Truly there is no depths to how low Trump will go. Every time we think he can’t stoop lower; he proves us wrong. The saddest and most disturbing part of all of it is that his followers don’t seem to mind. In just the last few days, he has seemingly gone over the deep end. After months of screaming without any proof that mail-in voting would lead to voter fraud and that it will take months or years to get the results of the election if ballots are mailed in, the Postmaster General he appointed is purposely trying to slow down the mail and to top off the whole idiocy of his voter fraud claims, Trump stated in his usual incoherent speech that:

“Florida’s got a great Republican governor. And it had a great Republican governor. Two great governors. And over a long period of time they’ve been able to get the absentee ballots done extremely professionally. They’re so well run. Florida’s a very well-run state. Low taxes, low everything. They’ve done a great job. Really a great job.”

Trump not only votes in Florida now, but does so by absentee ballot. It’s hard to believe that even Trump could utter the phrase, “Florida’s a very well-run state.” DeSantis’s handling of the pandemic might just be worse than Trump’s. And let us not forget the fiasco of the 2000 presidential election, which Florida has done little to reform their failings from then. Then, the very same day he praised the incompetent State of Florida, he followed through on his threats to sue Nevada over its plan to conduct the November election almost entirely by mail-in ballot.

In this episode of “Axios on HBO,” President Trump discussed in a disastrous interview for his campaign his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the upcoming election and much more with National Political Correspondent Jonathan Swan. The interview was filmed on Tuesday, July 28 and aired Monday, August 3 on HBO. While the interview highlighted Trump’s incompetence in handling or even understanding the coronavirus pandemic, the full list of his false claims during the interview are staggering. Swan grilled Trump on his laughably inaccurate claim that the virus is “under control,” which he has been making for more than six months. In the interview, Trump said, “Right now, I think it’s under control. I’ll tell you what –“

Swan responded with, “How? 1,000 Americans are dying a day.”

Trump’s answer was that “They are dying. That’s true. And you have — it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.” And there you have it, Trump’s total lack of empathy for the American people and his inability to be any kind of effective leader. All he can say is, “It is what it is.” It was one of many eyebrow-raising statements made by the president in the sit-down chat. The Biden campaign released a 27-second advertisement showing Trump making the statement, then cuts to a montage of images of medical professionals in protective equipment and people mourning those killed by COVID-19. The Biden campaign and The Lincoln Project have produced some pretty efficient ads, and they don’t have to rely on lies and misinformation.

These instances just continue to show his incompetence, stupidity, and lack of ability to tell the truth or have any morals. But now Trump is really trying to reach bottom in a new campaign advertisement. Trump, the darling of evangelicals despite his decidedly ungodly behavior, has put out a new campaign ad that mocks former Vice President Joe Biden for praying. Biden is shown with his head down wearing a mask and clasping his hands. “Deep in the heart of Delaware Joe Biden sits in his basement, alone, hiding, diminished,” the ad begins. Five seconds into the ad, a photo of Biden sitting on the floor by himself is shown with the line, but the Iowa newspaper The Gazette has come forward to say that the photo was taken by their reporter and had been dramatically manipulated. In the original photo, Biden is surrounded by reporters and supporters in the home of Coralville, Iowa Mayor John Lundell. Approximately three dozen people were in the room, according to the newspaper. Biden had sat on the floor after giving up his seat so someone else could sit there.

The ad ends by saying that Biden “Has no answers” and “He never will.” The end of the ad shows the last statement superimposed over a picture of Biden praying inside the historic Black Bethel AME church in Delaware. The image is meant to make Biden look like a defeated old man, when he is simply a man who is praying. Biden’s Director of Rapid Response said in an emailed statement, “Donald Trump is the only president in our history to tear gas peaceful Americans and kick a priest out of their church so he could profane it for a photo op….Which makes it unsurprising – but no less sickening – that the Trump campaign just denigrated Joe Biden for praying.”

