This day we mark the anniversary of a lie used to incite white supremacist terror perpetrated by Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, with his bizarre and absurd lie about Haitians in Springfield eating people’s pet cats. This is an exemplar of his fragile relationship with both truth and reality, and his madness, idiocy, and evil; but it also calls for questioning as a form of hate crime, which has triggered and authorized crimes against migrants and nonwhite Others.
This version of the Blood Libel used by the Nazis and the Inquisition, brilliantly interrogated in Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery, has been deployed against Asians historically, but now with Trump’s apologetics of white supremacist terror is generalized to all nonwhite Others. Here the enemy reveals his true motives and goals; ethnic cleansing in America.
And he’s using the Second Regime to send ICE terror forces to accomplish it.
Little wonder Trump and his apparatus of racist state terror are weaponizing the death of one of the most cruel and outrageous fascist propagandists since Julius Streicher, founder of theocratic terror organization Turning Point Charlie Kirk, assassinated by a fellow alt right fanatic of Nick Fuentes’ rival sect Groyper, as a pretext for McCarthy like purges and the politization of our security services in the brutal enforcement of submission and the repression of dissent.
The lunacy, the idiocy, the violence and the evil of Trump and the Republican Party; you never know which one is speaking.
But we do know this; everything the enemy says is a lie.
As written by Heather Cox Richarson in Letters From An American of September 13, 2024; “After bomb threats today, officials had to evacuate two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, and move the students to a different location. They had to close a middle school altogether. This is the second day bomb threats have closed schools and public buildings after MAGA Republicans have spread the lie that Haitian immigrants there have been eating white people’s pets. Haitian immigrants, who were welcomed to Springfield by officials eager to revitalize the city and who are there legally, say they are afraid.
Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo today explained where the lie had come from and how it had spread. More than two months ago, they wrote, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is Trump’s vice presidential running mate, began to speak about Springfield at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, trying to tie rising housing prices to immigrants. The next day, at the National Conservatism conference, Vance accused “illegals” of overwhelming the city.
On August 10, about a dozen neo-Nazis of the “Blood Tribe” organization showed up in Springfield, where one of their leaders said the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders” and blamed the Jews for the influx of migrants. The neo-Nazis stayed and, on August 27, showed up at a meeting of the city council, where their leader threatened council members. On September 1, another white supremacist group, Patriot Front, held its own “protest to the mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants” in the city. Right-wing social media posters pushed the story, usually with “witnesses” to events in the city coming from elsewhere.
In late August, posting in a private Facebook group, a resident said they had heard that Haitian immigrants had butchered a neighbor’s cat for food. Vance reposted that rumor to attack Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, on whom he is trying to hang undocumented immigration although it was Trump who convinced Republicans to kill a strong bipartisan border bill this spring. Springfield police and the city manager told news outlets there was no truth to the rumors.
Nonetheless, on September 10, Vance told his people to “keep the cat memes flowing,” even though—or perhaps because—the rumors were putting people in his own state in danger.
Trump repeated the lie at the presidential debate that night, claiming, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Today, President Joe Biden demanded Trump stop his attacks on Haitian-Americans, but Trump doubled down, promising to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield if he is elected, although they are here legally.
The widespread ridicule of Trump’s statement has obscured that this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to regain control of the Senate. Convincing Ohio voters that the immigrants in their midst are subhuman could help Republicans defeat popular Democratic incumbent senator Sherrod Brown, who has held his seat since 2007. Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester, both Democrats in states that supported Trump in 2020, are key to controlling the Senate.
Two Republican super PACs, one of which is linked to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have booked more than $82 million of ad space in Ohio between Labor Day and the election and are focusing on immigration.
Taking control of the Senate would enable Republicans not only to block all popular Democratic legislation, as they did with gun reform after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, but to continue to establish control of America’s judicial system. So long as their judges are in place to make law from the bench, what the majority of Americans want doesn’t matter.
In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”
That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.
McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate.
McConnell became Senate majority leader in 2015 when voters gave Republicans control of the Senate, and when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell refused even to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. McConnell’s justification for this unprecedented obstruction was that Obama’s March nomination was too close to an election, but the underlying reason for the 2016 delay was at least in part his recognition that hopes of pushing the Supreme Court to the right, especially on the issue of abortion, were likely to get evangelical voters to the polls.
