The numbers from the recent Virginia governor’s race seem to suggest that people have a very short memory, and are willing to “forgive” and “forget” what Republicans—with few exceptions—allowed to happen to this country. It is clear that the continuing embrace of Trumpism shows that few Republicans have learned any lessons from January 6, and many voters don’t appear to realize that you can’t erase the evil of Trumpism overnight. This remains true when you have a “Fuhrer” who just won’t go away, someone with the personality of a juvenile bully who nevertheless has honed a cult following that counts seemingly half the country hypnotized, with the hypnotizing device hate and paranoia.
Trump has of course empowered many fanatics who might otherwise see their evil controlled by “normal” civilized mores. Have you ever wondered what the most infamous, blood-thirsty Nazis would be if the Nazi Party did not exist? Heinrich Himmler was a life-long anti-Semite, had an obsession with “racial purity,” and German mythology became his “religion.” But he had earned a degree in agriculture; before joining the Nazi Party, he did odd office jobs and apparently tried his hand at chicken farming. Reinhard Heydrich was a naval officer until 1931, when he was removed for “conduct unbecoming an officer” in regard to his fiancé, who was a fanatical Nazi and persuaded him to join the party. Adolf Eichmann worked as a sales clerk for a radio company, and then as an agent for an oil company. Julius Streicher before and after World War I was an elementary school teacher, before his violent anti-Semitism found a home in the Nazi Party.
We can also wonder what retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn would have become, had he not had been born in a family with high-level military connections, and to eventually have the opportunity to “rehabilitate” himself in the Trumpist party. Throughout his life Flynn exhibited “poor judgment” and disregard of rules and the consequences of it—and yet he always seemed to receive a “get-out-of-jail-free” pass. As a teenager he apparently served a night in juvenile detention for “serious and unlawful” behavior, but whatever that was would be expunged from anyone knowing what that was about. Flynn was popular in high school, which apparently allowed him to get away with being a thoughtless hellraiser.
Flynn was incomprehensibly given a three-year scholarship by the University of Rhode Island ROTC despite his seeming intention to drop out after posting a “D” average grade his freshman year. Something “fishy” was going on there, probably intervention by his well-connected family. He eventually received a degree in something called “management science,” which is like getting a degree in Phys Ed. He went on to get a “master’s” degree from Golden Gate University, the kind of school where corporations and the military send people who didn’t learn the requisite skills when they were in a real school.
While in the military, Flynn rose through the ranks to become a three-star general (his brother became a four-star general), his chest covered with ribbons awarded for just “being there”—he never was actually in a situation where he had to use a weapon, not even in that unlawful farce that was the Grenada “invasion” where he was “awarded” a reprimand for unauthorized actions—a continuing pattern that his superiors would look the other way from throughout his rise through the ranks.
Flynn has provided plenty of clues of what he might have become had his family just let him quit school because of lousy grades and that “unlawful” behavior, perhaps just another white nationalist. In his last years in the military, he was assigned to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), where Flynn’s friendly contacts with Russians of a questionable sort was raising eyebrows. In 2013 he was “trustworthy” enough to the Russians to be allowed to become the first U.S. military officer to visit the headquarters of the Chief Intelligence Office (GRU, the successor of the KGB). The nature of this “visit” was questionable enough that Flynn was denied a return visit by James Clapper, who at the time was the Obama administration’s Director of National Intelligence.
An American intelligence informant named Stefan Halper suspected that Flynn’s relationship with a Russian woman and suspected spy was too “intimate” for comfort, and the possibility of Flynn giving away state secrets could not be ruled out. That “management science” degree apparently didn’t help control Flynn’s disruptive “management” style at the DIA; he ignored orders by his superiors, and he concerned colleagues that his increasing fanaticism about the “connection” between of Islam and terrorism was clouding his judgment. He was subsequently removed from the DIA; his “retirement” from the military was probably less “voluntary” than people suspect.
This pro-Russia, anti-Islam fanatic was a perfect fit for the Trump administration, but Flynn was forced to resign as National Security Advisor for lying to the FBI about his unauthorized, and unrecorded, meetings with the Russian ambassador. This wasn’t anything new; Flynn’s “friendship” with the Russians had long been open to question, and who knows what more mischief the Russians could have done if Flynn had remained as the NSA, given Trump’s denial of Russian election interference and ongoing cyber-attacks. After that, Flynn’s behavior continued to be not only suspect, but possibly treasonous; in 2015 he was paid $45,000 by the Russian government to take a seat next to Vladimir Putin and give a speech honoring RT—“formerly” the Kremlin’s anti-American propaganda arm known as Russia Today.
