Sunday, July 18, 2021

Not As A Bat Or Otherwise


Linking to a great video, the tweeter asks a legitimate question, one which in slightly different terms many people have asked:

 

In the last few weeks of Donald Trump's presidency

As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Führer.”

A spokesman for Milley declined to comment.

Portions of the book related to Milley — first reported Wednesday night by CNN ahead of the book’s July 20 release — offer a remarkable window into the thinking of America’s highest-ranking military officer, who saw himself as one of the last empowered defenders of democracy during some of the darkest days in the country’s recent history.

General Milley believed Trump might instigate a military coup to stay in office. 

Yet, though Donald Trump was impeached twice, he was acquitted twice. Several GOP members of the Senate and most GOP members of the House voted against certification of the electoral tally ratifying Trump's defeat for re-election. Nearly every Republican member of the House and Senate voted against establishing a bipartisan commission to investigate the attempted overthrow of the USA government, which was inspired and possibly instigated by President Trump  Seventy percent of the ballots in an anonymous straw poll at last weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference were cast for the former President..

Trump made more than $1.6 billion in outside income and revenue while in office. In the first five-and-a-half months since he left office, he billed the Secret Service more than $50,000 for lodging at Mar-a-Lago and Trump Bedminster (NJ).

He swindled the nation's taxpayers royally while he was President. He has not been indicted for anything (yet, anyway) and more than a third of those taxpayers want him to be President again, where he could again leverage his office, power, and influence to fleece those taxpayers. And there he'd be free from the hangman's noose because of the ludicrous legal opinion(s) that a sitting President cannot be charged with a criminal offense.

The ex-President remains far and away the most popular politician among rank-and-file Republicans and GOP members of Congress bow to his every whim. Moreover, in the unlikely circumstance in which he'd be elected President again, Trump would put into effect that "Fuhrer gospel" far more than he did in the previous four years.

The rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump are so far removed from human decency that some individuals in the left or the center cannot imagine that he could not be at least slightly deranged. But he understands learned behavior and knows what he can and cannot get away with to satisfy his every desire. That is not a mentally unwell man. That is an evil man.

 

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