Trump won in 2016, and Republicans got control of the Senate. In 2017, when Democrats tried to filibuster Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s long-empty seat, then–majority leader McConnell killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. The end of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees meant that McConnell could push through Trump’s nominees Brett Kavanaugh, with just 50 votes, and Amy Coney Barrett, with just 52 (in late October 2020, with voting for the next president already underway).
Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.
Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion.
Controlling the country through the courts was the plan behind stacking the courts with Republican nominees and weaponizing the filibuster to stop Democrats from passing legislation. In March 2024, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that McConnell “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
When he took office, President Joe Biden went to work putting his own mark on the federal judiciary. Almost two thirds of his appointees are women, and 62% are people of color. He appointed the first Black female justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court. But now, Republicans are hoping to retake the Senate to make sure that those appointments will stop, along with any more legislation. Their right-wing appointees to the courts will take the business of lawmaking out of the hands of American majorities.
Republican leaders are throwing everything they’ve got at the Senate races in Montana and Ohio, where they hope they can pick up the seat they need to take control of the Senate.
Attacks on immigrants in Ohio might move that needle.
In 1890, Republicans faced a similar problem. They had lost the popular vote in 1888, although they installed Republican president Benjamin Harrison in office through the Electoral College, and knew the Democrats would soon far outnumber their own voters. So they set out to guarantee that they could never lose the Senate, which should enable them to kill popular Democratic legislation.
But they misjudged the electorate, and in the 1890 midterm election, voters gave control of the House to the Democrats by a margin of two to one, and control of the Senate came down to a single seat, that of a senator from South Dakota. In those days, state legislatures chose their state’s senators, and shortly after it became clear that control of the Senate was going to depend on that South Dakota seat, U.S. Army troops went to South Dakota to rally voters by putting down an “Indian uprising” in which no people had died and no property had been damaged.
Fueled on false stories of “savages” who were attacking white settlers, the inexperienced soldiers were the ones who pulled the triggers to kill more than 250 Lakotas on December 29, but the Wounded Knee Massacre started in Washington, D.C. “
As I wrote in my post of July 8 2020, Our Clown of Terror: The Madness of Donald Trump; We now have two revelatory and electrifying exposes of the secret world of Trump’s psyche and intimate sphere of action from insider whistleblowers, which together form a portrait of America’s President not unlike that of Dorian Gray, a horrific monster and predator who moves among us concealed beneath a human mask by the sorcery of lies and illusions.
In this Mary Trump and John Bolton have done a great service to the witness of history and to our nation and all humankind as the fate of democracy and civilization hangs in the balance. Their books will be primary texts in any future civics and political history studies, unless of course Trump is given free rein by our citizen electorate to sabotage democracy in the cause of white supremacy and patriarchy.
While we await to discover whether the people will authorize the theft of their liberty by a state of force and control in abject submission to tyranny and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, or arise in resistance like a phoenix from the flames, The Guardian has thoughtfully clarified our choices by providing a precis of the exposes.
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump includes the following insights; “1 Trump allegedly paid someone to take his high school exams, 2 Trump praised his own niece’s breasts, 3 Donald Trump’s sister appears to be a key source, 4 Mary Trump spoke to the New York Times about Trump family taxes, 5 Trump told Melania that Mary Trump took drugs, 6 Trump Christmases could be tough, 7 Jared Kushner’s father didn’t think Ivanka was good enough, 8 Trump’s character was shaped by ‘child abuse’.”
The Room Where It Happened by John Bolton includes these revelations; “1 Trump pleaded with China to help win the 2020 election, 2 Trump suggested he was open to serving more than two terms, 3 Trump offered favors to authoritarian leaders, 4 Trump praised Xi for China’s internment camps, 5 Trump defended Saudi Arabia to distract from a story about Ivanka, 6 Trump’s top staff mocked him behind his back, 7 Trump thought Finland was part of Russia, 8 Trump thought it would be ‘cool’ to invade Venezuela.”
My own opinion is that any understanding of the motives and likely actions of Trump rests with the two great shaping forces of his life; the etiology of his narcissism and psychopathy as a survivor of child abuse, and the influence of his primary model Roy Cohn, wonderfully depicted in the HBO documentary The Story of Roy Cohn as well as Tony Kushner’s luminous Angels in America.
As I wrote in my post of August 7 2019 Psychopathy and the Nature of Evil: the Parallel Cases of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler; How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.