The assertion by a former commander on Flynn’s military intelligence acumen—that he was “tireless, focused, serious, and thought about how he went about connecting dots”—has been something completely absent in his character when it comes to his political philosophy, if it can be described as such. Flynn has at least twice, at a QAnon rally and on the far-right network Newsmax, suggested martial law should be imposed, with the military confiscating voting machines, and the 2020 election overturned and a “redo” of the election to take place.
But unlike Burt Lancaster’s coup-plotting general in the film Seven Days in May, Flynn doesn’t even have the fig leaf of self-righteous “morality.” As usual with far-right fanatics, Flynn only sees the world on his own narrow-minded terms. “There is no way in the world we are going to be able to move forward as a nation. He (Trump) could immediately, on his order, seize every single one of these machines,” he has said. This is not “forward” thinking: this is reactionary, fascist, cult-worshipping thinking.
The idea that this man could—at the “right” time and place—actually consent to lead a coup on the orders of a deranged president (if in fact Flynn isn’t all bluff) should not be simply dismissed as fantasy. Flynn has again courted hyper-partisan division recently at a conservative “Christian” rally by proclaiming that in order to be “one nation under God,” there must be only one religion, without exactly stating how we are supposed to be such short of “ethnic” and religious “cleansing.”
Carl Bernstein said that “It’s stupefying that we had a president of the United States that would entertain these knaves, fools, and dangerous authoritarian figures…Donald Trump looked for people (like this) to facilitate his authoritarian impulse.” Clapper himself claimed that this is not the Flynn he knew at the DIA, but that clearly was not the case; he was fired from his position because of this kind of “unhinged” behavior.
Trump had given the authority to do evil to extremist fanatics like Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows and many others eager and willing to carry out his orders, with the Joseph Goebbels wannabes at Fox News serving as his Ministry of Propaganda. We have to remember who Trump was before he became president: a megalomaniacal, narcissistic liar who cheated and swindled business partners, often refused to honor contracts, and repeatedly avoided paying for his failures as a businessman by filing for bankruptcy, in which those who trusted him were the ones who always lost their shirts.
Trump was a man who as president was guided by just two principles: hate of the race, ethnic and religious kind, and whatever he could do for tax avoidance and to enrich himself and those of his “class.” Well, actually there is another, far more dangerous “principle”: Once tasting power, Trump is now corrupted by it “absolutely” beyond what anyone can imagine.
There are those like Eugene
Fidell who think we should “get real” about dangerous fanatics who are Trump’s
most devoted disciples; for example, we should “get a grip” on how we view Flynn,
who is just a loudmouth expressing an opinion. But then again, such “loudmouths”
inspired all those people we saw on January 6, and continue to bring shame and
discredit on this country in the eyes of the world. By the way, Trumpist Lauren Boebert is proof that it is possible to be at least as psychotic as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who House minority leader Kevin McCarthy is vowing to give more important committee assignments if the Republicans retake the House in 2022.
Of course voters with their heads in the sand are going to say to themselves that a “real” insurrection will never happen. But let’s remember what happened in Germany in the 1930s: the social and political “elites” thought that the Nazis were no more than a useful “outlet” for the frustrations of the “common” people, and the Nazi leadership could be “controlled.” What happened instead was that the “elites” either lost control of the Nazis or joined them for their own “protection,” and the “common” people didn’t want to be bothered with the vagaries of democracy; they were perfectly accepting of violent dictatorship as long as the “others”—such as Jews—were the ones whose freedom and right to exist was violated.
This country “probably” will not
come to that. Trump (who is also suspected of passing state secrets to the Russians to show his "good will") apparently thinks Putin is "just like him," according to Chris Christie. If that also means that Trump admires Putin's anti-democracy, authoritarian tendencies, then we must ask ourselves just how close to the precipice do we
want to go by allowing Trumpism to continue unmolested, instead of banishing it
forever as a dark and dangerous political and social ideology that once
threatened democracy in this country.
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