how those communities can prepare for disasters.As Hurricane Milton barreled down on Florida, Joe Biden, in a TV briefing on Wednesday afternoon, felt compelled to condemn Trump’s “onslaught of lies” that is “undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been undertaken and will continue to be undertaken”.View image in fullscreenThe political effect of the hurricanes on Trumpism has been to congeal free-floating elements into the racist replacement theory and Hitlerian rhetoric. Trump’s lies set in motion an antisemitic wave in North Carolina blaming Jewish local officials there and Fema administrators for taking the money for illegal immigrants. Of the falsehoods after Hurricane Helene, “30% of the posts on X contained overt antisemitic hate, including abuse directed at public officials such as the mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the Fema director of public affairs; and the secretary of the department of homeland security. These collectively garnered 17.1m views as of October 7,” reported the non-profit Institute for Strategic Dialogue.Vance’s inclusion of gay and trans people into the overarching replacement theory fits the intensive Trump negative advertising campaign. Trump has spent more than $15.5m on TV commercials linking Harris to support for trans prison inmates – his most aired ad. In fact, in 2019 she stated she supported gender-affirming care for state prison inmates, according to the law, and responded similarly to an ACLU questionnaire about federal inmates. The Senate Republican political action committee has also invested tens of millions into anti-trans ads against Democratic candidates. Trump’s tagline: “Kamala’s for they/them, President Trump is for you.”Now, Vance implies, “they/them”, presumably in league with Greene’s “they”, are stealing the funds from the rest of us folks as a nefarious subplot of the great replacement. Adherence to every aspect of the theory proves loyalty to Trump. Vance and Scalise showed how to bend the knee.Trump’s transition chief on 7 October insisted on this unquestioning fealty to the leader. The self-described adults in the room, or “normies”, of the first term, who saw their mission to be curbing Trump’s lunatic or criminal impulses, will not be tolerated in the second. “Those people were not pure to his vision,” Howard Lutnick, the head of the Cantor Fitzgerald investment firm and the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, recently told the Financial Times. He explained that the “establishment” did not understand Trump’s “objectives” or “intuition” and “thought they knew better”. In the second term, “loyalty” and “fealty” would be the first qualification for consideration.Both Trump and Vance have stated that the senior federal civil service will be fired for their disloyalty. Consistent with Trump’s “vision”, his appointees would be required to swear an oath of loyalty to the leader above the constitution and laws of the United States. This oath was known as the “Führereid” in Nazi Germany, where public servants had to pledge: “I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the leader of the German reich and people, Adolf Hitler, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfill my official duties, so help me God!” All soldiers had to take a similar oath. Some of those who failed to swear the Hitler oath were executed.Trump’s Hitlerian rhetoric and threats have ramped up with each passing day closer to the election that will decide whether he will be the president or perhaps a prisoner. When Harris appeared on The View, a daytime TV talkshow with an all-female panel, he demeaned her as a “dummy” and the other women as “dumb” and “degenerates”. Women should be subordinate and submissive. According to his running mate, Vance, women who do not have natural children are essentially worthless, not truly women, unqualified to be teachers, and women over 50 years old have value principally for childcare. “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” – children, kitchen, church – was the policy slogan for the proper place of women in the Third Reich.The concept of “degenerate” – “entartete” – was a central category in Nazism. Modern art and music were deemed “Entartete Kunst”, or degenerate art, and banned. “Degenerates” constituted a broad swath of people, some of whom were infected with “poison in the blood”, as Hitler classified Jews and Trump counts certain types of immigrants, which is the basis of the replacement theory embraced by both Hitler and Trump. The degenerate also included disabled people, gay people (who wore pink triangles in concentration camps), Gypsies, psychiatric patients and the mentally ill (“behinderte”). Under the program beginning in 1939 of “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (“destruction of unworthy lives”), Aktion T4, the mass murder of “degenerates” was launched, officially called “Gnadentod”, or “mercy death”.Trump openly entertains fantasies of violence and vengeance. He called on 29 September for “one really violent day … One rough hour. And I mean real rough.” He was speaking about shoplifters. He promises the roundup of 11 million undocumented people and camps. In late August, he reposted under a headline “How To Really Fix The System” an image of his perceived enemies in orange prison jumpsuits – Harris, Biden, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Hunter Biden and Jack Smith. He called for the indictment of the congressional members of the January 6 select committee and military tribunals for Barack Obama and others.View image in fullscreenOn 5 June, the Fox News host Sean Hannity gave Trump an opportunity to soften his threat of retribution. “People believe that you want retribution and will use the system of justice to go after your political enemies,” said Hannity. Trump doubled down, saying: “I have every right to go after them.” On 7 October, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham tried again. “A lot of people will say: ‘Well, he’s just going to do to them what he – they did to him back at them.’” Trump replied: “A lot of people say that’s what should happen, right?” Or as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “We had declared one of our principles thus: ‘We shall meet violence with violence in our own defense.’”Trump’s rhetoric eerily continues to paraphrase Hitler’s, which eludes American audiences. His first wife, Ivana, claimed that a book of Hitler’s speeches was on his bedstand. Trump’s language just happens to be extraordinarily resonant.Campaigning on the debunked myth that Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, are “eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets”, Trump used unusual language for him to make his bogus point on 16 September. “Allowing millions of people, from places unknown, to INVADE and take over our Country, is an unpardonable sin,” he tweeted. His reference to “sin” in the context of his racist replacement theory, was, knowingly or not, an echo of Hitler, to convey exactly the same meaning. “The sin against blood and race is the hereditary sin in this world and it brings disaster on every nation that commits it,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.Lately, Trump has used over and over in speech after speech the same metaphor conflating personal and national humiliation. On 12 August, Trump tweeted: “Kamala has no ideas, and would be an absolutely horrible, RADICAL LEFT, President, laughed at all over the World. We’ve had enough of that!”On 22 August, Trump continued the “laughed at” meme: “She stands for Incompetence and Weakness – Our Country is being laughed at all over the World!” On 16 September, he tweeted: “THE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT US AS FOOLS, THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS AND OUR WEALTH. WE CANNOT LET THEM LAUGH ANY LONGER.” Trump has used variations of this “laugh” meme to highlight national dishonor dozens of time on his Truth Social account.On 30 September, at two rallies, one in New York City and the other in Walker, Michigan, Trump said: “Boy, what a group of people we have. It’s a joke. We’re laughed at all over the world for our leadership. Because this country has never been laughed at [like] a bunch of dopes. It’s never been laughed at like it is right now.”On 1 October, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump said: “What a miserable few years. It’s just been horrible. And people all over the world, especially the leaders, are laughing at how stupidly our country is run.”On 30 January 1939, Hitler delivered his notorious “prophecy” speech calling for “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. The most memorable image he evoked was of Jews laughing at him and at Germany. “During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance the Jewish race which only received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the state, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among many other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face.”After Hitler ordered the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, he returned to the imagery of Jews laughing in a speech that referenced his “prophecy”. “In Germany too the Jews once laughed at my prophecies,” he said on 30 September 1942. “I don’t know whether they are still laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing.”The Nazis underscored Hitler’s speech by producing a propaganda poster depicting caricatures of laughing Jews surrounding Franklin D Roosevelt, with the slogan: “Das Lachen wird ihnen vergehen!!!” – “Their laughter will disappear!!!”On 7 October, Trump returned for a rally at Butler, Pennsylvania, to revisit the site of his near assassination. “And we want to get respect like we had it four years ago, the entire world respected us, they respected us,” he said. “They respected us more than they’ve ever respected us, and now they laugh at us. We can’t have them laugh at us, can we?”

