He colluded with a hostile foreign power to influence the election, a new political associate of his is indicted every few weeks.

He hires white supremacists, calls neo-nazis fine people, brags about assaulting women, ridicules sexual assault victims and disabled.

He cuddles up to fascists, and attacks and insults our allies. He casually talks about doing away with constitutional protections, committing war crimes as a good thing.

His campaign advisor and National Security Advisor have been found guilty of being agents for a foreign power. He revealed classified information to the Russians in the oval office after bragging that he took care of the Russian investigation by firing the head of the FBI.

As each atrocity has been uncovered, he has lied about it, and been caught lying.

The White House is – by all accounts- a chaotic cesspool of backstabbing and nepotism. The military ignores orders from the president, because those orders are dangerously ill-advised.

He has a sizable minority of the nation willing to support any atrocity he pulls out his ass- attacking minorities, kidnapping children from their parents- its all cool with you halfwit fucks… because you are all so fucking pleased at how much these atrocities outrage ‘the libs’ that you don’t stop and think about whether you should also be outraged yourselves…

AND YET YOU WONDER HOW PEOPLE COULD POSSIBLY THINK THIS IS A DANGEROUS SITUATION? YOU DON’T SEE ANY DAMN PARALLELS BETWEEN THIS DESCENT INTO FASCISM AND THE ONES BEFORE IT?

What the hell is wrong with you ?

The only way you can be blind to the obvious danger signs is if you have a red hat pulled down over your eyes…

The man is a monster, and everything he believes in is an obscenity. Well, everything he CLAIMS to believe. I don’t think he has any other motives but self-aggrandizement and personal profit and power. We have been documenting his crimes here since he first started running for office. You choose not to believe it, and there is nothing we can do about that, but that’s just the way it is.

Trump and his policies are a threat to me, my health, my dignity, my prosperity and my freedom. And he has used hate, fear and lies to stir up the ignorant, the fearful and the hateful because he and his followers will benefit from his programs and policies. Or they think they will.

Trump and his party favor the bosses over the workers. The corporations over the people.

They are devoted to dismantling the social safety net.

They wish to build a society where only the wealthy will be able to access the benefits of the society.

They have no use for the protection of the worker, the consumer or the environment.

They are willing to exploit racial, religious and ethnic differences to divide the people against themselves.

They are prepared to manipulate and pervert political campaigns and constitutional protections
to further their own agenda.

They are determined to cut taxes, but not deficits.

They are willing to sell the country out to foreign powers to secure their political power and economic control.

They lie, and their followers not only tolerate it, but they collude in the deception because they think they will get a piece of the action in return.

These people are not interested in the long-term welfare of the nation, or even of the world. All they want to do is continue profiting from the chaos.

So maybe they won’t actually gas the Liberals, round up the Mexicans, or burn all the Mosques. But somehow, that does not reassure me one bit.

As for me, I have nothing to gain from their program. I do not own a business, or employ workers, foreign or domestic. I am not a religious fanatic or moral hypocrite. I am not a jingoistic super-patriot or nativist. I am not a racist or an entrepreneurial fantasist. I am not afraid my daughter will sleep with a black guy or that my son will turn out gay. And I have absolutely nothing against foreigners, in fact, my grandparents were foreigners and I am fiercely proud of it. I am proud, not ashamed, of my intellectual achievements and educational credentials and I enjoy hanging out with people like me. I prefer the company of scientists and artists to that of businessmen and athletes. That’s why I come here to the Zone, although if the GOP wins the mid-terms you can color my ass gone; I fear your people will start a systematic purge of everyone who disagrees with you or might threaten your power. Yeah, that’s right. You don’t need violence to persecute people, but I am physically afraid of the Trumpers. I was born and raised in the South. I know what these people are capable of.

Most of all, I have done very well in this country, and those things which America gave me that allowed me to prosper and progress are now threatened, even despised by Trump and his followers. Although at my age, I doubt if I will survive long enough to see the mess that American Conservatism is doing to the world and the planet, I am enough of a patriot to despise what this morally bankrupt, spiritually desolate and intellectually barren philosophy is doing to both.

It is wrong to try and predict Trump’s future policies with Hitler’s excesses. The first hasn’t happened yet, and the latter were the result of wartime. Browning talks about this at length! He agrees with you! However, there are eerie similarities between Trump’s rise to the Presidency and Hitler’s rise to power, which are outlined in Browning and painstakingly documented in Shirer.

We don’t need death camps for there to be Nazis.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

Funny, I had to go to a Russian website to find the full text. But I guess Russians are OK, now.

Just because Godwin’s Law has a name, doesn’t mean its a law at all. Fascism has appeared multiple times since its “official” creation by Mussolini almost a century ago. Besides Italy, Spain and Germany, there have been other fascist regimes in many other countries in Latin America, Asia and Europe, and innumerable fascist movements in many others. Look at Russia, Turkey, and the Philippines today. Every one of those states and regimes was different, and reflected the history, local conditions, national character and leader’s personality involved. They were all different, but they shared certain characteristics in common.

Only Hitler gassed the Jews and invaded Poland, but that doesn’t mean he was the only one who was a fascist, and that if you don’t invade your neighbors or conduct genocide you aren’t one.

There’s no way I’m going to change your mind, you apparently have too much invested in making excuses for this grotesque homunculus, but I suggest you read Browning’s essay carefully, he certainly anticipates and even addresses your essayist’s objections. Like Mark Twain reminds us; “History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.”

History and politics are not physics, there is no absolute truth that can be specified by means of some logical proof, observation, experiment or determined by mathematical calculation. But I’m not the only person who sees the parallels between American and German fascism, almost a century apart. Maybe you can’t see it, and maybe I can’t convince you otherwise, but you might profit by thinking long and hard on why so many others do.

As a historian of modern Germany, I have spent many years exploring the crimes that Hitler and his followers committed. When people make facile comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, they are trying, usually in good faith, to warn us about the dangers of ignoring history and its supposed lessons.

But it is my very familiarity with that history that makes me highly skeptical about the inflationary use of such comparisons. They do more to confuse than clarify the urgent issues at stake

https://theconversation.com/trump-hitler-comparisons-too-easy-and-ignore-the-murderous-history-92394

Godwin’s law…