As written in my post of October 28 2019, Trump and al-Baghdadi: parallel lives and reflections; As the world celebrates the death of al-Baghdadi, both tyrant and monster, and Trump claims credit in this the sole victory of his administration, as if for the trophy head of some dangerous beast shot by a guide while enjoying cocktails at the hunting camp, it may be interesting to compare the parallel lives, methods, and goals of Trump and al-Baghdadi.
Both Trump and al-Baghdadi are megalomaniacs and psychopaths who seized power through manipulation of those who perceived themselves as victims and readily dehumanized others to change their status, using disruption of norms and a reimagination of reality through lies and misdirects to shape history, and enacted regimes of state terror and campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing and of patriarchal misogyny and sexual violence against women.
Trump cannot distinguish truth from lies and delusions; his madness and childlike feeble mindedness, the tantrums and psychotic rages, the bullying and narcissism of a spoiled brat, does not however absolve him of responsibility for his actions, or those of the treasonous cabal of sex predators and fascists he has gathered around him.
Trump claims to have killed his dark reflection and shadow self by his spurious arrogation of a victory won by our intelligence and military services; but history will always see this second face behind his mask, a secret twin he bears into eternity, a face of power and twisted desires unrestrained by the laws and values of a democratic civilization and a free society of equals: the face of Trump’s heart of darkness, al-Baghdadi.
Also out of order per a timeline but next in thematic rank, October 19 2019, Trump the predator exposed in All the President’s Women; How do you spell Trump? Treason. Racism. Untruth. Misogyny. Predator.
Hey Republicans, thanks for showing us what’s under your masks.
You know, I can understand how the Fourth Reich conspiracy of Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, Nazi-Klan white supremacists, and their plutocrat and foreign puppetmasters might claim the first four parts of the Trump program of subversion of democracy with defiant pride amongst themselves, but that last one baffles me. Its as if the whole Republican Party decided to adopt a new nickname on their first day of prison, and started introducing themselves as Short Eyes.
Its all recounted in horrific detail in All The President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator by Barry Levine & Monique El-Faizy; the casual sexual assaults committed in an arrogance of power and privilege which echoes the aristocratic Right of Seigneur, perversions of cruelty and ownership of others as a form of dominion which are extensions of his psychopathy, and among the most terrible signs of his inhumanity and amorality his acquisition of a beauty pageant monopoly for the purpose of access to underage girls.
Trump’s whole life purpose and goal is to perv Miss America. Republicans, are you really going to claim that legacy as your own? Are the rest of us going to let it go unchallenged?
Let us unite together in this purpose; to restore the honor and morality of America, and vote Trump out of our government.”
And as I wrote on September 13 2019, Trump’s foreign policy: sabotage of America’s global hegemony of power and privilege; After three years of idiocy and madness, pathological lies and perversions, what is the legacy of Trump and his monkeywrenching of America?
Childstealing and whatever Trump and his Epstein buddies did which required the disappearance of witnesses and hundreds of missing migrant children.
Use of white supremacist terrorists as deniable assets to enable the theft of our freedoms and the transformation of our democracy into a police state of totalitarian force and surveillance.
Campaigns of racist ethnic cleansing and genocide against nonwhite immigrants and Muslims.
I could go on, but what is the point? What norms and values of America have Trump and the Republicans not violated? In domestic policy the Trump administration has been a disaster it will take a generation to recover from, if America survives at all.
As regards foreign policy, Trump has alienated our allies and emboldened our enemies, damaged our credibility and poisoned our diplomatic relations.
We have surrendered our ideals and our leadership of the world as its primary guarantor of democracy and human rights, and won nothing in return. I’m surprised anyone accepts our money; certainly the words of our President are meaningless and worth nothing.
In my post of September 16 2019, Trump’s New World Order: madness and tyranny; “ In a brilliant thumbnail analysis of Trump’s impact on the state of the world in terms of foreign policy, Simon Tisdall writing in The Guardian describes his policy of vacuous sound bites, staged publicity images, the diplomacy of a man totally ignorant of human relationships beyond the golf course and of any strategy of action to achieve goals other than grabbing the world by the crotch and hanging on while gobbling and ululating meaningless bestial sounds as if negotiating for slops in a hog trough.
Trump has discovered it’s not as easy to rape nations as it is to corner little girls in the dressing room of a beauty pageant, or even an adult one at Bloomingdales.
Not if we unite together in Resistance.
America now has a common cause with many nations of the world in overcoming fascist tyranny and rescuing democracy and the rule of law, of defeating the imperial conquest and subjugation of the earth by Trump and other figureheads of the Fourth Reich, and in the liberation of humankind and the restoration of the sovereignty of citizens.
