Donald Trump is not hiding his program if he returns to power. He calls his 46 policies “Agenda 47” (an overlooked opportunity, or can’t he count?). At least he has the Nazis beat. They only had a 25-point plan.
Regardless, it is completely nuts — which will thrill the MAGAs.
It is not a sea change for the right. American conservatism has always thrived on terrorizing the base. In 1964, in a classic essay titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter reviewed the history of fear as a political marketing tool — a tactic eagerly embraced by what he called the Radical Right. It was no coincidence that in 1964, Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential candidate.
The Arizona Senator was so off-center that the editors of Fact magazine asked 12,356 psychiatrists, “Do you believe Barry Goldwater is psychologically fit to serve as President of the United States?” They received many negative responses, including suggestions Goldwater was “suffering from a chronic psychosis” and that he “is basically a paranoid schizophrenic.”
Here is one that could be dusted off and reused.
“A megalomaniacal, grandiose omnipotence appears to pervade Mr. Goldwater’s personality giving further evidence of his denial and lack of recognition of his own feelings of insecurity and ineffectiveness.”
This remote analysis led the American Psychiatric Association to institute the “Goldwater Rule” forbidding their members from diagnosing people they had not met. Psychiatrists mostly observed this mandate until Goldwater’s psychological doppelgänger enthralled the MAGA snowflakes.
Conservatives have occasionally tried to tone down their apocalyptic rhetoric. Reagan celebrated America as a “shining city on a hill.” But neither Reagan nor even Goldwater (for example, despite all his sins, he was not a homophobe) would be welcomed by their political descendants, the MAGAs. Those insurrection enablers want their red meat bloody.
Trump obliged in 2017 with his “American carnage” inaugural speech. That was a mere warm-up. Today, he tells his cult that America is a shit-hole country riddled with the “radical left” and “marxist maniacs” who are “infecting educational institutions.”
He sees the US as home to “left-wing gender insanity” where “radical marxist prosecutors” are “destroying America”. And Americans have to be protected from “radical leftist ESG investments.” While “Biden’s EO” is “embedding marxism in the federal government.”
Can someone buy the man a Thesaurus? (Not that he would read it. Or even understand how you use it.)
On the positive side, Trump promises to end Biden’s “war on the suburbs” and dismantle the “deep state.” He will also end the “nightmare” of the “dangerously deranged.”
Beyond the minacious rhetoric, he grounds his agenda in lies and empty promises. He already had four years in which he achieved nothing except to give more money to the rich. No one free of the MAGA madness has any reason to think he will secure the border, reduce drug addiction, end veteran homelessness, address the rise of chronic childhood illnesses, end homelessness in general, or slash trade deficits. And those are just his modest goals.
In addition, he promises to “save American education,”“stop China from owning America,” and “end crime”— while he produces a “quantum leap to revolutionize the American standard of living” and “prevent World War III.” I wonder why he did not commit to curing cancer.
There is a bunch of other stuff, including the death penalty for drug dealers and human traffickers — plus a slew of tough guy anti-immigration gum-flapping. However, there is one initiative that is both revealing and chilling. Trump promises an “American Academy.”
The creator of Trump University promises this higher educational institution will be free to all and not cost the taxpayers a dime because he will finance it with “billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments.” That is theft of private property by the government — and what could be more Marxist than that?
But we do not have to worry because this new academy “will be strictly non-political, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed—none of that's going to be allowed.” Bullshit. It would of course be as politics-free as a Florida public university.
Not that we actually have to be concerned — at least about that. Trump’s promises to build anything are nothing but hot air. Exhibit one: the nonexistent border wall. Exhibit two: infrastructure weeks. Exhibit three: everything else the failure promised the first time around that did not even make it to a drawing board.
We also do not have to worry Trump will build anything approaching the Nazi state. He does not have the talent. Unfortunately, the problem is worse. He will go straight to Berlin in 1945 and leave America a pile of rubble — because it takes no brains to pull down the temple.