It all became a farce over the weekend—the whole of the presidential campaign, but especially Tuesday night's debate between the former president* and the current vice president. It will all be covered as though this were nothing more than a conventional political campaign, perhaps a little noisier than most of them. When in fact, one of the candidates is now running as an out-and-out fascist, his authoritarian ravings mitigated only marginally by the fact that he also is obviously lost in a cognitive netherworld. I have chosen to believe every word he said over the weekend.
At a rally in Wisconsin, talking about his plans for mass deportations of what he and his government of minor-league gauleiters will determine to be illegal immigrants, he said:
But in Colorado they've taken over. I mean in Colorado they are so brazen. They've taken over sections of the state and getting them out will be a bloody story. They should have never been allowed to come into our country. Nobody checked them. Were they criminals? Were they from jails? We have them pouring out from jails. We have the worst criminals in all of these countries. 168 so far are registered. 168 countries. They are in our country, and they said if you come back, you will be executed. You will be killed immediately. Not going to be easy, but we'll do it.
And on his own cyber-
Sturmer:
“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election.
"It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again.
“We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
This is not normal. This is not typical campaign rhetoric. Hell, it isn't even typical campaign mudslinging. It is the volcanic waste-product of a dangerous and disordered mind. And I choose to believe he means every word of it. I believe he will have his mass deportation squads and that they will be as bloody in their work as they think they have to be, and I believe he will honor sadism at the highest level of the government.
I believe he would arrange to have governors and secretaries of state and poll workers and inconvenient voters thrown into jail, and that he will enforce it through thuggery at polling places. Why would I not believe it? He keeps saying it in front of god and the world. He is a mentally unravelling out-and-out fascist and he is within a whisker of the White House again. He is a mortal threat to everything that is vital to the survival of this republic as we know it. To write about him as such, and to write about him as such every damn day from now until the first Tuesday of November is the proper, truthful, and, yes, the objective thing to do.
What is not proper, truthful, or objective is the weak-tea approach taken by A.O. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, who comes right up to the edge of doing what is right, and then scurries back to that airy place that has proven to be helpless in the face of the threat Sulzberger already has described.
As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence, I have no interest in wading into politics. I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection. It is beyond shortsighted to give up journalistic independence out of fear that it might later be taken away. At The Times, we are committed to following the facts and presenting a full, fair and accurate picture of November’s election and the candidates and issues shaping it. Our democratic model asks different institutions to play different roles; this is ours.
It is full, fair, and accurate to describe the Republican candidate for president as an angry, addled fascist whose every public utterance has been another dagger pointed at the heart of the system Sulzberger says is so profoundly threatened. Neutrality is surrender in this unique period in our history, the one that Sulzberger quite accurately describes elsewhere in his column. The NYT's political coverage has demonstrated nothing more clearly than it has illustrated that neutrality is a perilous fetishism in the best of times. These are not the best of times.
