QOTD: A Twisted Megalomaniac -- Digby

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/04/28/qotd-a-twisted-megalomaniac/

Gift link to article in The Atlantic by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/06/trump-second-term-comeback/682573/

We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”

I’ve written that this is all about world domination for him and got quite a bit of blowback. TDS to the max, I’m told. No, he’s just a crazy old man (which he is) not some world historical villain. He just said it. He believes he runs the world.

He doesn’t, of course. He barely runs the White House. But he has a tremendous amount of power to destroy things and he’s doing it:

For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”

That’s from a feature about Trump’s comeback in the Atlantic. Here’s a gift link if you want to read it. Gird yourself. It’s very disturbing.

This piece by Michael Tomasky in The New Republic defines this well:

When we think of the word fascism, everyone’s mind races immediately to Adolf Hitler. But the world has seen many variants of fascism, Nazism being only one. There’s Italian fascismo, there’s Francoism, there’s Banderism (that was Ukrainian) and Ilminism (South Korean) and more. There’s neofascism and crypto-fascism and ur-fascism and Islamofascism. But Donald Trump has given us something new: clown-show fascism.

Clown-show fascism describes a regime marked simultaneously by hubristic and defiant assaults on the democratic and constitutional order on the one hand and, on the other, a nearly laughable incompetence in just about every other area of the regime’s activity. The first characteristic certainly applies to the Trump administration, and it’s chilling and frightening and not at all funny. Just ask Mahmoud Khalil.

Yet at the same time, in other areas, the incompetence has been staggering. Trump’s constant about-faces and walk backs on tariffs have been an international embarrassment. Elon Musk’s DOGE has fired federal workers willy-nilly only to turn around and rehire many after the Musketeers realized they weren’t deep-state bloodsuckers and the work they did was kind of essential, after all—you know, like the people who tend the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

. . .

[love_katz]

1. I read the Atlantic article.

It confirmed what I already know. The energy behind Agolf $hitler's second term ( and threatened third term) is misogyny and the desire that too many men have to own and control women.
The give-away phrase in the article was how $hitler decided to work on gaining more votes from " non-college educated men".
The article illuminates the abuser attitudes that motivates the regime and the voters who back it. It's the manifestation of rape culture values.

Thank you for sharing Digby's column. I have low income and can't afford to pay for subscriptions to multiple media outlets. I would recommend reading the Atlantic article, if you can stomach it. My reaction is that I really wish I could move to Canada. This country hates women and everything that the regime believes and promotes proves that. I also suspect that the current revenge tour is, in part, to get back at both women and the courts for the E Jean Carol case, and the Stormy Daniels case.

Sisters: we need to stand together and fight. The next attack will be to try and take away our voting rights. We may not be able to fight on the grounds of the SAVE act being a poll tax on women, even though it's exactly that, and a blatant effort to disenfranchise us. We might have better luck saying that we support voter ID, but it needs to be provided FREE OF CHARGE to all eligible voters, and that it remains acceptable in all 50 states, even if we move. Furthermore, all necessary assistance, both financial and transportation must be provided so that all eligible voters can get the ID. If the GQP object to providing the needed assistance, then we can point out that what they are really doing is trying to disenfranchise women and brown people.
In the meantime, until women are able to achieve full equality and restoration of the rights taken from us, as many of us as possible need to follow plan 4B.
Just as racism is a problem that those of us who are white need to work on eliminating, misogyny is a problem that men need to face up to and work on eliminating. I know that there's lots of good men out there, but the patriarchal misogynists don't deserve our company or care. We need that for our Sisters, in order to protect ourselves and heal.

[erronis]

2. A great post, love_katz. I don't think most men (I'm one) are misogynist

but the ones that are may be more likely to seek power. If I knew how to reach out to my "brothers" and convince them that they should be kinder, more inclusive, I would. But I think it would have the same effect as me trying to tell any magat that trump is a loser.