Trump's 'Stab in the Back'
We know how an earlier such stab was avenged. Can we wake up in time to prevent history from repeating itself?
It’s powerful imagery. It’s an even more powerful sentiment. Brave, selfless patriots giving their lives to save the “fatherland,” and yet locked in smoke-filled rooms with beers consumed so fast they barely cool, “Jewish” bankers make deals with “cosmopolitan” tycoons to sell Germany off and divvy up the profits.
This is the rhetoric and lunacy that lit a fire in the belly of the weird guy from Braunau am Inn. He then masterfully wove it an entire revolution that wooed a nation, fed the cowardice and hate which apparently festers in all our souls, and the result was a war which led to 60 million dead. So-called undesirables were weeded out and burned in the way a farmer clears a field before planting.
The Weimar Republic didn’t have the messaging oomph that Hitler had. It did, however, have the power of the police and the levers of the state to contain the fascist brownshirts. If not for the Great Depression, Hitler might have had a baby or two with Eva and his great-grandchildren today, who would be doing silly videos on TikTok. The chaos of the Depression, however, suddenly amplified the Austrian corporal’s message. His accusations of a “great stab on the back” rang more accurate than ever.
Donald Trump rose to prominence in the wake of the 2007–8 economic crisis, the housing crisis. Trump has the economic proof to show the Americans in the trenches fighting each year to survive that “the whole system is rigged against them.” Most amazingly, if it is rigged against them, then it is rigged to enrich people like him. This is the grand paradox of Trumpism and the MAGA cult — but then this is how all cults work, right?
Under Obama, the economy began to recover, but Trump insisted it would be much better if not for “them.” He had found his “international Jewry
” in the brown faces of desperate men and women migrating North for better lives. He told the suffering men and women of Main Street, many who weren’t really suffering, that “if not for them, your lives, our country would be so, so much better.”
Trust him; he will rid the nation of that vermin, and the Father-Knows-Best optimism of the 1950s will again reign supreme.
They do trust him despite all of the chaos. They trust him despite his failed four years as the president and broken promises. They trust him despite the hundreds of thousands dead because of his failed leadership during COVID.
What separates Trump and his mythical tale of woe from Hitler is that many of the key levers of the government now work tirelessly to empower him. Citizen Trump has the entirety of the Republican Congress, the Supreme Court, and countless federal judges and governors around the nation working to ensure he becomes their “fuhrer.”
This is an advantage Hitler never had, and it is one that today is making the Trumpian narrative of misery and economic doom-and-gloom seem so much richer in its fine but fictional details.
Things aren’t so bad despite a full-court press from Republicans not to cooperate with President Biden. Somehow, the “worst president ever” has accomplished more than any president since LBJ. And yet, with each positive report on the economy, Trump and his vast network of stupid create more vivid images about how the wound in the back of Main Street is beginning to ooze pus and stink.
None of what he or they say is true, though.
We have a choice. Vote for truth; vote for America. Vote Blue from top to bottom.