While prominent religious leaders and activists, including anti-LGBTQ hate group, have made excuses for Trump several times over, will they stomach Trump mocking a devout Catholic man for praying in a church? If any of you are familiar with most Protestant denominations, especially those in the South and whose members are the core of Trump’s devotees, you know that these bigots don’t consider Catholics Christians. I can’t count the number of times I have heard Protestants make the claim that Catholics are not Christian. Many of my students—middle school, high school, and college—were surprised to know that the Catholic Church was the main form of western Christianity until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. So, don’t expect there to be much outrage in the South over Trump ridiculing Biden for praying. They don’t believe his is a Christian, so how can he pray? What they fail to realize or even want to know is that Biden is a regular churchgoer, while Trump has rarely ever stepped into a church.

This is going to be a controversial topic, but it is one that I want to address for a very specific reason. In the US Capitol, the National Statuary Hall is a collection of 100 statues contributed by 50 states, two statues each. Last month the House of Representatives voted to banish from the Capitol statues of Confederate figures and leaders, part of a broader effort to remove historical symbols of racism and oppression from public spaces. Senate Republicans are refusing to address the issue because they claim that it is up to the states to choose who is represented in the National Statuary Hall. Some of the statues never belonged at the Capitol in the first place, such as Jefferson Davis (CSA Pres.; Mississippi), Alexander Stephens (CSA VP; Georgia) or Robert E Lee (CSA Gen.; Virginia). However, at least one of the statues that the House wants removed are of people who I think redeemed themselves after their service to the Confederacy. 

Joseph Wheeler (Alabama), who was a West Point graduate, resigned from the U.S. Army to serve as a general in the Confederate Army and was considered one of its top cavalry leaders. However, Wheeler later represented Alabama for eight terms as a Democrat in the House. While in Congress, Wheeler worked to heal the breach between the North and the South after the Civil War and championed economic policies that would help rebuild the Southern states. At the age of 61, he volunteered for the Spanish–American War, receiving an appointment to major general of volunteers from President William McKinley. During the war, he was in command of Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, and then served in the Philippine-American War, where he left the volunteer service and was commissioned a brigadier general in the regular army, reentering the organization he had resigned from over 39 years before. I will admit that the statue should be replaced, because it portrays Wheeler in his Confederate uniform, but I think it should be replaced with a new statue of Wheeler. 

Honestly, the rest can go. The only other one that comes close to being redeemable is that of US Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglass White. White enlisted in the Confederate Army and was captured by Union forces in 1865. After the Civil War, he served in the state Senate and U.S. Senate before President Grover Cleveland nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1894. He became chief justice in 1910 and served in that position until his death in 1921. However, White’s record on race during his time on the Supreme Court is mixed at best. He sided with the Supreme Court majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the legality of state segregation to provide “separate but equal” public facilities in the United States, despite protections of the Fourteenth Amendment to equal protection of the laws. In one of several challenges to Southern states’ grandfather clauses, used to disfranchise African-American voters at the turn of the century, he wrote for a unanimous court in Guinn v. United States, which struck down many Southern states’ grandfather clauses. 

Some statues of Confederates have already been removed. One of those is that of Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, who formerly was one of Alabama’s statues. His statue was removed in 2009 and replaced with one of Helen Keller. Curry was removed because he was deemed racist and a former Confederate. Here’s the issue though, Curry did serve in the Confederate Army, but after the war, he was president of Howard College, now Samford University in Birmingham. Also, after the war he studied for the ministry and became a preacher, but the focus of his work for the rest of his life was free education in the South. His pro-slavery speeches from before the Civil War and membership in the Confederate House of Representatives may demonstrate strong ties to the southern cause; however, his efforts to promote education for Blacks during the Reconstruction era up through the end of the 19th century are reflective of ideals that were not shared by many of his contemporaries. The statue was removed anyway, and maybe Helen Keller is a better representation for Alabama.

This brings me to the inspiration for this post. The North Carolina legislature has voted to replace a statue of former North Carolina Gov. Charles Brantley Aycock, who is perhaps best known today for his campaigns to advance white supremacy. I agree it should be replaced. The problem is who North Carolina wants to represent the state instead. North Carolina wants to replace Aycock with a statue of the evangelical preacher Billy Graham. Graham may have been the spiritual advisor to every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama before his death in 2018, but he wasn’t known for welcoming all people into Christianity. In 1973, he said that homosexuality is a “sinister form of perversion” in his advice column, responding to a girl who wrote in and said she was in love with another girl. “We traffic in homosexuality at the peril of spiritual welfare,” he wrote. “Your affection for another of your own sex is misdirected and will be judged by God’s holy standards.” He then claimed that the U.S. “applauded” homosexuality because “morals have so eroded” and advised the girl to be “converted” and that “such reformation is possible for you.”

