Dorothy Thompson leaves the White House after a visit with Roosevelt, May 1940. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Today’s substack from Heather Cox Richardson contains a sharp warning about what Trump will do to those who oppose him, if he ever gets power again:
“On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be ‘bloody.’ He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is ‘a fascist to the core … the most dangerous person to this country.’
“On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those ‘radical left lunatics’ on Election Day.”
Our mediocre media soft-pedals Trump’s overt fascism. Most Americans are strangely unconcerned about what Trump intends to do if he ever gets power again, because journalists are afraid that to tell them would sound shrill and unobjective. We even have a new term for how the media normalize Trump’s depravity to avoid sounding shrill — “sanewashing.”
But scholars like Heather Cox Richardson don’t have to care what Republicans or centrists think about what she writes. She writes for a smaller set of people. She has, I believe, 1.3 million subscribers on Substack, as well as 2 million followers on Facebook. That’s a lot of people, but it’s only 1.3 percent of the American population.
Richardson writes today about Dorothy Thompson, a journalist who was expelled from Germany in 1934. Thompson was a rare journalist who risked sounding shrill when what she was writing about was gruesomely ugly. She had written in 1931 that Hitler was a man of “startling insignificance.”
In Harper’s Magazine in 1934, she wrote:
“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”
It seems that Dorothy Thompson analyzed everyone she met in the same way she analyzed Hitler. She wrote a fascinating piece for Harper’s Magazine in 1941, Who Goes Nazi? She asks us to imagine a parlor game at a large gathering of people. She describes twelve people in the room, whom she labels A through L, and asks whether they would “go Nazi.” She wants us to see how It Could Happen Here. People today are just the same as people were in 1941. For persons A through L, which types seem familiar? Whom do you like, and dislike, the most? Which one is Elon Musk? Is there a Liz Cheney in the room? For those of us who would never go Nazi, why?
It’s an odd paradox, and only the best of journalists and historians can get at it — how it can be that some of history’s greatest monsters also are pathetic little creeps.
Here’s another paradox. Given any major issue, the higher the stakes and the greater the controversy, the harder it is to find out what is really going on. Sources that depend on large audiences have to water things down so as not be accused of taking sides. But, somewhere in the fog of propaganda, there will be a few who are doing their best to get at the truth. Dorothy Thompson did it then. Heather Cox Richardson is doing it now.
Update: The New York Times seems to have had a fit of conscience:
I saw a few weeks ago Trump suggesting if he lost the election then Jews would be to blame. Predictably the media seemed to just shrug it off as Trump being Trump. You can only imagine the reaction if Biden or anyone else had said that.
Hi Chenda: It’s clear that Trump is rapidly turning into a vegetable. But that won’t make any difference. He has assembled a determined troop of goons who would complete the project. Some are evil billionaires, some are evil lawyers, and some, like Stephen Miller, are just plain evil. If they ever get power, then no election, no law, and no Constitution would ever get them out. Only millions of people in the streets would do it, but not before the American economy was looted and millions of lives lost or ruined.
I believe a lot of people in the U.S. are “collectively holding their breath” until the results of this election are known. It is a scary thought what our country could become if the wrong person wins. (I detest him so much, cannot make myself even type his name.) Surely, sane minds will prevail.
Hi Jo: Let’s hope so. Especially since we’re the sort of people whom the Trumpists don’t like.
I’m not a praying man, but I am hopeful Harris/Walz kick him to the side in November.
My inners churn when I hear that man’s voice, so I usually go to mute or off. I tend to not read any articles about him, though I may be short sheeting myself for not getting more “ammo” to argue my points about him. One day it’s a positive review of Harris/Walz. Another day its positive about “him”, one of a few reason I tend not to read. When he won the election over Hillary I felt this wave of embarrasment/terror throughout my body, and I feel I was actually depressed at first. Of course I got over it, but now that feeling is back. The ignorance and apathy surrounding us is as thick as pea soup.