Summer 2023. Much of the country is locked into a heatwave deathcycle brought on by climate change, or it's just a hot summer. I don't really know, but it feels like nothing ever seems to change this time of year. We're just hanging on until the start of the school year, hoping that then we'll be so busy that when the inevitable cooldown happens, we'll not even notice.
Of course, like the hellish summer we have endured so far we're continually stuck in the cycle of Trump. He never went away, not even after trying to get his armed acolytes to ransack the halls of Congress because he got his butt kicked in the 2020 election. The indictments are piling up, the force of law and order are finally breathing down his neck, yet his 38% continues to hang on and glorify his Orangeness. It's pathetic to be honest, but I don't really fear the man. I fear what comes next.
A year or two ago I read a book about Mussolini, the awful fascist dictator of Italy who came to power in 1922. He was a horrible leader but probably not as horrible as he could have been. Filled with personality and charm, he made some great speeches to bring out the worst in people but seemed to more content to bang a series of mistresses before going home to his overbearing wife every night. His squad of thugs would beat up dissenting fellow Italians for the sheer pleasure of it and used nationalistic and Catholic fervor to give a voice (and some substance) to antisemitism. But for his incompetence, he could have been far worse.
Perhaps one of the biggest legacies about Mussolini was that he was an inspiration for one Adolf Hitler. Hitler liked Mussolini's style, as well as his fervent nationalism that saw Jews and other minorities as objects belittle, persecute, and eventually destroy. Eventually he started a world war that led to the death of millions and destroyed his own nation, all because he lived in a world of Aryan resentment that found nothing constructive to create.
Mussolini was bad, but it took Hitler to take fascism and transform it into a wholly destructive Nazi movement. It took Hitler's 'competence' (I hate using that word as it sounds like I admire him but it's just descriptive of the effectiveness of his evil ideals) to grow this rage into something beyond a bunch of Angry White People with no outlet. I wonder if history is repeating itself, not across international boundaries but in the United States itself. Trump is the Mussolini in this analogy, something of a clown who screams a lot and glorifies himself and talks about the 'greatness' of America...but in fact he's not really serious about anything but his own power. Just like he never could be bothered to actually march ahead of his minions on January 6th, neither did he really take seriously his power. He was too busy playing golf and humping a flag and rage-tweeting while watching Fox News to really do all those things he ranted about. Part of me believes that he never really believes anything he says; he'd parade with the Gay Rights people or feed the homeless if he thought it would be politically advantageous. His incompetence, always real, found the full force of its might during the COVID pandemic as he mismangaged what could have been a triumphal event of his legacy and blew a winnable election against Mediocre Joe. And even though he's trying to make a comeback, he's becoming an increasingly old man who even with his 38% is being marginalized for the things he has done through his legal troubles and through a death by a thousand cuts. One of these days he'll have eaten one too many Big Macs, have a massive heart attack,and he'll be gone.
But my fear is that his movement will be taken over, just like Hitler eventually ursurped Mussolini. There's already a gang of fools trying to position themselves now to be the Next, people like MTG or Ron DeSantis whose own idiocy makes Trump look reasonable. These are people who scream and plot and stoke various resentments among people, but they just don't have IT like Trump. Instead, they're transitional figures, whose weakness amplifies the stupidity of this whole movement rather than strengthen it and make those of us who groan at the thought of the Democrats ultimately vote for them. One of these days, though, somebody else is going to come along and know what to do with this unruly mob. The red hat dummies will be organized effectively into a modern version of the brownshirted thugs, who will actually have the discipline and organization to do those things that Trump could only dream of.
I don't know who that person is going to be, but I'm guessing it's somebody who either we haven't heard of yet or is still totally unknown. Maybe a Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota, who leads a state small enough that she isn't well-known except in political circles. Maybe somebody like Elise Stefanik, a congresswoman from New York who started off as a reasonable republican but quickly turned into a Trump die-hard. What both of these women have in common is that they are young, attractive, reasonably smart, and likely savvy enough to not tip their hands. I fear that the Hitler that is to come will be somebody whom we might not expect, somebody young and attractive and seemingly a reasonable alternative to the madness we have seen. But once they arise and seize their power like Hitler in 1933, their true evil will come out. And when that happens, this country will really be in some deep s*it.
