This week learned from The Atlantic and from The New York Times that Donald Trump is a big Adolph Hitler fan.
Tom Nichols at The Atlantic writes: “Many Americans know exactly who Trump is, and they like it.”
A taste:
Some voters, to be sure, have bought into the mindless tropes that Democrats are communists or Marxists or some other term they don’t understand. But the truly loyal Trump voters are people who are burning with humiliation. They can’t get over the trauma of losing in 2020, the shame of buying Trump’s lie about rigged elections, and the shock of seeing each of their champions—Tucker Carlson, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and others—turn out to be liars and charlatans who have been fired, financially imperiled, or even imprisoned.
Rather than reckoning with the greatest mistake they’ve ever made at the ballot box, they have decided that their only recourse is to put Trump back in the Oval Office. For them, restoring Trump would be both vindication and vengeance. It would prove that 2016 was not a fluke, and horrify people both they and Trump hate.
I am not hopeful that Democrats will rally in large enough numbers to prevent this outcome. Harris’s campaign has wisely avoided a slew of traps and pitfalls, but too many Democrats are reverting to form, complaining about wonky intraparty policy differences while Trump fulminates against democracy itself. (Some of the nation’s media outlets have contributed to this sense of complacency by “sanewashing” Trump’s most unhinged moments.) I am also not sure that swing voters will really swing against Trump, but one ray of hope is that revelations from people like Kelly do seem to matter: A new analysis indicates that voters trust criticism from Trump’s former colleagues and allies more than standard political zingers from the opposition.
Read the entire piece here.