J.F.C. Dems-- No, This is Not a "Reichstag Moment"

Seriously, Cut the Hyperbole-- It's Not Accurate and Doesn't Help

It’s genuinely amazing to me how fast Democrats and progressive activists can take an issue that may work in their favor to bring unity and turn it into something beyond what most people can agree with. You give them an inch and they take it a mile.

The only thing I find almost as galling as Nazis is the left’s willingness to equate anything occurring today to 1930’s Germany. As the online adage of wisdom says, the first person to invoke Hitler in an online argument almost always automatically loses. Democrats are always way too quick to go to that well.

As if it has to be said, no, America today is not remotely close to Nazi Germany. The two are not the same league, they’re not even the same ballpark or sport. Trump is not Hitler. Republicans are not Nazis. We still have institutions with almost 250 years of foundation behind them. Hitler wrote an ideological polemic that described his caustic worldview and was the underpinning of his actions; Trump doesn’t even read one paragraph briefings and presides as if he’s shaking a magic eight ball. The Nazis plunged Europe into the bloodiest war ever and killed another 8 million Jews for kicks just because their own moral core was empty, evil and soulless; Trump can’t even win a Twitter spat with Elon Musk.¹

Which is to say Trump is an utter clown. With no sense of what the hell he is doing other than swinging wildly from decision to decision. Trump’s cronies are incompetent buffoons who only further demonstrate it whenever they open their mouths or let everyone know when they include journalists to their group chats. The Nazis were a focused machine with a huge Versailles sized chip on their shoulder geared towards revenge for the way Germany was treated post-WWI and were the ideological counterpoint to a rising communist movement in Europe. Republicans blow with the wind coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and quickly retract decades of principle on the whims of an idiot. Seriously, quit trying to make them out to be Nazis at every turn.

Which brings me to a lot of the rhetoric recently referring to Trump’s calling of the National Guard in California over immigration enforcement his “Reichstag Moment.” J.F.C.. NO, it’s not. Not even close. For a little historical context, the “Reichstag fire” was the moment Hitler used to get the Enabling Act passed as Chancellor, empowering him to make law by fiat (a subsequent vote by the Reichstag would be to overturn that result if they didn’t agree). His previous attempts were turned down by the Reichstag, but once the fire occurred, adverse parties agreed for the sake of national security that it was a good idea. Once they passed the Enabling Act, to their almost instantaneous regret, some of the first things Hitler did was eliminate political rival parties (the Bavarian Peoples’ Party for instance was dissolved and subsumed into the Nazi Party, and it’s leadership jailed until they swore loyalty to the Nazis), ensuring a guaranteed, compliant and growing political majority. In that, Hitler and the political class became completely aligned.

Trump can’t even get his “big, beautiful bill” through the Senate.

Do you see Democrats running up and down fearful of Donald Trump? Do you see them cowering to the Republicans and getting in line behind them? HELL NO! You’re seeing the EXACT OPPOSITE. Democrats are openly confronting him over what he is doing in L.A.. They see what Trump is doing and are openly calling it out as repugnant. Governor Gavin Newsom has re-stated his control over the situation and the entire Democratic Governors’ Association, and every Democratic Governor in the country, signed a letter to Trump calling this gambit out as unnecessary, unlawful and wrong. You have Democratic elected officials contemplating protesting with the protesters on the ground in L.A.. The Democratic Party seems to be aligned completely against him on this.²

And believe me, the Democratic Party isn’t completely aligned on much these days. Over the weekend, we had an audio recording leak of the DNC Chair Ken Martin whining about how David Hogg is undermining him. It was a pathetic and weak performance by a party that has routinely exemplified it since Trump won his second term. You know what though? You didn’t hear much about it because Democrats were uniting and solidifying around the images on the screen in Los Angeles, not some intraparty squabble that makes everyone associated with it look bad.

