reflectivepundit

Trump will Do What’s Best for Women, Whether They Like it or Not.

By Brigitte L. Nacos

At a campaign stop in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Donald Trump told America’s women that he would protect them, “whether the women like it or not.” He also revealed that his aides told him, not to make the remark and that he told them, "I said, 'Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not. I’m going to protect them.”

What the former president and once-again candidate for the highest office in the land, said, is a metaphor for his life-long patronizing attitude towards and sexual aggression against women.

He has sold himself forever as the best and the brightest, the toughest and the most successful, the best-looking alpha male who gets what he wants. Whatever it takes.    

In private life, in business, and in politics.

While misogynist Trump has attracted far more male than female hard-core supporters, a significant segment of white women is also loyal to him and his cult.

But in the 2022 mid-term elections and abortion referenda in several states, a significant number of conservative women voted with Democrats.  

Earlier this week, I was convinced that the opposition to Row v. Wade among those Republican women had declined. I assumed that many of them had returned to the fold.   

Now, I wonder whether “Trump being Trump” went too far with his chauvinist declaration of patriarchic Trumpian suppression of women’s agency.

At earlier campaign rallies, he insisted that he is the “protector of women” and wanted to take their minds away from “thinking about abortion.”

Now, all American women, including conservative ones, know how the Trumpian wind blows against all aspects of gender equality.

Perhaps, Trump’s latest macho bullet will ricochet back to marking his defeat thanks to women who are changing their voting decisions in these last days before Election Day…

When Trump and his Supporting Cast Spew Vitriol, the Dear Leader, GOP Officials, and Wall Streeters Like What They Hear and See

By Brigitte L. Nacos

When you thought that Donald Trump and his supporting cast could not go lower in their dangerous and crude attacks against opponents, the cult upped the ante last Sunday.

The horror-show at Madison Garden proved once again that these dirt-throwing characters find ever more hostile, threatening, vulgar and obscene put-downs of what their leader calls regularly the enemies within that he and his crew promise to persecute, execute, drive out of the country…

Starting with the election of Barack Obama and intensifying during the 2016 campaign, boundless hate of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Democrats dominated many niche websites at the far-right. Most people never read and heard the stuff.

But during Trump’s presidency and even more so after he left the White House, far-right extremism, the dehumanization, and the vilification of Americans outside the MAGA community along with the rhetorical war against legal and undocumented immigrants became part and parcel of one of the two major parties: Trump’s GOP.

House Speaker Mike Johnson was among those who warmed up the crowd in the Garden. When other supporting actors called Vice President Harris a prostitute controlled by pimps and the anti-Christ, a devil; when a self-described comedian characterized Puerto Rico as "a floating island of garbage” and Hispanics as fertile breeders of children, the House Speaker nor any other member of congress protested.

How could they? Their Dear Leader’s rhetoric picked up, where the supporting cast left off. And the crowd in the full Madison Square Garden gave them all jubilant ovations.

Wall Street, too, loved the celebration of right-wing extremism. As Yahoo’s financial page reported the day after,

• Trump Media & Technology Group stock (DJT) extended its five-week surge on Monday, rising as much as 20% following Donald Trump's rally at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden (MSG) over the weekend as investors bet on improved chances the former president wins the November election.

In other words, after the former president, his sycophants, and the MAGA masses descended into the ultimate sinkhole of inflammatory rhetoric, the stocks of Trump’s media company jumped significantly higher in anticipation of a more likely second Trump presidency.

 

The Washington Post as We Knew It Is Dying in Daylight

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In February 2017, weeks after Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States, the Washington Post put the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” underneath its masthead. These four words warned of democracy’s vulnerability and assured this leading newspaper’s journalistic pledge to defend democracy.

Yesterday, two minutes before noon on Friday, October 25, 2024, Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis published a short opinion piece declaring that the paper would not endorse any presidential candidate. He ended a practice going back to the endorsement of Jimmy Carter in 1976. It is also telling that the decision came after the opinion editor of the paper along with several member of the editorial board had drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris.

This retreat from journalistic ethics, namely, the responsibility of journalists and editors to hold those in power responsible for undemocratic behavior, was for me the last straw.

I canceled my subscription immediately.

As I read the Lewis declaration, I was momentarily shocked. But I was not surprised. I had noticed well before that the formerly sharp and deep bite of the Post’s watchdog role was getting increasingly weaker in the days and months after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, appointed Lewis earlier this year.

The controversial British journalist and media manager honed his skills in several of Rupert Murdoch’s papers. Shortly after his take-over in Washington, he got rid of the well-respected editor-in-chief Sally Buzbee and hired several of his former British colleagues away from Murdoch papers for the highest editorial positions.

There came an announcement of staff reductions with an opportunity to get rid of the best and brightest reporters and editors and there were multiple editorial initiatives and changes that seemed more appropriate for a tabloid, not for a serious newspaper.

The Washington Post as we have known it since its fine investigative roles in the Pentagon Papers Case and the Watergate Scandal is dying in bright daylight. And that at a time, when democracy is under attack from a far-right movement and its anti-democratic leader who makes no secret of his fascist plans.

