“But stupidity is not enough,” wrote George Orwell in 1984. The facts must be eliminated. “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.” Followers must “forget that one has ever believed the contrary”. Memory must be erased. “This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.” The past, like the facts, must be reinvented. “For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”

Donald Trump keeps saying that if he elected to a second term he will prosecute his political opponents, “the enemies within”. On 22 October he stated, once again, that as president he would use “extreme power … We can’t play games with these people. These are people that are dangerous people … an enemy from within.”

At the very moment Trump delivered his remarks highlighting his campaign for a dictatorship, the Atlantic published an article by Jeffrey Goldberg confirming his motive. He reported that Trump, as president, had rebuked the US military command, stating: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”

Then, Trump’s former chief of staff, former general John Kelly, stepped from behind the curtain in an interview with the New York Times. “Certainly,” he said, “the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators – he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.” Kelly added, the Times wrote, that “in his opinion, Mr Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law”.

The warning of the generals against Trump’s fascism is unanimous among those who have served most closely with him. The former chairman of the joint chiefs, retired general Mark Milley, told Bob Woodward, in his new book War, that Trump is “fascist to the core”. Trump’s secretary of defense, former general James Mattis, emailed Woodward to express his agreement with Milley that Trump is “the most dangerous person ever”, and “Let’s make sure we don’t try to downplay the threat, because the threat is high.” It’s Defcon 1.

In a case of exquisitely poor timing, two days before the latest revelations of Trump’s despotic intent and his own insistent bellicose demands for absolute power to use against his “enemies”, the Wall Street Journal editorial board assured its readers that Trump doesn’t mean it. There is no reason to take him seriously. In any case “the public isn’t buying this Democratic claim about Trump”. The “fascist meme” is just partisan propaganda. “The answer is that most Americans simply don’t believe the fascist meme, and for good reasons. The first is the evidence of Mr Trump’s first term. Whatever his intentions, the former President was hemmed in by American checks and balances.”

Not satisfied with absurdly dismissing Trump’s unapologetic statement, the Wall Street Journal felt compelled to airbrush the present and the past in the Orwellian tradition of “doublethink”. Within 48 hours, however, its dismissal of the supposedly “Democratic claim” about “the fascist meme” was swept away by Kelly. Having discarded Milley’s and Mattis’s earlier statements, the Journal must have figured it could deposit Kelly’s as well in the burn bag for facts in order to be able to embroider its sophistry. But, at least for the moment, creating doublethink is a demanding job.

An essential element in the normalization of Trump and his fascism is the erasure of his crimes and transgressions when he was president – his “first term”, as the Journal disingenuously describes it, as though he’s already elected to his second. Conjuring up an air of inevitability is another demoralizing Newspeak tactic. Trump’s threats, when they are not dismissed as mere rhetoric, are too generally reported as if they are something new, that they exist solely in the vacuum of this campaign, and that he has no past. Trump’s history is consigned to the memory hole.

But Trump’s presidency was a rehearsal for fascism. Quite apart from his record of kleptocracy, allegedly pervasive corruption and obstructions of justice, pardons of criminal associates and dangling of pardons to insure their silence, contempt for the law, maniacal obsession with Hitler, who “did come good things”, scorn for military service (“suckers” and “losers”), worship of foreign tyrants, congenital lying, paranoid conspiracy mongering, disdain for climate science, willful neglect of public health, ignoring warnings and spreading falsehoods in the Covid-19 pandemic resulting in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands, the organization and incitement of the January 6 insurrection, and indifference to the near-assassination of his vice-president by a mob he had unleashed (“So what?”), Trump systematically abused the Department of Justice to investigate, harass and prosecute his “enemies within”. Trump’s current rage is hardly a new threat. In a second term he intends to smash through the constraints that inhibited him in his first.

The Just Security website of the New........

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