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    Commentary: 2024 could be the year America fends off dictatorship, or invites it in

    FORMER (AND PERHAPS FUTURE) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has been saying some strange things lately. “I am your retribution,” he told the annual CPAC conference back in March. In a Veterans Day speech, Trump told a New Hampshire audience “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists” and “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” In a recent exchange ...
    by Benjamin Carter Hett, Los Angeles Times Jan 03, 2024 8 minutes
    Former President Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks at a rally, hosted by Club 47 USA, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center on Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023, in West Palm Beach, Florida.

    FORMER (AND PERHAPS FUTURE) PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP has been saying some strange things lately.

    “I am your retribution,” he told the annual CPAC conference back in March. In a Veterans Day speech, Trump told a New Hampshire audience “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists” and “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” In a recent exchange with Fox News host Sean Hannity — after Hannity bent over backwards to get Trump to say he had no plans to be a dictator — Trump said that he only wanted to be a dictator “on the first day” of his new administration. It has been widely reported that Trump and his allies are planning to invoke the Insurrection Act, allowing the president to deploy troops to crush protests.

    Since 2015 there has been much debate about whether or not Trump is a “fascist.” That debate is now over. Trump probably does not understand enough history or political theory to realize that he is a fascist. But instinctively he has found his way there. His language of “retribution,” of “vermin,” and of wanting to be a “dictator,” is a precise and highly alarming echo of the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in the early 20th century.

    If he is

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