Something Wicked This Way Comes

Harris lost it calling Trump a "fascist" and the media has succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome

Trump Derangement Syndrome seems to have gripped the commentariat on both sides of the Atlantic as the US presidential race enters the final stretch. Harris hasn’t lost yet, but there is an "end-of-days" feeling about the coverage across much of the supposedly "liberal" UK press. Normally mild-mannered columnists like Matthew D’Ancona in the European have taken to warning that “a rough beast slouches again to Washington.” D’Ancona believes the election has unleashed something primordially evil—“the dark instincts lurking in the brainstem and limbic system.” Yuck.

Over at The Guardian, George Monbiot is in a similarly apocalyptic mood. "Fascist" is too mild an epithet to encapsulate Trump’s threat to civilisation. He portrays him as a latter-day “Nero” and accuses the Republican Party of being saturated with “vengeful nihilism.”

Like D’Ancona, Monbiot also tries to put Trumpism on the psychiatrist's couch. “Men like Trump—damaged, frightened, pathologically insecure, resistant to love and therapy—can relieve their pain only by inflicting pain on others.” He says Trump will do this by installing nothing less than the apparatus of a brutal Nazi state. “It is not hard to see the militias supporting Trump turning into death squads,” he writes.

Death squads! Has Mr Monbiot been on the mushrooms again? Trump may be a blowhard right-winger, a narcissist, and a nationalist, given to conspiracy theories about immigrants eating pets, but he has not exactly been marching Brown Shirts down in Mar-a-Lago or sending gangs of thugs to smash up Jewish businesses in New York. Nor does he believe that the Jewish race, or any other race for that matter, should be exterminated in concentration camps.

The Republican candidate is not promoting an ideology of racial supremacy based on eugenics. He probably wouldn’t be able to spell it, for a start. Trump may have a penchant for wall-building, but he is not a military expansionist seeking to invade Mexico to create lebensraum for the Volk. Nor has he placed the US military under the control of an ideological Waffen-SS or made generals swear an oath to serve him unconditionally. He may have obliquely praised the quality of Hitler’s generals, like Erwin Rommel, but so have many people, including Winston Churchill.

Trump really is nothing like Hitler. He’s a wheeler-dealer chancer and a populist, the latest in a long line of similar US politicians throughout history, like Huey Long. You wonder if people like Monbiot have ever read anything about American politics or the history of fascism. Does he seriously believe that Trump is going to pass an Enabling Act extinguishing the US Constitution and imposing a military dictatorship? Does he think that Americans, whose fathers and grandfathers fought against the Nazis, would allow that to happen? What appalling arrogance to accuse 75 million Americans of voting for “death squads”.

This intemperate rhetoric seems to be a symptom of premature defeatism on the left. They wouldn’t be talking like this if they thought Harris was cruising for victory next week - they’d be laughing at Trump the orange coloured loser. But Democratic Party outriders seem to have twigged that the bait-and-switch operation that installed Harris as the candidate in July without her going through the primary process has failed. This is not surprising. Prospective candidates are grilled in state-wide primary contests for a reason: to see if they can cut it. Harris stood in 2020 and didn’t—quitting the race after winning only one primary vote. Why did they expect this mediocre and compromised left-wing politician to change the political habits of a lifetime and suddenly emerge as a female Barack Obama?

But look—I say again: she hasn’t lost yet. Trump may appear to have the “Big Mo,” as they call it in America, but the race is still too close to call, especially in the all-important swing states. Kamala Harris has actually performed rather better than her supporters had a right to expect. It’s just that she never was a credible presidential candidate in the first place, in the way Hillary Clinton arguably was in 2016.

Clinton lost to Trump partly because she insulted many voters by calling them a “basket of deplorables.” That wasn’t the only reason she lost, of course—many voters, not all of them male, disliked her self-righteous and hectoring persona and her breathless female chauvinism—but it didn’t help. Kamala Harris has doubled down on the name-calling, accusing voters of something even worse than just being morally deplorable. She has said that half the US electorate is prepared to support an actual “fascist.” And she didn’t just quote some disaffected ex-Trump employee calling him a Nazi; she said it straight off her own bat. Harris genuinely believes that her opponent is Hitler reincarnated. Trump has probably called her that too and a communist and many other things in his bizarre stream-of-consciousness rants. But the Democrats actually mean it.

The US media has picked up the allegation and run with it. MSNBC compared Trump’s Madison Square Gardens rally to a Nazi rally and ran footage of National Socialists giving the Nazi salute. This facile smear, days before a presidential election, leaves this once respected news outlet without a shred of dignity.

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As soon as you start comparing your opponent to a Nazi, you’ve lost the plot. Isn’t that the first lesson of political campaigning? Of civilised discourse? If the Democrats want to hand Trump this election, they are going about it the right way. And if the media commentators want to avoid destroying respect for their judgement, they should refrain from making hysterical and unhistorical forecasts of doom.