PUBLISHED TO
What it appears to be, tragically, should not come as a surprise to anyone. This is what the Republicans have allowed themselves to become. This is the nascent, unbridled emotion within each of them that Donald Trump has carefully nurtured and encouraged since he announced his presidential campaign. It’s the same sinister emotion he has channeled since taking office. It’s the emotion of eliminationism, hate, resentment, and murder.
It is the same emotion that kept—and continues to keep—Republicans of all stripes, whether in Congress, the Senate, or even your Republican “friends" on Facebook, from speaking up and objecting while he gleefully demonized whole swaths of Americans as undesirables, or "enemies of the people." While he made fun of women who dared to complain about being sexually assaulted. When he took pains to offer subtle encouragement to Nazis marching in Charlottesville. When he loudly proclaimed himself a (white) “nationalist.”
Trump’ s actions aren’t made in a vacuum—they are calculated—by Trump himself, by Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and others of their ilk, to inflame the hidden passions of a base already reflexively trained like rabid dogs to chant “Build the wall!" or "Lock her up!" Trump is just articulating what they really want, most of all, in their heart of hearts. They want to kill. They want to kill the press. They want to kill Democrats. And now, one or more of their own demented minions has, from all appearances, finally taken up the challenge. More will likely follow.
Some Americans must have thought they were getting a reality TV star. What they got was a terrorist with more power at his disposal than Osama bin Laden could have ever dreamed of.
With every tweet castigating Democrats for some imagined slight, with every unbalanced, vicious utterance at his Nuremberg-style rallies, Donald Trump has cultivated the Republican Party for this exact moment in time: The time when they would reveal their inner nature to us all.
Why this moment? That would seem obvious. They are feeling threatened.
I don’t think any of us can get inside the raw mess of sewage that is in the head of the person or persons that built and mailed these bombs, but the timing is hardly coincidental. The Democrats are on the verge of retaking the House of Representatives, and poised to throw a number of big wrenches into the Trump juggernaut—exposing the abject, stark criminality of this regime that House Republicans have struggled mightily to keep secret. The Mueller probe also still looms like a darkening shadow, absorbing and consuming members of this administration, one by one.
So Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric has gone berserk and stratospheric as he flails about, looking for targets. The pathetic “caravan” of dirt-poor migrants trudging a thousand miles away towards a dismal rejection at the border has suddenly become a secret cabal of “terrorists,” an easy shiny object to point at and scream, while Republican governors and secretaries of state work feverishly to disenfranchise as many American voters as possible before their date of reckoning on November 6.
Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, CNN, George Soros, Eric Holder—all targets straight out of the Trump demonization playbook—have all been subject to Trump's Twitter finger. And look who got the bombs delivered to them first.
Meanwhile the same Republicans under threat are running on nothing but pure racism and demonization of other Americans, since they have nothing else to point to, in terms of actual “achievements” (tax cuts for millionaires, anyone?). And on top of that, the stock market is violently gyrating, no longer offering relief, but a sense of dread to most Americans. To the extent there ever was a center there, it did not hold.
So now, we have murder and terror—the default option of the Republican mentality. Always available, always tempting, and always waiting for the right time to be unleashed.
And now it looks like it's here.
Vote November 6th. The future of this country depends on it.
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