This is all so pitifully predictable
I’ve said all along that while Donald Trump’s ouster would eventually happen at the end of a long and grinding investigative process, the only thing that could instantly jettison him from the White House in the mean time would be if he really screwed up and did something to outrage even the most politically tone-deaf of Americans. Now he’s finally gone and done it. And while this may indeed finally trigger his ouster, it’s just stunningly horrifying. And yet at the same time, it’s so predictable.
Donald Trump entered the race for president by falsely accusing the Hispanic immigrants coming across the border of being rapists and drug dealers. He was, very clearly, taking a page out of Adolf Hitler’s playbook. He picked an ethnic minority group that was a ripe target, and he decided to scapegoat that group by convincing the worst people out there that these scapegoats were to blame for everyone’s problems.
White trash losers everywhere wanted to believe Trump when he told them that they could happy and wealthy if Hispanic immigrants weren’t somehow ruining it all for them. It’s precisely what Hitler did to the Jews during his early period. In case Trump’s Nazi-like message wasn’t clear enough, during the campaign he retweeted a guy who had recently tweeted an image of his Jewish opponent Bernie Sanders in a gas chamber. As the campaign went on, Trump added Muslims and other minority groups to his scapegoat list. He was willing to say and do anything to convince white trash losers that they were the victims of minorities, and those white trash losers were willing to overlook everything in order to cling to this lie.
Now we’ve arrived at a place where Donald Trump has taken thousands of children from his favorite scapegoat group, Hispanic immigrants, and locked them in concentration camps. And yes, they’re concentration camps; they fit the literal definition, and they fit the context of how Hitler used concentration camps during his mid-period. They’re not death camps. Not yet. But Trump is suddenly just one step away from late-period Hitler, and so people are sitting up and paying attention.
It’s about time. Why did it have to come to this? Why did we have to reach the point where Donald Trump has children locked up in concentration camps? From the start it’s been clear that he was using Hitler’s playbook. He told us on literally day one that he was going to scapegoat Hispanic immigrants. He spent the rest of the campaign escalating his aggression toward them while encouraging ethnic violence in general. The people who still support him will burn in Hell for it. But what took everyone else so long to figure out that Trump has been copycatting Hitler all along – or took them so long to care?
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report