The MAGA Republican Party meltdown, floating island of garbage joke, beeper going off comment on CNN, “enemy within” declarations by Trump. All of it is a sign of MAGA rage and panic fueled by the power of Vice President Kamala Harris’s political campaign, and Harris herself.
Yes, we must be mindful of a coordinated MAGA plan to overthrow the 2024 election. Trump’s intentionally divisive demonization of Americans, Democrats, LGBTQ folks, immigrants, people of other faiths as targeted by Project 2025 is designed to motivate MAGA for another Jan 6. I’m not suggesting otherwise. But something else is also happening.
Part of a successful fascist agenda is maintaining culpable deniability by men like Trump even as they demonize groups/pit them against each other. Carefully crafted language allows voters in those groups to say “He said that about my group but he wasn’t talking about me.”
Careful fascist language is designed to fly under the radar. It normalizes MAGA white supremacist/Christian nationalist agendas via documents like Project 2025, which is a masterplan of anti-democracy extremism wrapped in mind-numbingly detailed outlines of government policy.
Harris, by virtue of her intelligence, vision, moral authority, has made manifest a new and vibrant vision of America. This has created a groundswell of political energy that has overwhelmed the graveyard cold political machinations of the Stephen Millers of the world.
Trump, ever the malignant narcissist, has seen Harris’s impact firsthand in a debate in which he used every trick in the authoritarian playbook and lost badly. This was the moment she broke him, and by extension his vast network of enablers and surrogates.
Since the debate, Trump has lost his trademark soft authoritarian language of the past and so have those around him. Language that offered culpable deniability to those who wanted to see themselves as “not the ones he’s talking about.” Or “not racist just conservative.”
Since the debate, the mass media has bent itself into pretzels attempting to normalize Trump’s Increasingly fascist language, desperate to sustain the horse race mindset allowed by more subtle coded authoritarian language of the Trump/Biden contests.
With Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, the final illusions of horse race civility have collapsed just days before the election because the Trump camp have descended into open rage, driven mad by the failure of their subtle fascist politics. They have done what their kind always does. They are openly doubling down on racism and sexism.
As extremist rage becomes white hot inside of Trump’s Musk/ Thiel/ Koch funded political bubble, Americans are seeing the unfiltered contempt for us all that has always lurked beneath Trump’s MAGA movement. Kamala Harris has done her part. Now we must do ours. Now we must beat the Republican Party us and down the ticket and beat them badly. http://KamalaHarris.com
Previously Published on Medium
Elvert Barnes on Flickr under CC License
