It was a heavy-set woman who could be in her 50s in the crowd, as the camera scanned it, that caught my eye and had also caught the attention of the camera person. She had an enraptured look on her face as she screamed: “Send her back.” It was just another disgusting scene from one of the Trump rallies in America that the man has to have to reassure himself.
She wore a Trump T-shirt and a red cap that said ‘Make America Great Again’ but it was easy to imagine her in the traditional German dirndl, standing by her Mann. It is strange but I still have a very young memory of Adolph Hitler screaming in German on the radio just before the Second World War. I would swear that you could hear his spittle hitting the microphone of the era. And I was afraid.
It has been something of an unwritten rule that we do not compare Trump and Hitler. The comparison can be frightening.
And it is not the men themselves. They are very different, with different upbringings and careers. The similarity is in their followers.
The point is that there is very little difference between the fascists who follow the two men. And it is in their collective ignorance that they shall be led. It is in their ‘born again’ ability to follow hollow heroes. It is in their acceptance of what they have to know are lies. Welcome to a frightening Middle America.
Trump is the American gun culture run rampant. It is in the misogyny of the biker cult. It is in the anger of oppressed and impoverished blacks. It is in the wink-wink ‘Green card’ of cheap labour, the belittling of what are considered lesser races. The fascists stand by a man who tears apart families and puts children in cages. It matters little what they think of him. What do they think of themselves?
Americans will long rue the corruption of their political system that allowed this madman access to power. They will rue their bigotry and how they were used by someone with a very different agenda.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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