In my life there was only one time really where I genuinely saw a “Reichstag Moment” and that was 9/11. In the aftermath, George W. Bush’s approval rating shot up to an all time high of 90%. He had a political blank check to pretty much do anything associated with National Security he wanted, and some of the things he passed and managed behind the scenes were downright shameful looking back. But Bush did them with the Democratic Party aligned with him to do what he wanted. The Patriot Act passed the Senate 98-1 with only Russ Feingold voting against. In the aftermath of that, when a war resolution vote came up on Iraq with sketchy evidence that there were WMDs there, most Democrats—including ALL of the potential Presidential candidates in 2004 and 2008— voted in favor of it. Republicans steamrolled opposition to do anything they wanted to do and personified them as weak and unable to keep you safe (“You don’t want the evidence to be a mushroom cloud!”), and it worked. That level of political power, where there is no opposition left at all to oppose you, is what a “Reichstag Moment” is. And for as much as Republicans at the time were also equated to Nazis and Fascists, and as much as Democratic pessimism and hyperbole was pushed to the nth degree, the fact that we still have a democracy and free and fair elections proves that rhetoric wasn’t true then. It’s not true now.

I’m constantly hearing so much frightening rhetoric about Trump that it’s conflicting and confounding to reality. Look, he’s either an orange clown or the Antichrist, but he can’t simultaneously be both. I side with the idea he’s more Bozo than Beelzebub. His whole administration is a cadre of third tier circus freaks. They don’t know what they are doing, and when actions and events get the chance to be absorbed by the body politic and by the judicial system he usually loses, badly and obviously. Incompetence gets exposed eventually, and when it does there are always repurcussions. He’ll lose here too.

The irony is that it was always the Republican Party who was the big “states’ rights” party in my lifetime, who were always skeptical of governmental overreach and a strong federal government; here you have Republicans embracing a strong federal government action that if a Democratic President doing them they’d have hearings on the Hill the next day crying “BLASPHEMY!” Remember Cliven Bundy, the cattle rancher who rounded up some gun-totin’ friends of his to fend off the Bureau of Reclamation trying to seize his ranch for back taxes (for having his herd graze on federal land)? Republicans made a hero out of this whackadoodle. The same with Randy Weaver, the gun nut at Ruby Ridge who lost his family when he got into an armed stand-off with federal ATF agents. Republicans actually made demons out of the ATF for it’s actions at Waco against David Koresh, even though Koresh was a cult leader. But here you have the federal authorities going after suspected illegal immigrants, many of them legitimate American citizens (who are not even being afforded due process to defend themselves), and the Republican Party is silent, even encouraging of the actions. This event doesn’t demonstrate Trump strength so much as it underscores Republican weakness, capitulance and cowardice. They fear their own voters so much they’d rather stay sheepishly quiet and hope it all passes as if they were ostriches with their heads in the sand rather than speak out against it. Sure, you still get the crazies like MarkWayne Mullin justifying the worst of Trump’s positions; however the ones that know better and see what’s going on are sadly quiet and compliant right now. Trump’s castrated them thoroughly.

Which brings me to my last point I want to make. Since 2009, the Republican Party had been trying to eliminate Obamacare and made a series of votes against the program. When they clearly had the votes to kill it, they scheduled in the middle of the night, a vote to scrap it altogether. Republican John McCain, probably the last old school Republican with principles and the man who lost the Presidential election to Barack Obama, came for the vote coming from the hospital where he had been receiving care to treat his cancer, and very visibly voted against the rest of his party, securing health care for millions. He didn’t say a word, a simple hand gesture was all it took. In the 1950s, it was an Iowa born attorney Joseph Welch who nailed the coffin shut on Joe McCarthy when he admonished him, ”You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last. Have you left no sense of decency?”³ And lastly, during the mid-2000s when elected Democrats were fearful of siding with anti-war activists, and the anti-war movement was diffuse and not really focused, it took one woman, Cindy Sheehan, protesting in her tent 5 miles from Bush’s Crawford Ranch, wanting to speak to the President about her son killed in Iraq, that completely changed the narrative about the Iraq War and got the Democrats aligned in a way to counter the militant GOP push, by focusing on veterans and the declining situation in Iraq.

