The Trump phenomenon has left me, as so many others, speechless. I've felt an almost demonic power in his ability to get people to talk about him talk about him talk about him him despite themselves - and have tried to resist the manic meme. But this article, by New York Times journalist Jonathan Weisman, forces me to put words to my speechless horror. In it he describes a few of the responses he received after retweeting an Op-Ed piece on Trump enthusiasts in the Washington Post by Robert Kagan called "This Is How Fascism Comes to America."
These Americans aren't affronted but excited at that idea, and it inspires them to send Holocaust-themed death-threats to Weisman. Like an image of the gates of Auschwitz, the famous words “Arbeit Macht Frei” replaced without irony with “Machen Amerika Great” or an image of a smiling Mr. Trump in Nazi uniform flicking the switch on a gas chamber containing my Photoshopped face. I don't care who Trump is or isn't. If he enables such as these, if he even encourages them by not condemning them, as he does white supremacist racists and Islamophobes, then demonic he is, and Kagan's worries are real.
