We are witnessing the making of a fascist president in real time; The Guardian, October 28, 2024

Sidney Blumenthal, The Guardian; We are witnessing the making of a fascist , president in real time

"In a case of exquisitely poor timing, two days before the latest revelations of Trump’s despotic intent and his own insistent bellicose demands for absolute power to use against his “enemies”, the Wall Street Journal editorial board assured its readers that Trump doesn’t mean it. There is no reason to take him seriously. In any case “the public isn’t buying this Democratic claim about Trump”. The “fascist meme” is just partisan propaganda. “The answer is that most Americans simply don’t believe the fascist meme, and for good reasons. The first is the evidence of Mr Trump’s first term. Whatever his intentions, the former President was hemmed in by American checks and balances.”

Not satisfied with absurdly dismissing Trump’s unapologetic statement, the Wall Street Journal felt compelled to airbrush the present and the past in the Orwellian tradition of “doublethink”. Within 48 hours, however, its dismissal of the supposedly “Democratic claim” about “the fascist meme” was swept away by Kelly. Having discarded Milley’s and Mattis’s earlier statements, the Journal must have figured it could deposit Kelly’s as well in the burn bag for facts in order to be able to embroider its sophistry. But, at least for the moment, creating doublethink is a demanding job.

An essential element in the normalization of Trump and his fascism is the erasure of his crimes and transgressions when he was president – his “first term”, as the Journal disingenuously describes it, as though he’s already elected to his second. Conjuring up an air of inevitability is another demoralizing Newspeak tactic. Trump’s threats, when they are not dismissed as mere rhetoric, are too generally reported as if they are something new, that they exist solely in the vacuum of this campaign, and that he has no past. Trump’s history is consigned to the memory hole."