Not a single red cap



Click here for a high-resolution version and check out our new government..

The deplorables are very slow to figure things out, so I doubt that they have yet begun to understand that Trump has no further use for them. It was last July, after all, that Trump told a bunch of Christians at a rally that, if they voted for him in November, then they wouldn’t have to vote again. That went over their heads.

Lots of chumps in red caps came to Washington to participate in the glory. But they were left out in the cold. (And, being what they are, they left miles of rubbish outside the Capitol.) The deplorables still have to be managed, of course. But that’s what Fox News is for — the branch of government charged with profitably managing the deplorables.

Trump loves a pageant and understands the importance of visuals, but obviously he wanted the inauguration to be Mar-a-Lago elegant. Still, it is surprising that he threw no bones to the little people, to keep them convinced that he cares about them. Fox News will need some footage on that, though. So surely it will be arranged, once the weather is better and the price of eggs has come down.

What’s up with these visuals?

Was Elon Musk’s sieg heil intentional, right in front of the presidential seal? The American media, naturally, are playing it as though it’s a both-sides thing, that we can’t be sure what Musk meant. Maybe. But the video has gone viral, and we’ll soon know whether others are inspired to imitate him.

And what about Trump not putting his hand on the Bible while taking the oath of office? Was that intentional? That image, too, has gone viral. Can you imagine the uproar it would cause in MAGA world if a Democrat did that? I have no idea what Trump meant by it. But I hope the deplorables are exerting themselves to figure it out.

Mussolini

At the Contrarian yesterday, Jennifer Rubin interviewed Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University. Most of us know more about Hitler than we do about Mussolini. The interview sheds much light on how Trump is following the fascist playbook. Most of us do know, I think, how it all ended for Mussolini. Italians back then, like our deplorables now, were slow to figure out who Mussolini really was. But once they figured it out, they put a stop to it. There are pictures of Mussolini’s end at Wikimedia Commons, for those who haven’t seen the visuals.


Benito Mussolini and you-know-who.

7 thoughts on “Not a single red cap”

  1. Honestly, the sad thing to me is that none of my conservative friends have any positions that align with Trump. They just want him in office instead of Biden, Harris, or whoever else. They won’t articulate any coherent position. It was the same eight years ago. I can’t imagine advocating for nothing but being so hellbent on making it happen just to spite the “opposition”.

  2. Hi Dan: Yes. I see a lot of that, too. Political positions aside, though, don’t you think that they buy into the scapegoating and that they believe the propaganda?

  3. The parallels are terrifyingly stark. David how do you see law enforcement and military acting as resistance against Trump ? Would they defy his orders if he gets more out of control? I can see him purging the top brass and installing MAGA loyalists. Could individual states act as political resistance?

  4. Hi Chenda: There are just so many unknowns and unpredictables at this point. I do think, though, that the National Guard would be much easier to corrupt than the U.S. military. National Guard troops are partly under the control of each state. It was the Ohio National Guard that fired into a group of students at Kent State University in 1970. I believe it was Ruth Ben-Guiat, in a podcast, who said that she sees Pete Hegseth as Trump’s guy for linking up with the right-wing militia groups that are scattered around the U.S. If Trump starts setting up some kind of command machinery to bring all the civilian militias into one organization under his control, then he’d have his SS. The pardons certainly were a big first step toward making the top militia guys available and loyal to Trump. Hegseth is the sort of guy that a unified militia would love to take its orders from.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *