"People want to trust others. I, too, would rather believe that the president of the United States was an honest, decent, thoughtful person. For some people, having an authority figure be trustworthy is so important that they will not accept the obvious facts about Trump...
"[Given his lack of care or concern and his conditioning, Trump] is the worst person imaginable to lead the United States through the coronavirus crisis. Everything he says or does is for himself, either to have power over others or to hurt them in revenge against their disagreeing or standing in his way. Because he has shown himself to be incapable of either conscience or empathy, he is basically a predator, lacking the most essential parts of our humanity.
"Repeating his lies over and over is like the 'big lie' technique made famous by Hitler. It works because when a lie is endlessly repeated, even decent people assume there must be some truth in it."
Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote about the ways in which the destructiveness of certain personality types can manufacture evil. For Fromm, the emotional pathology of socio-psychopaths often has little to do with impaired daily functioning, for example, being too anxious or depressed to go to work. As Fromm sees it, it is not uncommon for people in positions of power who are deeply disturbed to appear normal.
Henry Girioux extends these ideas:
"This is not merely a matter of the truth or morality being abandoned in the interest of producing a fascist politics, it represents the emergence of a politics that mimics the transition from the mentality of greed and the concentration of power in few hands-celebrated in the film Wall Street -- to a dangerous state of mind in which violence and death become the organizing and governing principles of a society.
"As the New York Times points out, more Americans have died in the last three months [from the Corona virus] than "died in the Vietnam and Korean Wars combined and nearly twice as many as died of battle wounds in WWII. Trump responds by blaming China for the outbreak, and sending out endless tweets attacking Obama.
"Moreover, Trump has blood on his hands. This is evident not only his well-documented late response to the pandemic but also because of his failure to impose one week earlier a lock-down and social distancing, which a Columbia University Study, suggests would have saved 36,000 lives.[1]
"Trump [then] dismissed the criticism by calling Columbia a "liberal, disgraceful institution." In addition, one wonders how many lives could have been saved if Trump had quickly put in place a federal plan to deal with the virus instead of prioritizing the needs of the economy over human life.
"Trump has cultivated a taste for savagery and defines the world in the image of his own self-interest and war. He has revived the architecture of fascism by mainstreaming its mobilizing passions. He calls people animals"he refers to the press as fake news as a way to discredit the oppositional media and journalists who hold him accountable; he rounds up the children of undocumented brown people and puts them in cages; he makes racial cleansing a governing principle of his administration; he normalizes lying, making it the basic rhetorical experience of our time; he amplifies the militarized discourse of fear and numbs the culture with his pervasive anti-intellectualism and control of the right-wing media as unadulterated propaganda machines."
We are now - and will continue to be - faced with the question of whether we will be "trauma victims" or "trauma survivors." We know that one of the main reactions to traumatic events is paralysis and a state of dissociation or chronic distractedness. Will we allow our own paralysis to prevail?
Will we succumb to the latest political theater or - God forbid - a contrived war or false-flag scenario?
We should ask, without exaggeration, whether a fresh form fascism is in the offing - one adapted to the American landscape. Some would argue that it is already in the process of establishing itself.
As Cass Sunstein has written in an article titled, "It Can Happen Here," the problem is that Nazism was so horrifying and so barbaric:
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