The easy answer: Its leaders! The GOP suffered through a seismic revolution in going from Eisenhower and Reagan’s Good Ole Party of Republicans, i.e., liberals in the sense of the Enlightenment, people who respect freedoms and democratic ideals, i.e. democrats and republicans with a small d and r; to Dubya’s Good Ole Piranhas, demented hawks who might still be looking for WMDs in Iraq. But now they’ve swung so far to the right that they’ve become the Fascist Party of America (FPA). Their House speaker wants a Christian theocracy a la Iran’s; their VP candidate wants to end all reproductive freedoms, including IVF, and ban all abortions, even in the case of rape or incest or threat to a mother’s life; and their presidential candidate wants a police state with him in charge, one that will end all opportunity for most Americans except for his family and their super-rich friends, a la Maduro or Putin. In other words, the GOP is the FPA because they are now led by fascists.
But what is a fascist? As Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s VP before Truman, said, ‘A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.’ I would only edit that statement at the beginning: “A fascist is usually a sociopath whose lust….” That’s needed to completely describe the FPA’s fuehrer, Donald Jackass Trump. to a T and all his other sick sycophants who lead the FPA. Other mindless MAGA maniacs are just mindless lemmings who are following those leaders over the precipice.
Most fascist leaders, if they have any political success at all, have to be at least part-time con men like Narcissus le Grand, of course. That’s why the FPA looks like any mafia organization: There are smart fascists and and there are dumb ones. The two Johns, Bolton and Kelly; Rex Tillerson (who coined that famous description of Trump, “he’s a f&^%ing moron”); and a few others, were smarter than most but really dumb as posts because they thought they could control the jackass and his family (dumbness is in all their DNA). No one can control Trump because he belongs in a straitjacket and locked up in a padded cell! Besides being a sociopath, who sometimes can be harmless, Trump’s also a psychotic individual. (A large panel of mental health pros determined that years ago.)
How should voters react in these circumstances? Don’t think about that question too long. (You won’t if you’re a mindless MAGA maniac, of course. Such people are generally brain-dead zombies.) And the answer won’t matter anyway if the FPA turns the US into the FSA, i.e. the “Fascist States of America.” Once fascists take control, chaos, collapse, and crises can only follow! It’s not a left versus right issue anymore either: Left and right come around and close the circle off at a point called fascism, that point where Henry Wallace’s definition throws away ideology by making any claims to one irrelevant. Maduro of Venezuela differs not in the least from Bolsonaro of Brazil. Trump is just another Putin, and just as much a danger to world peace as that Russian fascist, if not more so, because Trump is dumber.
Donald Jackass Trump is so dumb that he lives with his foot in his mouth. (Maybe sucking on those painful bone spurs he invented to avoid the Vietnam draft? And they criticize Walz because he spent twenty years in service of his country? C’mon!)
Buried in the Secret Service’s acting director’s testimony about the assassination attempt on the FPA candidate was the observation that they guard the guy with the “nuclear football” more. Are you willing to let that “f&^%ing moron” carry that football again? Do you want to give it to the dolt who suggested using disinfectant against Covid? Pass it to the madman who wanted to trade Puerto Rico for Greenland to cut losses after a hurricane in that “shithole country”? (Puerto Ricans are real Americans, you dumbass, not fake ones like you!) Who took Putin’s word over the opinion of many of his own national security advisors who claimed Putin’s sycophants interfered in the 2016 election? If your answer is yes, you also belong in a straitjacket and locked up in a padded cell!
Okay, it’s possible that I have it all wrong. Maybe the fascists’ stupidity just leads them to harmless 1984-like doublespeak gaffes? But isn’t it hard to believe that anyone could like the taste of shoe leather or stinking toes so much? Otherwise, after hearing some of those asinine comments from Donald Jackass Trump and his running mate, J. Done-Nothing Vance, we would have to say that FPA really means “Foot-in-the-Mouth Party of America”…that’s a fair description but not the whole story!
Narcissus le Grand, talking to a group of black journalists (lots of boos from that crowd for good reason), stated that Kamala Harris “just happened to turn black.” (She’s mostly identified herself as Black-Asian, by the way; went to Howard U; and was a member of the nation’s first black fraternity!) Analysts across the political spectrum are still wondering what that jackass meant by saying that if Christians vote for him now they’ll never have to vote again. Is he thinking of creating a Christian theocracy modeled after Iran’s Muslim one with him as a Christian ayatollah? (His Mar-a-Lago decor looks quite Islamic, by the way, but that fool likes red and gold.) The SBC and Catholic far-right might like that possible turn of events; I want to puke thinking about it!
J. Done-Nothing Vance is still trying to walk back his “crazy cat ladies” remark, putting his foot farther in his mouth in the process. (Is it getting there by way of…no, he’s not that limber!) Everyone’s still trying to figure out what he meant when he said that people with children tax-wise should be rewarded more than people who don’t. People with children already have a lot of tax benefits childless couples don’t have—or childless cat ladies don’t–benefits that make sense and were mostly proposed by Dems. (The FPA has torpedoed others. They don’t help anyone but themselves…to your money! Trump drove up the national debt, not Biden.). And hell, I know a lot of childless cat ladies who’ve done more for human progress than J. Done-Nothing could ever manage to do (not that the privileged Yale grad who loves his couch would ever want to help anyone either).
The FPA might self-destruct with all their foot-in-the-mouth disease choking the zombie life out of them, but we can’t count on it. The zombie voters who pay more attention to sports and Hollywood’s crappy excuse for movies might just be stupid enough to give Trump and his fascist sycophants one more try. As Wallace said, fascism is about grabbing power and exploitation. They’ll get that on the trickle-down, right? Wrong! All they’ll get is their sewage.
The 2024 US election is about one party, the FPA, that wants the power to do just that, ruin the country even more; and another, the Dems, who want power to remain in the hands of the people. This election might be the last one where voters can choose which party best represents a secure future for them, their families, and future generations. There’s only one choice that’s right and morally correct. It’s not a tough choice, folks! You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see which one is right.