Over the past two months, America’s political establishment has been forced to come to terms with a rather sobering reality: Donald Trump may be the country’s next president.
That prospect seemed so far fetched as to be laughable just 9 short months ago, but with New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina in his pocket and rivals seemingly unable to mount any kind of meaningful counterattack, Trump is on his way to the nomination.
And that means Hillary Clinton is one bungled national campaign away from going down in history as the member of America’s deeply entrenched political aristocracy who allowed Donald Trump to take the keys to the White House.
This would all be funny if it weren’t slightly unnerving.
Sure, it’s great to see not one but two protest candidates upending the political status quo (Bernie being the other), but Trump is beginning to sound more and more like a fascist. Indeed it was just two nights ago when the likely GOP nominee suggested that he would change the country’s libel laws so he could sue the media for running “dishonest” stories about him.
Let’s be clear: we’re not saying Trump is doing this knowingly. Trump has no "ideology" so to speak, so it's technically not possible for him to intentionally espouse something dangerous. Rather, Trump is just Trump. He says what's on his mind and sets out an agenda that sounds good to him and it just so happens that elements of that agenda sound a lot like something that would emanate from a far-right ideologue.
Need proof? Well look no further than Trump's Twitter account where this morning, the presumed Republican nominee retweeted a quote widely attributed to Benito Mussolini:
"@ilduce2016: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” – @realDonaldTrump #MakeAmericaGreatAgain"
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 28, 2016
Hiariously, Trump apparently didn't understand that the account he retweeted was a parody account designed specifically to test whether he is indeed a fascist. Here's the profile picture:
Apparently, Trump was duped by Gawker. "Last year, Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg created a Twitter bot that would post quotes from the writings and speeches of the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, but with all of them attributed to businessman and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump," Gawker wrote earlier today. "This morning, he retweeted that account."
Meanwhile, two former Mexican presidents have now compared Trump to Hitler. "He is acting and speaking out against immigrants that have a different skin color than he does, it is frankly racist and [he is] exploiting feelings like Hitler did in his time," Felipe Calderon, a conservative who was president of Mexico from 2006 to 2012 said on Saturday.
“He’s going to take the US back to the old days of conflict, war and everything. I mean, he reminds me of Hitler," Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox told CNN.
Of course Trump doesn't care. We'll simply close with what he told NBC's Chuck Todd upon learning that he'd accidentally retweeted one of the most reviled ditators in history:
"Chuck, it's okay to know it's Mussolini. Look, Mussolini was Mussolini," Trump responded. "It's a very good quote, it's a very interesting quote, and I know it... I know who said it. But what difference does it make whether it's Mussolini or somebody else? It's certainly a very interesting quote. I want to be associated with interesting quotes. And people, you know, I have almost 14 million people between Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and all of that. And we do interesting things. And I sent it out. And certainly, hey, it got your attention, didn't it?"
Yes, Mr. Trump, it sure did.