      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill 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. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Why is our so-called democratic society suppressing freedom of speech? | Laura Flanders

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      Claud Cockburn, my grandfather, knew when it was time to leave Berlin.A young British journalist, he’d worked as a correspondent for The [London] Times in that city in the 1920s before transferring to New York and Washington DC. Returning to Germany in July 1932, he saw “storm Troopers slashing and smashing up and down the Kurfürstendamm”, and war propaganda: “huge exhibitions of ‘the Front’, soldier figures standing in a real-life size trench playing with a dummy machine gun”, he wrote.In a letter to my grandmother, Hope Hale, a US-based journalist just then pregnant with my mother, he described how fascism on the horizon felt: “It’s hard to imagine that this is something one is really seeing.”Until it wasn’t hard. As Cockburn wrote: “Hitler. He came to power. I was high on the Nazi blacklist. I fled to Vienna.”Cockburn’s story is retold in a forthcoming book by his son, journalist Patrick Cockburn, due out this fall from Verso. It’s a timely intervention, inviting us to consider how different what Claud called the “Devil’s Decade”, is from our own.The 1930s saw the press in fascist countries co-opted or suppressed. In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels’ ministry of propaganda saw to it that only state-approved stories were told. Independent journalism was not just discouraged – it was dangerous. Writers were shot. Books were burned. To facilitate the Fuhrer’s dominance, the Third Reich subsidized the production of cheap radio receivers called Volksempfänger, which not only made money for friendly manufacturers but also channeled distraction and Nazi communication directly into people’s homes. In Italy, Mussolini’s regime did much the same, using media as a tool to consolidate power and propagate fascist ideology.Today, Elon Musk is no Joseph Goebbels. Still, as I write, the billionaire entrepreneur known for co-founding Tesla and SpaceX (his privately owned rocket-and-satellite company), and now owning X (formerly Twitter), has been accused of stoking bigotry and hate. Controlling content and its moderation (or lack of it), Musk is seeing to it that his powerful, free, social media platform pumps out pro-Maga propaganda, while joining with other tech billionaires to invest in the Trump-Vance campaign.That campaign has made calling journalists “enemies of the people” so central to its message that future generations will have to be reminded that Adolf Hitler did it first.Goebbels operated in a dictatorship where the media was entirely controlled by the state with the explicit goal of suppressing freedom of speech and promoting genocidal thinking. We operate within a supposedly democratic framework in which no minister of propaganda is forcing the newspaper of record to instruct its journalists covering Israel’s war on Gaza to restrict the use of the terms “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing”, “refugee camps” and “Palestine”. Some newspapers, like the New York Times, do it unforced.Homogenous, even in an age of media proliferation, the most influential media spent June in lock-step, disparaging one elderly candidate’s fitness for office after a stumbling performance in a debate. This August that same media devoted precious time to carefully “fact-checking” the drivel of the other elderly candidate after an entirely unhinged press conference. The same candidate has promised to suspend the constitution and be a dictator “on day one”.One is reminded of the headline over the New York Times report on Hitler becoming Chancellor: Hitler Puts Aside Aim to be Dictator. “There is no warrant for immediate alarm,” the editors wrote on 31 January 1933. “The more violent parts of his alleged program he has himself in recent months been softening down or abandoning.”Quitting the Times to found the Week, a newsletter that became famous for its scoops and takedowns of those in power, Claud’s work was not risk-free. His opposition to fascism and the complicity of western democracies in enabling its rise made him a target for enraged rulers and rightwingers in the UK and overseas. Too impecunious to sue, the Week was often threatened and finally banned, in January 1941.We like to think our media landscape today is shaped by subtler forms of control: media monopolies, mass-market pressure, extreme commercialism and digital surveillance. And then there’s Julian Assange. Assange, through Wikileaks, published classified documents that exposed US government killings in Afghanistan and Iraq. For that, Assange wasn’t shot, but he was locked up and charged under the Espionage Act, the first person to be so charged for an act of journalism since that act’s passage in 1917.This June, after five years in London’s grim Belmarsh prison, Assange agreed to plead guilty to one Espionage Act charge of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense documents. In exchange, Assange got his freedom, and so did that old word “treason”, dusted off for new, 21st-century use.Methods of information control evolve, but one phenomenon seems to remain: timidity. Living in Vienna, where loquacious diplomats, lawyers and refugees circulated stories and suspicions from all over Europe, Claud read the English daily papers and was struck “by the fact that what informed people were really saying – and equally importantly, the tone of voice they were saying it in – were scarcely reflected at all in the newspapers”.It is hard to imagine that one is really seeing what one is seeing until it isn’t.

