Image by Stéphan Valentin.
Last Sunday’s New York Times featured the paper’s top White House correspondent Peter Baker’s late-breaking discovery that “In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission.”
Below I dig into the Times’ stunning unearthing of this breakthrough story—who knew? – and how “the national paper of record” relates its discovery to Donald Trump’s response to the assassination of the fascist youth leader Charlie Kirk**.**I offer a critique in the form of italicizedinterjections.
Any More Late Bulletins?
**NYT/Baker:**President Trump does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all Americans… Politics…is about division — debating big ideas vigorously until one side wins an election or carries the vote in Congress. But [no recent US president has] practiced the politics of division as ferociously and consistently as Mr. Trump, for whom it has been the defining characteristic of his time on the national stage.
Street: As my father (a high school and college cub reporter at his town’s local newspaper) used to say, “any more late bulletins?”
TheTimes’storyline here is more than a decade old. It is quite an understatement: Trump is a wannabe fascist strongman-for-life who is waging war on the majority of Americans and on previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law (such as they are) with a viciously racist, sexist, violent, and xenophobic nationalist politics of “Us and Them.”
The Times’ “traditional notion of being president” has always been a ruse. US presidents have primarily served the nation’s capitalist and imperialist ruling classes.
“Conventional Presidential Playbook”?
NYT/Baker: “The first few minutes of President Trump’s Oval Office address after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week followed the conventional presidential playbook. He praised the victim, asked God to watch over his family and talked mournfully of ‘a dark moment for America…”
Street: Not really. Charlie Kirk was a noxious fascist youth leader working to create a genocidal racist, arch-patriarchal, and Christian white- and xenophobic-nationalist Amerikkka. Trump spent the opening minutes of his “Oval Office [Fatherland News] address” noxiously extolling his fellow far-right hatemonger Kirk as a freedom-loving champion of democracy, justice, and free speech.
There’s a Name for This: FASCISM
NYT/Baker: “…Then he [Trump] tossed the playbook aside, angrily blaming the murder on the American left and vowing revenge. That was stark even for some viewers who might normally be sympathetic. When Mr. Trump appeared later on Fox News, a host noted that there were ‘radicals on the right,’ just as there were ‘radicals on the left,’ and asked, ‘How do we come back together?’ The president rejected the premise. Radicals on the right were justified by anger over crime, he said. ‘The radicals on the left are the problem,’ he added. ‘And they’re vicious. And they’re horrible….Mr. Trump has long made clear that coming together is not the mission of his presidency. In an era of deep polarization in American society, he rarely talks about healing. While other presidents have typically tried to lower the temperature in moments of national crisis, Mr. Trump turns up the flames. He does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all the people. He acts as president of red America and the people who agree with him, while those who do not are portrayed as enemies and traitors deserving payback…. ‘The left has declared war on America,’ Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist and a leading voice in the MAGA movement, said in a text message on Saturday. ‘Trump is a wartime president now focused on eradicating domestic terrorists like ANTIFA,’ Mr. Bannon added, referring to the antifascist movement.…The notion of Mr. Trump as a wartime president in a war against some of his own people speaks to just how different his presidency is. Campaigning last year to reclaim power four years after his re-election defeat, Mr. Trump dispensed with the usual bromides about national unity, and instead declared that the biggest threat to the United States was ‘the enemy from within.’…He vowed ‘retribution’ against those who in his view have betrayed him or the country, and he has spent the first eight months of his second term exacting it against Democrats, wayward Republicans, estranged allies, law firms, universities, news outlets and anyone else he considers disloyal or excessively liberal….He sees a country riven into two ideological and political camps: one that supports him and one that does not. He governs accordingly.”
Street: All obviously true but this leaves out the accurate and relevant word for the violently anti-leftist world view and political playbook behind what theTimes describes here: FASCISM. To get a handle on this basic and important reality, Baker and his editors should consult (for starters) the University of Toronto philosophy professor Jason Stanley’s bookHow Fascism Rules: The Politics of Us and Them(2018), my volumeThis Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America(2021), and theremarkable podcastsand website of the national organizationRefuse Fascism.
The Worst Perpetrator “Distraught”?
NYT/Baker: “Plenty of left-wing voices online have fueled the divisions. Within hours of Mr. Kirk’s death, Americans of all stripes began pointing fingers at each other, even before a suspect had been caught or any motivation had been firmly determined. Mr. Trump and other allies of Mr. Kirk’s, who were distraught at the senseless killing of a 31-year-old rising star on the right they knew and liked, expressed roiling indignation at comments that gave the impression of cheering or rationalizing the murder of someone over political views.”