And finally, herein is the text of my post in celebration of the start of the Impeachment process on September 24 2019, America rediscovers its values: the impeachment of Pennywise; ”Jubilation in the streets as America rediscovers its values and begins the impeachment of Pennywise, demonic clown and cannibalistic monster who dwells beneath the human face of Trump, a mask of flesh stolen from the abducted and enslaved women in the brothels his grandfather built the Trump family fortune on during the Alaska Gold Rush, and who today carries forward the legacy of terror and misogyny he was raised with, whose election should be de-certified as the coup of a foreign power and whose Presidency has no legitimacy.
History will remember Trump as the standard bearer of the global Fourth Reich and its assault on democracy, stealer of children for his vile and twisted purposes, author of genocidal ethnic cleansing and builder of concentration camps, pathological liar and ignorant fool, whose alliance of xenophobic racists and white supremacists, Christian Identity fanatics and other Gideonite fundamentalists who dream of the restoration of the Patriarchy under medieval Biblical law as a tyranny of the Elect, and amoral Plutocrats out to loot America for all the wealth they can send offshore while sabotaging our economy and driving our nation into collapse, thereby removing the major guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world and opening everything to exploitation.
A full accounting of the treasons and crimes of Trump and his Republican conspirators would fill a thousand pages and more, would roll on like the endless night litany of the death of God during an Orthodox Easter service; but this is the moment of its end, wherein the chanting turns to rapture and joy at the break of dawn, for Nancy Pelosi and the power brokers of the Democratic Party have rummaged around in Pandora’s Box and found at last our hope, calling for impeachment and the restoration of the rule of law just at the point of no return, before the legitimacy of our government and the values on which it is built, freedom, equality, truth, and justice, are forever lost and America falls to fascism and tyranny, and with it the world descends into a second Dark Age.
It took a millennia to emerge from the last one; civilization may not be recoverable again, should it fall under conditions of fascism and totalitarian regimes of absolute state power and surveillance, war, ethnostates and genocides, and unbridled extractive plunder of the earth. And this we must resist.
Therefore celebrate with me the call for impeachment, and prepare ourselves for the great struggle ahead to make it real, to reawaken America’s values and to save democracy and universal human rights throughout the world.
On the principle Cede Nothing To the Enemy, I am appropriating the Cat meme for the cause of justice:
Communique of Lilac City Antifa to Springfield Ohio Direct Action Commando: We stand with the Haitian community and all human beings against fascist and white supremacist terror. When they come for one of us, they will be met by all of us.
‘A very old political trope’: the racist US history behind Trump’s Haitian pet eater claim: Trump’s bizarre rant about pet-eating Haitians is just the latest in a hoary US tradition of scapegoating immigrants
Haitian immigrants helped revive a struggling Ohio town. Then neo-Nazis turned up: Springfield’s immigrant community was targeted by far-right extremists months before Trump shared racist rumors
Vance, Yost targeting Haitians in Springfield, Ohio with ignorant fear-mongering disturbs me deeply • Ohio Capital Journal
Neo-Nazi and far right groups seize on Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric
Extremist groups are latching on to ex-president’s xenophobic messages to recruit people and spread ideology
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/08/trump-immigration-neo-nazi-far-right
Woman Behind Springfield Haitian Immigrants ‘Eating Pets’ Rumor Speaks Out – Newsweek
https://www.newsweek.com/springfield-woman-erika-lee-haitians-eating-pets-rumor-speaks-out-1953851
Heather Cox Richarson in Letters From An American
‘This has to stop’: Biden condemns attacks on Haitian US immigrants
A bomb threat in Springfield, Ohio, came after Trump repeated baseless rumor about immigrants ‘eating pets’
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/13/springfield-ohio-bomb-threat
‘They’re eating the cats’: Trump rambles falsely about immigrants in debate
Ex-president’s repetition of unsubstantiated claims
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/10/trump-springfield-pets-false-claims
The Rose City Historical Marker Springfield OH
The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco
Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, Justin A. Frank
All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator, Barry Levine, Monique El-Faiz
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Mary L. Trump
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, John Bolton
The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/500773.The_Psychopathic_God?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_42
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/17/john-bolton-book-trump-china-dictators-saudi-arabia
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jun/17/roy-cohn-film-ivy-meeropol-hbo
Torch of Liberty 
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