Trump Showed Us Who He Was Before He Became President

Posted by collectivist

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

– Maya Angelou

“It’s amazing,” fellow CounterPuncher Eric Draitser recently wrote me, “that people ever thought a Trump administration would be something other than this.”

“This” is the demented neofascistic Trump-Pence regime, which openly violates basic constitutional norms and rules while conducting itself in barefacedly racist, sexist, and eco-cidal ways.

The long record of this presidency’s transgressions now includes the open dog-wagging assassination – on brazenly false pretexts – of a foreign military commander atop a state (Iran) with which the United States is not at war and without the permission of a government (Iraq) on whose soil the monumental war crime took place. In response to mild Democratic Party criticism of the timing and grounds for the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Trump has re-tweeted a right-wing lunatic’s tweet depicting Democratic Congressional leaders Charles Schumer (Senate Minority Leader) and Nancy Pelosi (House Speaker) in Muslim garb (a turban for Schumer and a hajib for Pelosi) in front of an Iranian flag.

Trump’s “press secretary” (who never holds press conferences) went on Trump Television (FOX News) to accuse Democrats of taking “talking points from Iran” for questioning the reasons given for the reckless assassination.

A book published by a leading civil rights lawyer last summer finds 20 common themes, rhetorical tactics, and dangerous policies that Trump is “copying from the early Hitler government” in 1930s Germany: holding power without winning majority support; finding and using direct lines of communication with their base; blaming others and diving on racial lines; relentlessly demonizing opponents; constantly attacking objective truth; relentlessly attacking mainstream media; assaulting science; cultivating a fawning alternative media to spread his lies; regular orchestrated mass hate-rallies; extreme nationalism; making a big show of closing borders; embracing mass detention and deportation; using borders to protect selected industries; embedding rule by rewarding capitalist elites; rejecting international norms; attacking domestic democratic processes; attacking courts and the rule of law; glorifying the military and demanding loyalty oaths; proclaiming unchecked power; relegating women to subordinate roles.

The Trumpenstein will not likely leave the White House without bloodshed even if he is bested in the Electoral College next November. Don’t take it from a leftist like me. The conservative American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein and the right-wing Trump senior administration official “Anonymous” have both recently warned that the tangerine-tinted Twitter-tantruming truth-trashing tyrant Trump may not honor the outcome of an election result that doesn’t go his way. “Members of Congress, governors and state legislators, leaders in civil society, lawyers, law enforcement figures and the military need,” Ornstein says, “to be thinking about how they might respond.”

Whence Trump’s special love for despots and dictators of various ideological stripes (ranging from Vladimir Putin to the blood-soaked Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte, the murderous Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin-Salman, the North Korean dictator Kim jong-Un, the Brazilian eco-Nazi Jair Bolsonaro, and Turkish despot Recep Erdogan) around the world? “The president,” one top national security aide told Anonymous, “sees in these guys what he wishes he had: total power, no term limits, enforced popularity, and the ability to silence critics for good”

“Bring Back the Death Penalty…The Right to be a New Yorker”

But, back to Draitser’s comment. Anyone who has been surprised by the nature of the Trump presidency wasn’t paying attention to pre-presidential Trump. The fact that the real estate baron and former reality television star Donald J. Trump was a malignantly narcissistic racist, sexist sociopath and an instinctual fascist was clear before he became a seriously viable presidential contender.

“The Donald” of the 1980s and 1990s was notorious for cheating contractors and workers, abusing his wives and other women, suing and defaming his critics, holding racist sentiments, and endless and shameless self-promoting. The son of a Ku Klux Klan member, a corrupt real estate mogul who sent the future president to military school, Trump made a political mark for himself during the late 1980s with harsh public comments about the “Central Park Five,” five black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted of the rape of a jogger in New York City. Trump bought newspaper advertisements calling for New York State to “bring back the death penalty” in the aftermath of the attack. His statement contained this chilling statement:

“When I was young, I sat in a diner with my father and witnessed two young bullies cursing and threatening a very frightened waitress. Two cops rushed in, lifted up the thugs and threw them out the door, warning them never to cause trouble again. I miss the feeling of security New York’s finest once gave to the citizens of this City. Let our politicians give back our police department’s power to keep us safe. Unshackle them from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’ which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s. We must cease our continuous pandering to the criminal population of this City. Give New York back to the citizens who have earned the right to be New Yorkers” (emphasis added).

(Trump has since refused to apologize for his campaign against the Central Park Five despite the full exoneration of the falsely accused men.)

Trump said this when he became irritated by the presence of legally required braille dots on the elevator towers of one of his New York City building: “no blind people are going to live here.”

Trump’s first wife Ivana told Vanity Fair in 1990that her ex-husband kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside table – a claim that seems all too reasonable given the openly fascistic nature of Trump’s presidency. . ."

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/20/trump-showed-us-who-he-was-before-he-became-president/