      Laura Flanders is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders & Friends, a nationally-syndicated TV and radio program. More

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      We each have a Nazi in us. We need to understand the psychological roots of authoritarianism | Gabor Maté

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      “Any attempt to understand the attraction which fascism exercises upon great nations compels us to recognize the role of psychological factors,” the German-Jewish social psychologist Erich Fromm asserted in 1941. Such factors are not specifically German or, say Italian, nor were they the manifestations of a unique historical era, now safely in the distant past. Not only can the malignant political-economic-ideological climates required for the flowering of fascism develop anywhere, so are its emotional dynamics present in the psyche of most human beings.“We each have a Nazi within,” the Auschwitz survivor Edith Eger has written – pointing, in my observation, to a near-universal reality. Many of us harbor the seeds for hatred, rage, fear, narcissistic self-regard and contempt for others that, in their most venomous and extreme forms, are the dominant emotional currents whose confluence can feed the all-destructive torrent we call fascism, given enough provocation or encouragement.All the more reason to understand the psychic sources of such tendencies, whose ground and nature can be expressed in a word: trauma. In the case of fascism, severe trauma.Nobody is born with rabid hatred, untrammelled rage, existential fear or cold contempt permanently embedded in their minds or hearts. These fulminant emotions, when chronic, are responses to unbearable suffering endured at a time of utmost vulnerability, helplessness and unrelieved threat: that is, in early childhood.The human infant enters the world with the implicit expectation of being safely held, seen, heard, physically protected and emotionally nourished, her feelings welcomed, recognzied, validated and mirrored. Given such an “evolved nest”, in the apt phrase of the psychologist Darcia Narvaez, we develop and maintain a strong connection to ourselves, a deeply rooted confidence in who we are, a trust in innate goodness present in the world and an openness to love within ourselves, as without. Trauma represents a disconnect from these healthy inclinations, in extreme cases a defensive denial of them as being too vulnerable to bear. And that, in essence, is what fascism is on the emotional level: a desperate escape from vulnerability.Looking at the hideous demigod of fascism, Adolf Hitler, or at his present-day caricature Donald Trump, who is often compared to him – including some years ago by his current vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance – we find many remarkable characteristic similarities: relentless self-hypnotising mendacity, mistrust bordering on paranoia, devious opportunism, a deep streak of cruelty, limitless grandiosity, unhinged impulsivity, crushing disdain for the weak.Both had grown up in homes headed by abusive fathers, with mothers impotent to defend their children. In Hitler’s case, the bright and sensitive child suffered merciless violence. Trump was subjected to the ruthless emotional dictatorship of a father, Fred Sr, who Mary, Donald’s psychologist niece, describes as a “sociopath”. “Donald Trump is a poster boy for trauma,” the eminent trauma psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk told me.In both cases the rage and hatred represent eruptions of the forbidden and therefore repressed emotions of childhood and the compensations of a psyche pulverized into insignificance. In turn, as the biographer Volker Ullrich writes: “Hitler … gave the decisive signal for Germans to give free reign to their hatred and destructive desires.” He spoke to and promised to redeem those masses in his nation who also experienced themselves as threatened and insignificant – to “make them great again,” if you will.“What they want,” he wrote, “is the victory of the stronger and the annihilation or the unconditional surrender of the weaker.” This fascistic drive to dominate is the unconscious rejection of the small child’s vulnerability and a defensive identification with the unassailable power of the abusive father.What draws people to such leaders? On the socioeconomic plane, their own sense of exclusion, dislocation, grievance, marginalization, loss of place and meaning. On the emotional, psychological level, a trauma-induced absence of confidence in themselves and the drive to submit for protection to some person perceived as “strong.”This is coupled with an urge to flee from responsibility by casting blame on some vulnerable yet vermin-like and threatening “other” – a Jewish, Muslim, Hispanic or Slavic person, say – who serves as the target of one’s ingrained hostility, the real sources of which rest in the deep infantile unconscious.The American psychologist, Michael Milburn, has studied the childhood antecedents of rightwing ideological rigidity. His research confirms that the harsher the parenting atmosphere people were exposed to as young children, the more prone they are to support authoritarian or aggressive policies, such as foreign wars, punitive laws and the death penalty.“We used physical punishment in childhood as a marker of dysfunctional family environment,” Milburn said. “There was significantly more support for the capital punishment, opposition to abortion and the use of military force, particularly among males who had experienced high levels of physical punishment, especially if they had never had psychotherapy.” I was intrigued by that last finding.“Psychotherapy,” Milburn said, “speaks to a potential for self-examination, for self-reflection.” Self-reflection, something the fascist mentality cannot abide, can soften the heart.Neuroimaging studies have shown that the amygdala, the tiny almond-shaped brain structure that mediates fear, is larger in people with more rightwing views. It is more active in those favoring strong protective authority and harboring a suspicion of outsiders and of people who are different. This is a telling finding, because we know that the development of the circuitry of the brain is decisively influenced by the child’s emotional environment in the early years.“The monster Adolf Hitler, murderer of millions, master of destruction and organized insanity, did not come into the world as a monster” – so wrote the psychoanalyst Alice Miller. Fascism, in that sense, is an all too human phenomenon, an outcome of many influences salient among which, on the personal scale level, is the unspeakable suffering of the child.

