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Escaping the "Mussolini moment": Trump's enablers and the banality of evil

Rogue Valley

Lead or get out of the way
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2/20/21
It started with a ride down an escalator in 2015, and escalated rapidly. From the first cries of "rapists" invading our country to dog whistles like "Stand back, stand by," Donald Trump's dangerous delusions of power and control brought this country to the brink of collapse, and everyone who allowed that to happen is an enabler and a collaborator. From White House cronies and sycophants who shared in Trump's power fantasies and deep contempt for large swaths of Americans, to his equally evil children and Republicans in the Senate led by Mitch McConnell, to America's attorney general, to the doctors at Walter Reed who agreed to lie for the president and to sign non-disclosure agreements, thereby violating their Hippocratic oath, to the ICE bullies who separated infants and children from their parents and incarcerated them in cold, filthy camps, to the former heads of the CDC and FDA who caved after White House pressure, to irresponsible media moguls, they are all responsible for the terrifying threat of autocracy we faced, and the increase in violence that culminated at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Together, they are responsible for militias that felt emboldened in their militarism and for bad cops who mercilessly shoot to death Black and brown men and women. They are responsible for the resurgent KKK and groups like the Proud Boys.

They are responsible for federal courts being packed with ultra-conservative lifetime judges, and a Supreme Court that saw the demure but deadly Any Comey Barrett added to its ranks. In short, they are responsible for the near-demise of democracy. Adding to why we are on the edge of another Great Depression, and responsible for America's damaged standing in the world, Donald Trump's enablers and collaborators aided and abetted the disasters in our health, education and infrastructure systems, the filth in our water and the comeback of chemicals in our food. They are responsible for the deaths of almost half a million Americans who died needlessly because the super-spreader in chief just didn't give a damn. They also exemplify the "banality of evil" that philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us about when she reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a major architect of the Holocaust. Eichmann was, he insisted to the court in Jerusalem, simply following orders. So were White House staff, employees of government agencies who didn't speak up or quit their jobs in order to save the country, business moguls who didn't end their major donations to a corrupt fraud, and Fox News, which wouldn't stand up to a lunatic when he blamed everyone else for our disasters and incited violence. So too are the voters who inexplicably still stood with their man even though everything he does hurts them the most.


Political-theorist Hannah Arendt would have recognized the Trump administration's "banality of evil" early on and quite clearly.

Perhaps today, the US will exceed 500,000 COVID-19 deaths within the past 12 months. Much of that death and misery accrues to the purposeful criminal negligence of Donald John Trump and his willing army of enablers.
 
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