Americans still have The Right Stuff
Though all of us acquainted with the history of the convulsions of the 20th-Century, and who gave close attention to Donald Trump’s serial indecencies during the 2016 campaign, knew that there would inevitably be a reprise of the vandalism and violence that attended the birth of the Third Reich, it was nonetheless a shock to see torchlit mobs marching through the streets of Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village” chanting “Blood and Soil.”
We weren’t kidding when we worriedly recalled Krystallnacht; when we condemned the naked malice and outright violence at Trump rallies; when we reminded that Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini, too, systematically attacked the press; when we marveled at the bald, demagogic lies and his supporter’s blithe indifference to those lies; when we warned that these things are the opening acts of a fascist state.
Those who thought that Trump didn’t mean the things he said, that a better Donald Trump would emerge after the election, were grievously, dangerously, wrong. The corrupt and incurious and malicious human sewage you see is who Donald Trump really is.
There is no better Donald Trump. His sympathy for Nazis is real. His hostility to American ideals is real.
But: When even the Joint Chiefs, as apolitical a body as exists in American life, publicly reject The Donald’s deeply un-American blabberings and moral equivocations, you know the jig is up. Everywhere you look, Americans mean to defend their country and its ideals against its president. There is still plenty of the Right Stuff in the Good Ol’ U.S. of A., and it’s going to be allright.