      Gabor Maté is a public speaker and the author of five books published in 41 languages, most recently The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in Toxic Culture More

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      The reich stuff – what does Trump really have in common with Hitler?

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      When Donald Trump shared a video that dreamed of a “unified reich” if he wins the US presidential election, and took nearly a full day to remove it, the most shocking thing was how unshocking it was.Trump has reportedly said before that Adolf Hitler did “some good things”, echoed the Nazi dictator by calling his political opponents “vermin” and saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, and responded to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville by claiming that there were “very fine people on both sides”.The Hitler-Trump analogy is controversial. “Some of Trump’s critics – including Biden’s campaign – argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison,” the Politico website observed recently. “Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders – and even some of his more historically-minded critics – argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.”The former camp now includes Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in Britain. The Dutchman, whose previous books include Freud’s Theory and Its Use in Literary and Cultural Studies, has just published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying.In it, De Berg compares and contrasts Hitler and Trump as political performance artists and how they connect with their respective audiences. He examines the two men’s work ethic, management style and narcissism, as well as quirks such as Hitler’s toothbrush moustache and Trump’s implausible blond hair.In a Zoom interview from his office at the university campus, De Berg quotes the American comedian and actor George Burns: “The most important thing in acting is honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” He adds: “The most important thing in populism is authenticity. The moment you’re able to fake that, you’re in.”De Berg, 60, happened to be renewing his study of National Socialism, and rereading Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, just as Trump was first running for the White House in 2015. “Obviously, there are massive differences,” he acknowledges. “Hitler was an ideologically committed antisemite who instigated the second world war and was responsible for the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews died.“But then I looked at their rhetorical strategies and their public relations operations and I began to see how similar they are in many ways. So I thought, OK, why not do a book looking at Hitler from the perspective of Trump?“We tend to see Hitler as a genocidal mass murderer, which of course he was, but not so much as a populist. I thought looking at it through the perspective of Trump can help us wrap our heads around the idea as to why so many people actually supported Hitler and vice versa.”View image in fullscreenAbove all, De Berg argues, Hitler and Trump were and are political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policies – Make Germany/America great again – but know how to draw attention using jokes, insults and extreme language. In this they differ from Joseph Stalin, the Soviet autocrat who was a poor public speaker and preferred to work behind the scenes.“Their extremist statements are very deliberately meant to provoke a reaction and to get them into the press. Hitler actually writes quite openly about this in Mein Kampf and this of course is the challenge: what do you then do as a journalist or as an opposing political party when the other person makes these extreme statements?“Do you then not report these things, but then the populists will say whatever they want to say? Or do you contradict them and point out the lies and the extremism, but in that way you’re only drawing more attention to the fact that they’re running and to all they’re proposing?”Along with its headline-grabbing potential, the extremist language also plays well with many voters. De Berg says: “Most of their electorate are dissatisfied with the status quo for a variety of reasons – globalisation, automation – so they want to change the system and here you have an anti-establishment candidate who is not politically correct, who says that we will sort it, who doesn’t come up with all these ‘cowardly, rotten compromises’.”Many such voters are ready to blame a scapegoat, “the other”. Hitler blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in the first world war; Trump launched his 2015 campaign demonising immigrants from Mexico and continues to put border security front and centre. “It decomplexifies the world. Instead of abstract social structures and historical developments, you have one specific group of people that you can blame all your problems on.”One of the touchstone observations from the early Trump years came from the journalist Salena Zito. In September 2016 she wrote in a column for the Atlantic magazine that “the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally”.Again De Berg is alive to rhymes with Hitler. “There were a lot of National Socialists interviewed after the war who said, well, yeah, OK, Hitler was saying all these extreme things but we realised he was a mass politician and we thought that he was just saying things that he didn’t really mean, that he was just exaggerating a little bit. Someone said the demands in Mein Kampf we took as the dogmas in the Bible – no one thought that these things would be fulfilled 100%.“The same is true, dangerously, with the things that Trump says. In his rallies he outlined a whole range of very problematic things that he would do when he was going to be president, but that doesn’t mean all people literally believe that. I don’t think they literally believed that he was going to build this big concrete wall between Mexico and the United States. Many of them thought, unconsciously, what he’s really saying is he will protect America’s traditional identity.