Free Republic

The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong. Donald Trump isn’t a fascist, or even a semi-fascist, in President Biden’s term. Mr. Trump is an opportunist. His ideology is coextensive with his temperament: In both, he is an anarcho-narcissist. He is Elmer Gantry, or the Music Man, if Harold Hill had been trained in the black arts by Roy Cohn. He is what you might get by crossing the Wizard of Oz with Willie Sutton, who explained that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” As for Mr. Trump’s followers, they belong to the Church of American Nostalgia. They...

Even progressives treat the president as a familiar monster. And he hasn’t destroyed the world yet. It’s hard to prove intangibles, harder still when they are in motion, like October clouds, moving rapidly across millions of minds. One obvious but neglected intangible is worth noticing in the weeks before the elections: The country—consciously or unconsciously—has gotten used to Donald Trump. Twenty-one months into his administration, Mr. Trump has been processed, or half-processed—even subtly domesticated—by the large, complicated American mind, which is improvisational and on the whole incoherent except in moments of national crisis. Even progressives to whom he is a...

I turned on NPR just now, the morning after the fall of Baghdad, and heard sounds of elegy, tones of regret: a report on the "humanitarian crisis," followed by about ten seconds of doleful segue mood music - oh, woe! It will be fascinating in the days ahead to see how the left plays this rather inconvenient turn of events - the vindication of George W. Bush and his savage blood-for-oil fascist aggression. Footage of joyful crowds in Baghdad, and the Saddam statue going down like the Berlin wall, the women trilling in celebration, and the men whacking Saddam’s head...