Who on earth thinks MAGA devotees are drawn in by hate?

When rump cult members are asked by polls or media interviewers, they will almost always claim that they are "color blind" and have no hint of bigotry influencing their attraction to the greatest president ever.    

You know who doesn't believe a word of their denials?

Uh-huh, Pres. Hare-brain von BottomlessPitOfEvil, that's who.

The op-ed below by Philadelphia Inquirer writer Will Bunch is chillingly on the mark in explaining how and why a feral, sadistic sociopath is able to drag the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave down into a rabbit hole of fascist perversion complete with -- indeed, politically built and reliant upon -- MAGA-crowd-pleasing genocide (given the in-custody deaths that have occurred in America for the first time in decades, "genocide" is not hyperbole).  rump just began his 2020 campaign the same way he oozed onto the scene in 2016, by scapegoating immigrants and other darker-hued enemies of God-fearing angry white people and promising to keep the Others out, to throw them in cages and/or to kick them out.

Possibly he does this because every time he throws out these lines at rallies of the MAGA faithful, they roar with glee and adoration.  For a colossal narcissist, that is sustenance itself.

The administration's sadistic treatment of asylum-seekers, says Bunch, is rump's instinctual appeal to the bedazzled acolytes who'd cheer his shooting "someone" on Fifth Ave.  Bunch invokes the super-charged term "concentration camps", and then he repeats it just to make sure we know he meant to say "concentration camps".  He combines it with the term "gulag" to lace the image with the recognition that the mission these cages serve is an autocratic scheme to keep the corrupt regime in power.  The treatment of rump's child hostages at the border fails to meet the internationally accepted standards for the treatment of prisoners of war.  

When that demonic fake descended the gilded escalator with Mrs. Diablo, the image told the world where his diseased personality would take the country if he got the chance.  Down.  

Bunch aims to inject a bone-deep chill of fear about the danger that we could see another Election-Day debacle.  He catalogues the forces and agencies that will be openly and surreptitiously working to recreate the 2016 dynamic that engaged white supremacists and seduced voters disgusted by him to throw their votes away or not cast them at all.

Better to be terrorized now, to fully face the real danger, and so to be spurred to make whatever difference each of us can before the election; better to feel a moving angst now than later to regret having done less.     

Words of hate in action under Trump

WILL BUNCH

Central American migrants wait in March for food in a pen erected by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to process a surge of migrant families and unaccompanied minors in El Paso, Texas. CEDAR ATTANASIO

Do you smell something?

That’s the stench of freedom dying, and it’s coming from America’s southern border, where refugee children seeking U.S. asylum as they flee murder, rape, and degrading conditions in Central America have instead been tossed into a growing gulag of squalid concentration camps, created by an administration desperate to cling to four more years of power.

Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University tasked with monitoring government compliance with a court order on how long migrant kids can be held in detention, said that, not only is Trump’s Border Patrol not complying, but attorneys are shocked at what they found at a Clint, Texas, facility where hundreds of youths have been sent: children sleeping on frigid concrete floors, covered in filth, unable to shower for days, and taking care of one another because the authorities are looking the other way.

Binford told the New Yorker that some of the kids who’d been in Clint for three weeks or longer “were filthy dirty, there was mucus on their shirts, the shirts were dirty. We saw breast milk on the shirts. There was food on the shirts, and the pants as well. They told us that they were hungry. They told us that some of them had not showered or had not showered until the day or two days before we arrived. Many of them described that they only brushed their teeth once.”

This report was just one of several in the last week about the rapidly expanding number of young migrant children detained in conditions that aren’t just substandard but inhumane to the point where they fall short of international standards such as the 1949 Geneva Convention, which demands that detained people receive “conveniences which conform to the rules of hygiene,” such as showers equipped with soap and water.

The progression here is both horrifying and yet blandly predictable to anyone who’s followed modern world history. An authoritarian strongman rides a populist wave to power by demonizing The Other — in this case, refugees — as people who are murderers, rapists, and something less than human.

Now in power, the Trump administration is pursuing foolish policies (like eliminating the aid to Central American countries that can stop people from making the dangerous trek north in the first place) that then turn asylum seekers into next-level political props, as “defenders” of prisoners whose detention proves to Trump’s base the threat that Dear Leader is defending them from “an invasion.” These policies are shocking crimes against humanity from a nation that once held itself out as a beacon of human rights, and it’s getting worse. At least six migrant children have died since September in U.S. custody along the border, most in the growing gulag of American concentration camps.

After an initial 29 months of the Trump presidency that has infuriated and yet somehow numbed the president’s millions of critics with a state of what could now be called “normal chaos” — a daily parade of lies, outrageous tweets, firings, mini-scandals, and giveaways to Big Business — the past week should have served as a wakeup call.

This week brought America to the brink of an even worse state of affairs. The nation and the world came with a couple of hours, if not mere minutes, of a military conflict in Iran that had enormous potential to trigger a regional inferno in the Persian Gulf. The launch and recall of a U.S. strike on the Islamic republic was an inevitable next step in a policy that ripped up a working peace deal for a non-nuclear Iran and traded it for confrontation at the behest of Trump’s patrons — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel — and to prove the “toughness” of the American autocrat. The rampant militarism and national pride of authoritarian governments is always a road to war. Do you really think Trump will turn out any different?

Iran wasn’t the only alarming operation that the president launched and called back this week. Shortly before Trump kicked off his 2020 reelection campaign with a raucous rally in Orlando attended by members of the Proud Boys and other extremists, he tweeted that an operation would commence this weekend to deport “millions” of unauthorized immigrants from inside the United States, ripping apart families in mostly blue-state big cities. The number of immigrants to be raided, detained, and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, dipped into the low thousands and then the entire operation was put on hold for two weeks — but it’s a fight that’s far from over.

The strategy of Phase 2 is twofold — to keep Trump’s base inflamed but to create new divisions among those who oppose him, to make Democrats furious at each other over impeachment/ lack of impeachment, and to rile up key voting blocs such as young people or African Americans who in enough cases voted for third-party candidates like Jill Stein or flat-out stayed home in 2016. They may do so again in 2020 if egged on by enough Facebook ads, whether they come from Trump Tower or from St. Petersburg. And all it will take to get there is this amped up strain of neofascism. 

wbunch@inquirer.com

215-854-2957 will_bunch