“And that – to use a posh phrase – interpretative openness means that both the more extreme followers and the less extreme or ‘moderate’ followers can recognise themselves in the speaker’s words. That made Hitler and makes Trump so difficult.”Trump’s incoherent, meandering and zigzagging mode of speech adds to the effect. “Trump goes from the FBI to a judge to the Democrats to communists and so on. You can then say, well, clearly this guy is an intellectual nitwit, he can’t talk in a logical, argumentative way. He could but he realises that this vague way of tying all these people together actually gives different sections of the electorate different things they can identify with. Some might not like the FBI, others might not like immigrants and so on.”Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years as president, according to a count by the Washington Post. Perhaps the most egregious is “the big lie” that he, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election, only for it to be stolen due to widespread fraud. De Berg writes in his book: “The idea behind the concept of the big lie is that if an untruth is sufficiently extreme, people are likely to accept it if only because they cannot bring themselves to believe that anyone could lie in such an outrageous manner.“It was Hitler who came up with the concept, writing in Mein Kampf that ‘the great masses of the people … more easily fall victim to a big lie [große Lüge] than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads, and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others.’”View image in fullscreenThe spectacle and social glue of mass rallies is also key. In controversial comments to Playboy magazine, the British singer David Bowie once observed: “Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars … Look at some of his films and see how he moved. I think he was quite as good as Jagger. It’s astounding. And boy, when he hit that stage, he worked an audience. Good God! He was no politician. He was a media artist. He used politics and theatrics and created this thing that governed and controlled the show for 12 years. The world will never see his like again.”Trump’s rallies are typically rollicking affairs, the atmosphere part circus, part concert, part sports, bringing like-minded people together as ritualistically as church. In all weathers they share a collective sense of grievance and also find ways to have fun. In small towns that often feel left behind by big cities, they can represent the biggest event of the year and offer the thrill of live performance in an otherwise digitally saturated age.De Berg comments: “If you look at the lives of many ordinary Germans during the Weimar Republic immediately after the first world war, when the economy wasn’t doing well and there were all sorts of problems, many of them could not afford to enjoy all sorts of spectacles but they could go to a Hitler rally.“You can go to a Trump rally as well and that creates a feeling of solidarity, a community of feeling, which of course is at the same time the dangerous thing because people then identify with each other. They lose their individuality, they lose their critical capacity, and at the same time all together they identify with a political leader, so the political leader can do whatever he wants.”There is also something alarmingly familiar about the way in which the Republican party thought it could co-opt and control Trump, only to find itself capitulating and being recast in his image. One by one the party stalwarts have fallen into line, abandoning long-held principles, while dissenters have been purged.De Berg continues: “Hitler goes from 2.6% of the vote in 1928, meaning more than 97% of the electorate don’t want him, to the Nazi party becoming the biggest party in 1932. Then these conservative politicians say, OK, we’ve got this political nincompoop here but he’s a populist and he’s popular, the people like him. If we try and make this guy vice-chancellor then he can do our bidding.“Hitler says no, I’m not going to be vice-chancellor, I want to be chancellor, so eventually they give in but they still think that he is going to do what they want and push through their policies. One of these conservative politicians memorably said, ‘We’ve hired him.’ Hitler manipulated them and he becomes chancellor and from there on in it all goes disastrously wrong with German society.”He adds: “One of the most worrying things for me about Trumpism is the way he has managed to transform what you thought were very rightwing but ultimately rational politicians into people who have become basically Trumpists.“What happened was not that they manipulated Trump but Trump ended up manipulating them and then, in effect, just taking over the Republican party. All these people had to renounce all the things they used to believe in: international free trade agreements, a forward-leaning role for America in the world.”There is, the academic warns, method in Trump’s madness: the buffoonery, chaos and word salad speeches may be more calculated than they appear. “I would like people to become more aware of how incredibly consciously Trump is going about doing what he’s doing, how incredibly cunning and devious he’s been. People should absolutely not underestimate this guy.” More

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      Clownfall: don’t be taken in by the trick of a great dictator | Letters

