Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?

Are the richest the most vulnerable?

The answer is, many people, including those who stand to lose a lot of money. If he doesn’t scare you, you’re either not paying attention, or you’re living in the MAGA Media bubble that encompasses Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and a jillion podcasts and websites. All places where his ongoing cravenness and craziness goes unreported.

This week he scared some of the uber-wealthy, like the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, who have for the first time in decades, directed their editors not to endorse a candidate for president. It will not surprise you to learn that those owners are billionaires with billions of dollars in government contracts. They believe their government contracts are at risk if they endorse Kamala Harris and Donald Trump wins.

Let’s focus on the Washington Post. In 2019, Amazon, founded and controlled by Post owner, Jeff Bezos, lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract because Bezos had been publicly critical of Trump. Now he fears losing a $3.9B government contract for his rocketry company, Blue Horizon. That would leave Elon Musk’s SpaceX as the sole commercial gateway to space. Bad news Jeff: If Trump wins, you’re out of luck regardless. What Loyalty he has goes to Musk, endorsement or not.

Robert Kagan is a contributing editor at the Washington Post. His response seems to speak for the newsroom and the editors that quit over this preemptive effort to curry favor: “The Post has been emphasizing that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy,” Mr. Kagan said. “And so this is the election, this is the time when we decided that we’re neutral?”

Likewise, Woodward and Bernstein, the authors of “All the President’s Men,” the Watergate exposé they led for the Post, said that while they respect the owner’s right to decide, it “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.” Eighteen Post writers called Bezos’s decision “a terrible mistake.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES/SIENA COLLEGE POLL

2,516 voters nationwide conducted from Oct. 20 to 23:

•76% believe American democracy is under threat. (20% believe it is not. Interestingly, maybe predictably, it depends on your partisan view as to which side you believe is making the threat, but I don’t understand exactly how Harris is a threat.)

•New Trump supporters are least likely to say that he’s a threat to democracy.

•21% think a president should be able to break the law. (Pre-Trump, that number was zero.)

•78% think that the election will be free and fair.

•49% fear Trump will dispute/disrupt the outcome.

•50% take Trump seriously when he says he will use the military against our civilian population. About the same number believe him when he says he will round up and deport over 10 million people. They also believe him when he says that he will use the Justice Department to exact revenge on his political enemies.

An interesting phenomenon here revolves around the idea that if a lie is repeated often enough, it begins to resemble the truth. Donald Trump has spent so much time lying about voter fraud and fixed elections that he has undermined America’s faith in it elections. A signature self-serving act. Thanks, Donald; you’re always thinking of others.

He gets all the attention while everyone previously in his orbit are ignored.

Because presidential power is as seductive as the Sirens sweetly singing to Ulysses, we’ve had plenty of authoritarian presidents, but in yet another in a string of unprecedented firsts, Donald Trump is alone in being referred to as a fascist by his own—fearful—generals and cabinet secretaries. These are not unserious people. They are our highest ranking military officers and diplomats. What’s particularly galling is that while he oh-so-predictably denounced his hand-picked generals (calling his longest-serving Chief of Staff, General John Kelly,  a “total degenerate,” a “LOWLIFE” and a “bad General”), he made zero—zilch—no effort whatsoever—to deny being a fascist or to distance himself from the description, which also applies to those dictators on whom he has a desperate man-crush: Hungary’s Orban, China’s Xi, North Korea’s Un, and of course, Russia’s Putin.

If you want a simple definition: In WWII the U.S. defined Fascism as “government by the few for the few.”  

In his typical word-salad style, he loves to call his opponents—oh, sorry, his “enemies,” who are just normies in everyone else’s world—communists and fascists, often in the same breath. He’s blissfully unaware of just how much, and why, communists and fascists hate each other.

Less than a week out, some think an unseen Harris landslide is brewing. No one thinks similarly of Trump’s chances. The polls say it’s too close to call, and maybe it is, but I don’t trust polls.

The only certainty is that the overwhelming emotion remains fear.

©2024 Jon Sinton