Is Trump Hitler? Probably Not — And Other Notes From Today’s Electoral College Circus
By: Michael Tracey
Tags: Politics, 2016 Election, Russian, Democracy, Donald Trump

Someone today in Harrisburg who thought the election was “hacked” — photo by MT

In an election season suffuse with ironies, today did not disappoint. Despite a crusade mounted by people like Larry Lessig to deprive Trump of 270 electoral votes, substantially more electors ended up defecting from Hillary, which is almost too amazing for words.

I for one think @lessig ought to issue a public apology for misleading his followers. A number of protesters I spoke to showed up to Harrisburg, PA under the sincere assumption that a critical mass of GOP electors were likely to abandon Trump and throw the election to the House of Representatives. Even though the coup idea did gain significant elite support, it was never a serious possibility, and Lessig is responsible for deluding people into buying his fantasy.

After speaking with protesters who’d traveled to Harrisburg, in some cases driving many hours from as far away as Massachusetts, I really despair about the future of anti-Trump movements among both liberals and leftists. Those groups tend to be wrongly conflated (especially by conservatives) but in this case they conflated themselves, by uniting under the banner of Electoral College subversion. That is to say: the people who showed up to Harrisburg (and I would imagine this was true elsewhere) were a weird combination of mainline Clinton loyalist Democrats and activist leftist types, the latter of whom tend to shun electoral politics. I saw a lot of people protesting at the State House wearing their worn out #ImWithHer paraphernalia and still proudly displaying their Hillary bumper-stickers. Along with them you had left-wing agitators (I say that endearingly) who never had any affinity for Hillary, but nevertheless joined her fans in rowdy chants accusing Trump of treasonous collusion with Putin. I almost could not believe what I was hearing.

The appropriation of the language of “treason” is at once disturbing and pathetic — it seems mostly borne of inchoate anti-Trump animus rather any genuine belief that Trump is guilty of treason. (Although there were definitely some true RUSSIAN MENACE believers in the mix.)

For this I blame the media and Democratic Party figureheads more than I blame any individual protester. Most people aren’t sophisticated consumers of news — they have jobs, school, family, and other stuff to worry about. They rely on trusted sources who are paid to process news for a living to provide them with reliable information, and they’ve been utterly failed in that regard. It’s an institutional problem.

I’ll have more to say on these themes tomorrow, but for now I just wanted to touch briefly on one particular interaction I had at the PA State Capitol. After the Electoral College meeting was officially adjourned and things seemed to be winding down, a middle-aged woman near me in the public gallery bellowed at the top of her lungs: “You just gave us Adolf Hitler.” She was loud enough and the acoustics of the room were such that I’m sure every elector and dignitary in there heard it.

Now, that’s an extreme assertion. You can’t get more extreme, frankly. If a Hitler-like figure is about to take the reins of the most powerful state in world history, all of us should be flipping the F out right now, and doing whatever we can to organize some kind of last-minute resistance — lest we just sit around and wait for the onset of mass genocide. I’ve written before on the inconsistencies of the TRUMP = FASCIST position, and one objection I’ve consistently raised is that people in positions of influence who espouse this line have a real harmful impact: when renowned pundits writing for major publications casually declare that Trump is a fascist, of course regular folk are going to believe it — thus causing the kind of hysteria that was on display today in Harrisburg.

By happenstance, I ran into the screaming woman later on. Her name is Susan and she’s from Penns Grove, NJ. She was perfectly nice, though agitated. After some very light probing, I got her to concede that she doesn’t really believe the Hitler thing. She doesn’t think Trump will actually implement concentration camps and exterminate millions, nor does she think he’ll set out to invade Europe. She allowed that yes, the Holocaust is what tends to come to mind when people hear “HITLER!” and maybe she ought to have tempered herself and chosen a different warning cry. Her friend did chime in to predict that Trump will launch World War III, so that’s something, but still — not Hitler.

I worry about these histrionics on a number of levels. First, it’s not good for the mental health of people to believe that a Hitler-like figure has ascended to power. With good reason, that’s liable to give them major stress and anxiety. Such beliefs will also render Trump’s opposition crazed and ineffectual. They’re going to be fighting against a made-up enemy, rather than Trump. And lord knows Trump needs an effective opposition. Screaming about Hitler and Putin and everything else isn’t effective opposition — it’s just nonsense.

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