Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse

First on the White House agenda – the collapse of the global order. Next, war?
First on the White House agenda – the collapse of the global order. Next, war? | Jonathan Freedland

Donald Trump doesn’t read books. He leaves that to his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, the man rapidly emerging as the true power behind the gaudy Trump throne. Given Bannon’s influence – he is the innermost member of the president’s inner circle and will have a permanent seat on the National Security Council, a privilege Trump has denied the head of the US military – it’s worth taking a good look at the books on his bedside table.

Close to the top of the pile, according to this week’s Time magazine, is a book called The Fourth Turning, which argues that human history moves in 80- to 100-year cycles, each one climaxing in a violent cataclysm that destroys the old order and replaces it with something new. For the US, there have been three such upheavals: the founding revolutionary war that ended in 1783, the civil war of the 1860s and the second world war of the 1940s. According to the book, America is on the brink of another.

...

Because Steve Bannon is not destroying the old, clunky post-1945 order for the sake of a fairer, more equal, more interdependent world. He seems instead to dream of a bloody, fiery war that will kill millions – out of which will be forged a new, cleansed and even more dominant America.

It’s a terrifying vision. Next to that, any progressive should want to conserve what we have. If that makes us the new conservatives – with Bannon, Trump and the Brexiteers as the wrecking-ball radicals – then so be it.
 
Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/normalization-lesson-munich-post/

THE TRUMP-HITLER COMPARISON. Is there any comparison? Between the way the campaigns of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler should have been treated by the media and the culture? The way the media should act now? The problem of normalization?

Because I’d written a book called Explaining Hitler several editors had asked me, during the campaign, to see what could be said on the subject.

Until the morning after the election I had declined them. While Trump’s crusade had at times been malign, as had his vociferous supporters, he and they did not seem bent on genocide. He did not seem bent on anything but hideous, hurtful simplemindedness — a childishly vindictive buffoon trailing racist followers whose existence he had mainstreamed. When I say followers I’m thinking about the perpetrators of violence against women outlined by New York Magazine who punched women in the face and shouted racist slurs at them. Those supporters. These are the people Trump has dragged into the mainstream, and as my friend Michael Hirschorn pointed out, their hatefulness will no longer find the Obama Justice Department standing in their way.

Bad enough, but genocide is almost by definition beyond comparison with “normal” politics and everyday thuggish behavior, and to compare Trump’s feckless racism and compulsive lying was inevitably to trivialize Hitler’s crime and the victims of genocide.

But after the election, things changed. Now Trump and his minions are in the driver’s seat, attempting to pose as respectable participants in American politics, when their views come out of a playbook written in German. Now is the time for a much closer inspection of the tactics and strategy that brought off this spectacular distortion of American values.

What I want to suggest an actual comparison with Hitler that deserves thought. It’s what you might call the secret technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used on their opponents, especially the media. And they’re not joking. If you’d received the threatening words and pictures I did during the campaign (one Tweet simply read “I gas Jews”), as did so many Jewish reporters and people of color, the sick bloodthirsty lust to terrify is unmistakably sincere. The playbook is Mein Kampf.
 
Me neither. Enjoying the super bowl.
Best super bowl ever. Tom Brady goes down in history as the best QB in the history of the NFL.

His politics suck though. I'm $500 richer :) the money doesn't matter . It was one hell of a game.
 


The diplomatic travails of President Trump and his past Twitter fixation with Kristen Stewart provided plenty of fodder for “Saturday Night Live” this weekend. But a sketch lampooning Sean M. Spicer, the White House press secretary, in which he was impersonated by Melissa McCarthy, the comic actress and a surprise guest star, stole the show as “S.N.L.” continued to take swings at a president who delights in hitting back.

In the show’s cold open, Alec Baldwin returned for another outing as Mr. Trump, phoning up other world leaders under the guidance of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon (actually an “S.N.L.” cast member dressed as the Grim Reaper). As Mr. Trump, Mr. Baldwin first called Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia (Beck Bennett), who reminded him that President Barack Obama promised to receive 1,200 refugees held in detention in Australia.

“No refugees,” Mr. Baldwin said hastily. “America first, Australia sucks. Your reef is failing. Prepare to go to war.”
 
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