The Murdoch-ization of the Washington Post is progressing fast. One can only assume that this was what Bezos had in mind, when he put a Murdoch crew in charge.

Trump and Vance: Sexist Autocrats at the Gate of Power

By Brigitte L. Nacos

One reason why the name “strongmen” befits autocrats is that they typically have a male superiority complex. In the fascist mind, men are the superior and women the inferior gender.  

Italy’s Benito Mussolini claimed that women “never created anything.” 

Germany’s Adolf Hitler wrote in his manifesto Mein Kampf,

“The rights of citizenship shall be conferred on every young man whose health and character have been certified as good, after having completed his period of military service. The German girl is a subject of the State but will become a citizen when she marries.”

A century later, after women in western democracies won voting and other rights, anti-democratic far-right autocrats threaten the progress that women fought for in the past.

Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance are poster boys of sexist would-be strongmen in the current campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris is their main target.

At a recent campaign stop, Trump told the crowd that “Joe Biden became mentally impaired; Kamala was born that way.” What a display of sexism. For Trump, old age affected the male opponent’s mental abilities, the female opponent was never mentally fit but born, as Trump claimed at another occasion, with “a low IQ.”

The former president’s vulgar denigration of the vice president is both sexist and racist. When he called her the other day “lazy as hell,” he invoked an old stereotype of blacks. In 2016, Trump’s rhetorical attacks against Hillary Clinton were sharp, but nothing came close to his vicious language against Harris. “You are a shit vice president,” he shouted at one rally. And the crowd screamed back in an enthusiastic chorus, “shit, shit, shit.”

JD Vance seconds everything his “Dear Leader” spills out. And then he dishes out his own extreme ideas and plans. Like Hitler and other past and present strongmen nationalists, Vance’s reactionary notion of females’ role in life is their duty to bear children and keep house. Vance wants “childless cat ladies” and married couples without off-springs to pay higher taxes and have diminished voting rights. The latter punishment for not having “a direct stake” in their country would be achieved by giving children voting rights to be executed by their parents.

Just as telling is Vance’s agreement with the statement of one like-minded fellow that the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female is helping to raise children--supposedly he meant grandchildren.

Obviously, Vance has learned from his mentor Peter Thiel, a wealth, anti-democratic high-tech guy who wrote in an essay that “the extension of the franchise to women was one of the major reasons for the decay of America’s democracy.”

Thiel and his authoritarian Silicon Valley brethren, who are contributing generously to the Trump-Vance campaign, would get their say in a Trump/Vance administration.

With sexist autocrats at the gate of power, women must stop them, when they cast their votes.  

How Trump’s Gene Theory Copycats Hitler’s Aryan Superiority Tale

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Earlier this month, in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, Donald Trump attacked Kamala Harris’s immigration record by claiming that illegal aliens commit crimes because they have bad genes. He said, “You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes.”

A year earlier, Trump accused illegal immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”  He also called illegals “animals” and “not-human.”

And in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican Party’s Nominating Convention, he warned contrary to the facts,

• The greatest invasion in history is taking place right here in our country. They are coming in from every corner of the earth…They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums…That’s why, to keep our family safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.

In short, Trump claims that illegal immigrants, who are mostly brown and black, have bad genes and thereby poison the purity of white Americans who have good genes. For him, that is a  reason to remove them from American soil.

That should give all non-white citizens pause, when they fill out their ballot less than four weeks from now. We know from his many racist remarks and actions in the past that Trump applies his unscientific gene theory to non-white citizens as well.

Trump’s dangerous claims are very similar to Adolf Hitler’s race theory. In his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” Hitler attacked German Jews as plague that endangered the Aryan superiority which he believed was based on good genes and blood. In his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote nearly a century ago,  

• History furnishes us with innumerable instances that prove this law [of nature]. It shows, with a startling clarity, that whenever Aryans have mingled their blood with that of an inferior race the result has been the downfall of the people who were the standard-bearers of a higher culture.

And in a speech in Munich, Hitler said,

• WE DEMAND IMMEDIATE EXPULSION OF ALL JEWS WHO HAVE ENTERED GERMANY SINCE 1914, and of all those, too, who through trickery on the Stock Exchange or through other shady transactions have gained their wealth.Against the infection of materialism, against the Jewish pestilence we must hold aloft a flaming ideal [of the superiority of Aryan genes].

Many influential people in Germany, political and business leaders, did not believe that Hitler planned to make his race theory part and parcel of his domestic policy, once he would become Germany’s leader. But many Germans bought his scapegoating of their Jewish fellow-citizens blaming them for all the problems the country had at the time.

Today, Trump’s stereotyping of illegal immigrant is enthusiastically supported by MAGA crowds and many GOP politicians. Opponents are silent because they do not have the backbone to speak the truth.

Trump has promised the biggest mass deportation of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history and the establishment of detention camps to facility this task once he is president again.

We should remember that Hitler threatened “only” the expulsion of Jews from their German homeland before he came to power.

And we all know what he did as strongman leader.