It's one thing to dump on Trump, as author Rick Perlstein did on today's With All Due Respect, calling The Donald a modern-day George Wallace, and floating "fascism" about him. But Perlstein took things a nasty step further, denigrating Trump supporters in the ugliest terms.
Per Perlstein, Trump has unleashed forces in his supporters "that are more animalistic than human." Perlstein added that spectacle of the US losing to ISIS has filled Trump fans with "childlike, impotent rage."
Perlstein is the author of Nixonland, a critical look at the 37th president. The premise of his interview with John Heilemann was to draw parallels between the Nixon era and the Trump phenomenon.
Note the pusillanimous way that Perlstein, instead of having the guts to accuse Trump of "fascism" himself, puts the word in the mouths of others.
RICK PERLSTEIN: In 1968, the candidate who really defined kind of the Trump position was this guy George Wallace . . . and what makes Trump really distinct, and just like George Wallace, was he has absolutely no filter. George Bush might say Islam is a religion of peace. Going back to Ronald Reagan, 1978, refusing to support an initiative in California that would have banned gay teachers. They knew that if they would have pushed this kind of stuff that they would be playing with fire.
Trump has none of that, and that's what makes people willing to use this word fascism! Because once you feed on the angry energies of people who feel dispossessed, you kind of unleash forces in the human brain that are more animalistic than human. And that's what so frightening about Trump, and that is why you see his popularity increase and increase and increase. Midcentury intellectuals knew from studying basically the fascists in Europe in the 1940's that once you kind of tear way that thin layer of civilization in an electorate, anything is possible. Human beings can be very ugly.
. . .
JOHN HEILEMANN: It seems to me there's another issue going on here, too. A second ago I was going to talk about what's going on abroad. You had in 1968 and then still again in 1972, you had a long war that America was self-evidently losing.
PERLSTEIN: The idea that America was, suddenly, as Reagan, as Nixon put it in a 1970 speech, a paper tiger. And as Kissinger put it, we were being defeated by a fourth-rate military power.
HEILEMANN: Right, and that again, you kind of have, it seems to me, the parallel there as you come to now, you have another war, a different kind of war obviously, but a war that a lot of people perceive rightly or wrongly the United States is losing against ISIS, a team, a group of people that President Obama denigrated similarly by calling them the JV team. It seems to me that that's fueling a lot of the anxiety and a lot of the longing for a strong man that kind of parallels Nixon and is playing out with Trump.
PERLSTEIN: Yes. That childlike, impotent rage.