Street: I have seen many unfortunate and regrettable online examples of infantile leftist and liberal celebration and snark along with lots of baseless conspiracy theorizing and pretending to know the shooter’s motivation and politics in advance of evidence. But the worst perpetrator by far on this score has been Trump himself, who immediately played the Reichstag Fire card before anyone knew anything about the shooter’s identity.
I strongly doubt that Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump is or was “distraught” over Kirk’s death. The fascist ogre is a malignant narcissist, incapable of sincere concern for other human beings. He has likely relished the assassination, seeing it a golden opportunity to smite his enemies and inflict more repression of his “radical left” “enemies within.”
Baker should review the history of the 1933 Reichstag Fire, probably set off by a Nazi agent but blamed on “communists” by Adoplh Hitler in order to “justify” the consolidation of the Third Reich dictatorship.
Reasonable Fears for Any Decent Person
**NYT/Baker: “**His critics fear that Mr. Trump will now use the Kirk assassination to go further on liberal organizations and institutions, a view encouraged in ominous social media posts by Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff and a leader of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.”
Street: Just “his critics”? Any serious, decent, and honest observer of Trump’s history and conduct who believes in democracy and the rule of law should be alarmed at how Trump is trying to use the Kirk assassination to intimidate and repress decent people and organizations!
“I Don’t Care How” (Stephen Miller) “We Shot Down Every Leftist Organization”(Loomer)
Street: “Ominous posts” from the leading White House nativist and fascist Stephen Miller? This could have used some elaboration from the Times. Last Friday, Miller went on Fatherland/FOX News to vow that the Trump regime would use Kirk’s assassination to “dismantle the organized left,” which he absurdly called “a domestic terrorism movement in this country” while offering no specifics on specific individuals or groups who comprise this supposed movement. “The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven,” Miller yelled, “was that we have to dismantle…the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence, and we are going to do that…under President Trump’s leadership. I don’t care how.”
Baker and the Times might want to check out the menacing messages from the maniacal conspiratorialist far-right influencer Laura Loomer. “It’s time,” Loomer wrote after news of the shooting broke, “for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization. If Charlie Kirk dies from his injuries, his life cannot be in vain. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.’”
Loomer has Trump’s ear, as seen in her success earlier this year in getting members of the National Security Council fired.
False Equivalence
**NYT/Baker:**Mr. Trump is certainly right that his opponents have called him a ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi.’ But his outrage at incendiary rhetoric is situational. In the same Fox News interview last week in which he complained about excesses by the left, he referred to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and front-runner for mayor of New York, as a ‘communist.’”
Street: TheTimes posits here a false equivalence between people calling Trump fascist and Trump calling Mamdani a communist. The misrepresentation is simple: Mamdani is a progressive social democrat and (as Baker says) not a communist, but Trump and his regime really are fascist (as Baker does not or cannot say). That’s not wild and “incendiary rhetoric.” It’s a basic historical fact for which I and many others have consistently provided an ongoing mountain of evidence.
Postscript: An Alarming Phone Call
Here’s an interesting part of their story that the Times and Baker have so far missed even though it is a perfect fit for their incomplete narrative…
After announcing the arrest of the likely and confessed shooter Tyler Robinson, Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox made an impassioned plea for the peaceful handling of America’s internal political divisions. “We can return violence with violence, we can return hate with hate,” Cox said, “and that’s the problem with political violence, it metastasizes, because we can always point the finger at the other side and at some point we have to find an off-ramp or it is going to get much, much worse.”
Just moments after he made this civilized case for nonviolence, Cox was called by the angry US president and fascist leader Trump. According to Cox, speaking to The Atlantic, Trump said this to the Utah governor: “You know, the type of person who would do something like that to Charlie Kirk would love to do it to us.” Trump then told Cox that being US president is “one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet,” rattling off stats that 15% of those to occupy the White House had been shot. And 8% have died at the hands of an assassin.”
Yesterday, Cox went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to say that Kirk’s shooter was motivated by “leftist ideology” but offered no evidence in support of this claim. Cox further fueled fascist Amerikaner rage by telling NBC’s viewers that Robinson was in a romantic relationship with a transgendered person. That makes Cox potentially an agent of the very political violence he purports to abhor.
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