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Stephen Gottlieb: Trump’s Dangerous Motives

I spoke last week about the importance of the whistle-blower’s complaint. It’s also the tip of the iceberg. Burt Neuborne was ACLU legal director and a founder of NYU’s Brennan Center.  I’ve known Burt for decades. His publisher accurately describes him as a leading constitutional lawyer who’s sued every president since LBJ.

His new book raises very serious concerns about Trump’s dictatorial intentions. As Burt notes, we’ve known since 1990 that Donald Trump kept a copy of Hitler’s collected speeches by his bed and studied them carefully.

For those born later, Adolf Hitler initiated World War II and the extermination camps that were responsible for the deaths of seventy to eighty-five million people, from all continents. More than a million American soldiers were killed or wounded. That’s Trump’s idol.

Burt goes further, comparing the themes that both Hitler and Trump emphasized. Whatever else he hasn’t figured out, or doesn’t care about, Trump has been a good student of Hitler’s.

There isn’t time to lay them all out. Like Trump, Hitler fired his supporters up with racial and religious hatred, extreme nationalism, closing borders, mass detention and deportation. Almost every word from Trump is about hostility based on race, religion, national origin, closing the southern border and extreme nationalism, stirring a recipe for violence.

Hitler and Trump insulated themselves from criticism by denying the press any credibility and found ways to reach the public without going through the media. Reporters spend their days interviewing people, checking documents, records and participants in the news. Trump simply calls everything fake, and attacks the media in its entirety, though he’s obviously the biggest liar among us. Everything he says is reduced to single adjectives – fake, terrific, good, bad, etc. – without evidence or explanation while denying the obvious. Unhinging his audience from the work of everyone else means he can speak without fear that contrary argument will reach his audience’s ears, until truth becomes meaningless.

Both Hitler and Trump cemented their rule by enriching the wealthiest, giving them outrageous gains, tax cuts, and exemptions from rules meant to protect the public from death, destruction and deceit.

Both thumbed their noses at democratic, judicial and legislative processes and powers. In other words Trump cares only about himself and his ability to become a dictator in the style of his idols. Encouraging people to use what he labels their “Second Amendment rights” in politics is what Hitler did with his Brown Shirts, substituting the nozzle of their guns for ballots and elections. That’s the path to hell but it is a path, with the trappings of dictatorship, that looks good to Trump.

I’ve hesitated to call for impeachment because my priority is to oust Trump from office, however possible, before he can get further with his obvious desire for unchecked power.

That said, Trump’s refusal to obey constitutional limitations on using his office for personal gain, and to abide by statutes and congressional subpoenas, are clear indications of his thirst for power and disrespect of the work of the American Founders, the Constitution, its meaning, original or otherwise, and the system of checks and balances set up to control people like Trump. The emoluments clause was intended to limit opportunities for presidential disloyalty to America. But rather than make America great again Trump is intent on destroying America for personal gain, the ultimate form of disloyalty.

He must be removed from office.

Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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