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      I thank Adrian Chiles for drawing attention to Adolf Hitler’s chilling quote from the 1920s: “It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us … whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again…” (Everyone laughed at Hitler in the 1920s. A century on, are we making the same mistake?, 24 April).As a very young child, I lived through the second world war in Dublin; while Ireland was neutral, the war was nonetheless very present to us there. Like Chiles, all my life I have wondered how millions of people could have been taken in by a figure such as Hitler, with terrible consequences.And while there may be significant differences between Hitler and a certain figure south of the Canadian border, it’s not hard to see the ploy that was advocated in the quote that so chilled Chiles being employed by the latter – and successfully, to judge by much media coverage.David BlackwellEastern Passage, Nova Scotia, Canada Adrian Chiles’s column was excellent. As a liberal American, I take the danger that is Donald Trump very seriously. I, and most of my circle of contacts and friends, understand that half the electorate in the US will vote for Trump, irrespective of anything he does or any court proceeding. We find this very frightening.I would like to think that some, if not most, liberal voters have thought this through, particularly after the 2020 election and its aftermath. It’s vital that some journalists finally have chosen to puncture the fragile facade that is the reliability of American democracy.Gary RintelmannMequon, Wisconsin, US I have to agree that political leaders who are laughed at, such as Hitler, still have the potential to rise into power and produce destructive outcomes. I have read many books on Hitler and 20th-century history. While there was a unique set of circumstances that helped propel him into power, his narcissistic belief in himself and a fanatical determination to fulfil his imagined destiny are basic human traits (found mostly in men) and will always be present in the human race until one of them finally wipes all of us from this planet.Ed StrosserEast Elmhurst, New York, USView image in fullscreen More

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      Aide tried to stop Trump praising Hitler – by telling him Mussolini was ‘great guy’

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      Donald Trump’s second White House chief of staff tried to stop him praising Adolf Hitler in part by trying to convince the then president Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, was “a great guy in comparison”.“He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” the retired marines general John Kelly told Jim Sciutto of CNN in an interview for a new book.“I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world. And I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing. I mean, Mussolini was a great guy in comparison.”Kelly, a retired US Marine Corps general, was homeland security secretary in the Trump administration before becoming Trump’s second chief of staff. Resigning at the end of 2018, he eventually became a public opponent of his former boss.Sciutto is a CNN anchor and national security analyst. His new book, The Return of Great Powers, will be published on Tuesday. CNN published a preview on Monday.Kelly told Sciutto it was “pretty hard to believe” Trump “missed the Holocaust” in his assessment of Hitler, “and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theatre” of the second world war.“But I think it’s more … the tough guy thing.”Trump’s liking for authoritarian leaders, in particular Vladimir Putin of Russia, is well known. His remarks to Kelly about Hitler – like his former practice of keeping a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed – have been reported before.But Sciutto’s recounting of his conversation with Kelly comes amid resurgent fears over Trump’s authoritarian leanings, with Trump the presumptive Republican presidential nominee despite facing 91 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar civil defeats, and having seen off attempts to disqualify him for office.Kelly’s remarks to Sciutto were published shortly after Trump welcomed to his Florida home Viktor Orbán, the strongman leader of Hungary.Singing Trump’s praises, Orbán said that if Trump defeats Joe Biden for re-election, the US would not “give a penny” more in aid to Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders.Kelly told Sciutto Trump “thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim [Jong-un] was an OK guy … to him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have Nato, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”Trump recently said that if re-elected, he will encourage Russia to attack Nato members Trump deems not to pay enough into the alliance.Condemning those remarks as “dumb, shameful and un-American”, Biden has sought to portray Trump as a threat to world security as well as US democracy.Kelly told Sciutto: “The point is, [Trump] saw absolutely no point in Nato. He was [also] just dead set against having troops in South Korea, again, a deterrent force, or having troops in Japan, a deterrent force” to North Korea.Kelly was not the only general to fill a civil role in Trump’s administration. James Mattis, also a marine, was Trump’s first secretary of defense while HR McMaster, from the army, was Trump’s second national security adviser.Kelly told Sciutto Trump thought US generals would prove as loyal to him as German generals did to Hitler.“He would ask about the loyalty issues,” Kelly said, but “when I pointed out to him the German generals as a group were not loyal to [Hitler], and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, he didn’t know that.“He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal – that we would do anything he wanted us to do.”A Trump spokesperson told CNN Kelly had “beclowned” himself and should “seek professional help”.Kelly said: “My theory on why [Trump] likes the dictators so much is that’s who he is.“Every incoming president is shocked that they actually have so little power without going to the Congress, which is a good thing. It’s civics 101, separation of powers, three equal branches of government.“But in his case, he was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial-type powers to send US forces places or to move money around within the budget. And he looked at Putin and Xi [Jinping, of China] and that nutcase in North Korea as people who were like him in terms of being a tough guy.” More