Why Donald Trump is the man Americans should fear

It’s irresponsible to compare anything that doesn’t equate to the murder of six million people with Hitler. But at this stage, it might be considered irresponsible to not compare Donald Trump with anyone but the father of the Third Reich.

While Trump hasn’t killed anyone, and hasn’t yet begun funding the construction of concentration camps across the lower 48, he represents more than a political candidate running for the nation’s highest office, he represents a movement - of people who feel their lives have been betrayed by forces they have no control over.

Better political pundits than this columnist have spent the better part of six months forecasting the demise of Trump’s candidacy. “Trump called Mexicans rapists. He’s done,” was said too many times to count. “Trump mocked a woman’s menstrual cycle. He’s cooked,” predicted many more. While others forecast the reality show billionaire wouldn’t last the summer, the financial filing deadline, or the debates.

On Monday, a poll showed Trump no longer leading in the early voting state Iowa for the first time since he announced his candidacy. Later that same day, Trump released a policy statement that urged for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. “He’s finished,” was the popular refrain heard across a galaxy of media outlets.

On Tuesday, a CNN poll showed Trump extending his lead in both Iowa and New Hampshire. His anti-Muslim, three-card trick worked again. But how many more of these morally repugnant, yet political expedient aces does he have left up his sleeve?

In other words, has Trump finally crossed his Rubicon?

The Obama administration called Trump’s heinous scheme “un-American”. Senior GOP leadership went as far to say Trump’s views on Muslims are not only un-American, but also “anti-American”.

“This is not conservatism,” Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the House, said. “What was proposed yesterday is not what the party stands for and, more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for.”

Even Dick Cheney, who not only tortured Muslims, but whose disastrous actions led to the death of approximately one million Muslims, denounced Trump. Along with the Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus.

The wagons have circled. The GOP establishment has done its calculus. Trump can’t deliver the Republican Party electoral success in 2016. He can only bring them disaster. So they want him gone.

Bigger than the party

But Trump is more than a candidate. He’s now a movement. He not only has a movement of disenfranchised middle-class Americans in tow, but also a conservative media class that is heavily invested in ensuring a conservative candidate never actually wins the US presidency. They have anti-Hillary books to sell, and their ratings and speaking fees soar whenever a Democrat is in the Oval Office.

Trump also knows he’s now bigger than the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Trump tweeted that a poll showed 68 percent of his supporters would support him as an independent. On Wednesday he doubled-down on that thinly veiled threat by hinting this was indeed the way he was thinking.

Much has been written about the failed respective third-party bids of Ross Perot (1992) and Ralph Nader (2000). More has been written about how the latter probably handed George W Bush the White House. But neither man represented a movement. Neither led a movement in a time of such great fear and anxiety - as we see today. Their bids took place in the pre-9/11, pre-Islamic State (IS) days of yesteryear.

Trump is stoking the same anxieties and fears that fascist dictators of yore used to propel their ascendancy. A broken political class, a corporate-owned media class, has provided the political space for Trump’s anti-Muslim fuelled fascism to thrive.

For decades, leaders of both major political parties have betrayed America’s middle class, while ignoring, forgetting and maligning the underclass. Fascism emerges in times of great national distress.

Wall Street funded political parties, and special-interest funded politicians have kept a decimated middle class distracted with “hot button” wedge issues.

Since the 1980s, the political class has overseen the greatest transfer of public wealth to the private sector in the history of human existence. Americans, for the most part, didn’t notice. While corporate overlords robbed the Treasury, sold wars as new products, and fiddled with the tax code, their preferred elected officials kept Americans busy with abortion, immigration, gay marriage, and a multitude of wars on every noun imaginable - drugs, crime, terror, etc.

A middle-class lifeline

Today more than 50 million Americans find themselves living in poverty. For many, third-world level misery is only one bounced rent cheque away. A recent poll found a whopping 47 percent of Americans could not afford to pay an unexpected bill of $400 or more, which means more than 100 million households are faced with an existential crisis each and every day.

Fewer and fewer Americans have the luxury of time to investigate what the national headlines mean.

“Many trapped in mass culture are gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source,” writes C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite.

They want answers. They want action. They want a lifeline out of their plight. Law-abiding citizens who have played nice, attended church, donated time and money to charity, finished high school or even college - find themselves asking, “Why is my life falling apart?”

In 2009, Noam Chomsky, who remains one of America’s greatest public intellectuals, forewarned the emergence of a fascistic leader. He said the parallels between America today and Weimar Germany are “striking”.

Chomsky added, “The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen… If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest, this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger, and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says, ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews, Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks.”

As it turns out, thanks largely to a wave of IS terror attacks; the “enemy” is the Muslims, and by “enemy” I mean an ideal political distraction - one that allows America’s struggling middle class to forget their personal woes, and invest in a leader who will take their collective fight to the threatening other.

All fascist dictators emerge as tough-talking yet charismatic solutions to an internal threat. Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism, said that in Germany, “there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented”. A yearning we now see articulated through Trump - whether Trump is tied to the GOP or untied as an independent - it might matter not.

I am in no way suggesting Trump can win the Oval Office. What I’m suggesting is each new terror attack has propelled Trump in that general direction. The question then becomes - what happens after the next IS-claimed terrorist attack, and the one after that? If history is a guide, it won’t be that Muslims just get the blame for terrorism but also for the middle-class’s economic decline. And that only helps the fascist Trump.

- CJ Werleman is the author of Crucifying America (2013), God Hates You. Hate Him Back (2009), and Koran Curious (2011), and he is the host of Foreign Object. Follow him on twitter: @cjwerleman