On Friday’s Amanpour on CNN International (but interestingly did not air on PBS), substitute host Bianna Golodryga opened with one of the show’s kookiest anti-Trump guests yet (and there's been some stiff competition there), “Doomsday Scenario” newsletter author and Howard Dean for President webmasters Garrett Graff.
In 2019, he wrote that Fox News was a threat to national security and recently compared ICE to Hitler’s Gestapo, so he has a history to live up to. Graff certainly brought in the accusations of "fascism" and “authoritarianism” linked to Trump’s takeover of the Smithsonian, ICE raids, and the National Guard patrolling D.C. This time, he used the release of his new book on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to sound off on Trump, saying the "American Reich" is upon us.
Even Golodryga’s introduction was packed with barely suppressed liberal hysteria.
[A]rmed troops on the streets of Washington, D.C., and threats from the U.S. president that more cities will soon follow. President Trump is ramping up his anti-crime agenda with immigration raids...And Trump's critics are increasingly in the firing line, as the administration seeks to bend the U.S. legal system to its will. There's also a grinding assault on America's cultural institutions...It's a weight of evidence that has many asking, is the world's leading democracy losing the fight to protect its founding democratic values? My next guest says that the answer is clear and that the United States has already slipped into fascism.
She then fawned over Graff's warning as "quite chilling to hear these words from you," someone whom she hilariously claimed is "not known for hyperbole and faux outrage, so the fact that you are sounding the alarm now and the fact that you have said that this has been a pivotal week in what you've concluded has been the U.S. term to fascism really speaks volumes."
"What specifically about this current environment in this week that we're in has led you to that conclusion," she asked.
Check out Graff's answer and tell us he's not in the business of ginning up hyperbole and phony outrage: "[H]ere we are, you know, seven or so months into the Trump administration, we see the military, you know, seizing and holding our nation's capital....You know, this is what fascism would look like in America and I think the sooner that we recognize what this moment now represents in our country, the better we can confront it and act on it."
Graff described ICE's tactics as "kidnapping and grabbing people off the streets, sometimes to deport them overseas, to countries that they have no connection to. I mean, that is as textbook an example of how fascism operated in the 20th century in Germany or the Soviet Union as you could possibly imagine…."
False parallels abound: Germany and the Soviet Union didn’t so much deport their opponents as put them in prison or liquidate them. And critics of Trump’s so-called fascist dictatorship like Graff feel pretty free to criticize the dictator. Wouldn’t they be afraid to speak up if they truly believed their own rhetoric?
Graff offensively compared D.C.’s female mayor Muriel Bowser to an abused wife (with Trump the abusive husband) for daring to say a few non-hostile things about Trump’s federal intervention. Golodryga quoted a recent Graff article back to him that dredged up a Hitler parallel.
[T]his line really stood out to me. You said, “Do we end up merely like Hungary, "merely," in quotes, or do we go all the way toward an ‘American Reich’? So, far after years of studying World War II, I fear that America's trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933 than it does Budapest circa 2015.” That is very chilling, Garrett, to hear those words from you and to read them….
Except the Trump administration is the one defending Jews from anti-Semitic attacks, to the disdain of the anti-Israel left.