It only takes one good person to bring down a House of Cards, and make no mistake, the Trump circus is just that. The Reichstag Fire is a metaphor for the accumulation of absolute power; I don’t see that here— I see a weak guy trying to look strong and only getting weaker by the minute. The more he does shit like this, the more exposed he gets and the more his facade crumbles. That’s not a recipe for indomitable electoral strength, it’s the harbinger of a sound and encompassing loss and diminishment.

The events of this past weekend are worthy of pause and reflection. It should worry us how quickly Trump and Stephen Miller were so quick to casually invoke the Insurrection Act to federalize the National Guard in this instance. There are certainly legal details that should make conscientious people legitimately concerned.

It’s just not the Reichstag Fire.

PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner

Famous anti-war activist Peter Coyote chimed in on the protest efforts. His statement is excellent, and is produced below in full:

I’m watching the Los Angeles reaction to ICE raids with trepidation and regret. Three years ago I taught a class at Harvard on the “theater of protest”— designed to help people understand why so many protests turn out to be Republican campaign videos working directly against the interests of the original protest.

A protest is an invitation to a better world. It’s a ceremony. No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at. More important you have to know who the real audience Of the protestis. The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, The Congress,etc. The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them. If you win them, you win power at the box office And power to make positive change.Everything else is a waste. There are a few ways to get there.

Number 1 let women organize the event. They’re more collaborative. They’re more inclusive, and they don’t generally bring the undertones of violence men do. 2 appoint monitors, give them yellow, vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protester sit down. Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement. Number 3 dress like you’re going to church. It’s hard to be painted as a hoodlum When you’re dressed in clean Presentable clothes. They don’t have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience.Number 4, make your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people.Let signs do the talking. Number 5 go home at night. In the dark, you can’t tell the cops from the killers. Come back at Dawn fresh and rested. I have great fear that Trump’s staging with the National Guard and maybe the Marines is designed to clash with anarchists who are playing into his hands and offering him the opportunity to declare an insurrection. It’s such a waste and it’s only because we haven’t thought things through strategically. Nothing I thought of is particularly original. It was all learned by watching the early civil rights protests in the 50s and 60s. And it was the discipline and courage of African-Americans that drew such a clear line in the American sand that people were forced to take sides and that produced the civil rights act. .The American people are watching and once again if we behave in ways that can be misinterpreted, we’ll see this explained to the public in Republican campaign videos benefiting the very people who started this. Wake up. Vent at home. In public practice discipline and self control. It takes much more courage.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

Amazing how the Elon Musk-Trump Social Media feud was only 4 days ago. Kind of dropped from the headlines didn’t it? Coincidence, I think not.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

Trump’s a clown. Treat him as one. Laugh at him. He’s not meant to be taken seriously, he’s meant to be joked at and ridiculed. Don’t be afraid of him— mock him.

LIKE WHAT YOU SEE? MAKE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE AND SHARE!!!

Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. Oh, that was the big news on Friday, a mere 4 days ago. You don’t think the timing of this shitstorm had anything to do with changing the headlines do you? I mean, the number of Google searches for “Trump Epstein” spiked right up until he announced he was calling up the National Guard in California. Timing certainly seems suspicious.

2. Whether that proves politically popular we’ll have to wait and see, but I don’t see alignment with Trump on this, I see direct confrontation with him on it.

3. Speaking of the McCarthy episode, I did watch the CNN presentation of Good Night and Good Luck this past weekend. It’s good and a well made stage presentation. Very timely and worth your time if you can catch it on a rerun or see it live. I prefer the Oscar nominated movie to the play though because 1) David Strathairn is perfect as Edward Murrow, and Clooney’s good but not in the same league, 2) the black and white works excellently with the times and atmosphere, and exemplifies the era, 3) the newscasts and archival footage integrated into the story is more seamless in the movie than the stage, and 4) the supporting cast is A-list, while on the stage, they don’t do a bad job but it’s not the same. Nonetheless, I’ll reiterate, watch it if you can.