In 1993, he said that AIDS was “God’s punishment” for homosexuality. “I could not say for sure, but I think so,” he said. Two weeks later he retracted the remark, saying, “I don’t believe that, and I don’t know why I said it,” but we all know why he said it. He believed it. Graham also opposed same-sex marriage, and in 2012 he took out full-page ads in favor of North Carolina Amendment 1 which banned it in North Carolina. Graham’s stated position was that he did not want to talk about homosexuality as a political issue. Corky Siemaszko, writing for NBC News, noted that after the 1993 incident, Graham “largely steered clear of the subject.” Graham may have kept mostly silent publicly after the 1993 incident, but it’s obvious he must not have privately. His son, who is now CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and of Samaritan’s Purse, is one of the most virulent homophobic men in America. He is also a major Trump supporter. One example of his vitriol towards gay people came when he attacked former presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg. Graham attacked Buttigieg for his homosexuality and marriage to another gay man in April 2019, tweeting “Mayor Buttigieg says he’s a gay Christian. As a Christian I believe the Bible which defines homosexuality as sin, something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized. The Bible says marriage is between a man & a woman—not two men, not two women.”  Franklin has kept his father’s website which still says that sex is sin unless it’s “within a marriage between a man and a woman” and that the Bible “speaks only negatively of homosexual behavior whenever it is mentioned.”

So, here is my question: Why is it acceptable to place a statue of an extremely influential homophobe in the National Statuary Hall in this day and age?

The answer is simple. What it boils down to is this: within American politics, it is still acceptable by many to be homophobic, but from many of the same people it is not acceptable to be a racist. What is the difference? The difference is that with all the gains the LGBTQ+ community have made, we are still second-class citizens and the religious right wants to keep it that way. For many out there, LGBTQ+ lives do not matter. It is inherently wrong to be either racist or homophobic. Americans must realize that.

When I was doing research for my PhD, I spent four weeks in Italy. It was truly a wonderful experience. I found Italians to be some of the kindest, friendliest, and most welcoming people I have ever met. However, one incident will always stick out in my mind. I was going somewhere in Rome, and I had taken the Rome Metro, which back then was only an X across the city (they were just beginning work on the C Line when I was there). I don’t remember where I was going that particular day, mainly because of what I ran into when I emerged from the Metro. The street was full of people marching and dressed in black. Angry shouts were coming from the sidewalks from people not dressed in black. One of those dressed in black walked up to me and put a leaflet in my hand. That’s when I realized I’d emerged someplace that I did not want to be. The leaflet was for one of Italy’s neo-facist organizations. I am not fluent in any language but English, but because I studied Spanish throughout my years in school and dabbled a little in French and Italian, I do have a familiarity with most Romance languages, and while I can’t speak any of them well, I can read enough to understand what I’m reading.

When I see the hate groups today marching in the streets of the United States and bolstered by our president, I do see similarities between that Italian neo-fascist parade and what we see today in the United States. The biggest difference is that the Italians were mostly peaceful, the American versions are not. The American hate groups are armed and threatening. While the neo-fascists in Italy had very little representation in the government, we not only have a president that supports them but a political party that is silent about them. The same political party also defends their rights to carry weapons in the streets and terrorize other American citizens. These same political leaders send in secret law enforcement officers to attack peaceful protestors who are trying to change problems with police brutality against minorities but do nothing when the protestors are supporting the current administration, violence and hate. Watch Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) question Attorney General Bill Barr about federal officers who descended on protesters near the White House ahead of a photo-op for President Donald Trump yet ignored protestors who threatened to kill the Michigan governor. 

In a Washington Post op-ed published on his retirement, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was a key witness in President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry, wrote, “Our national government during the past few years has been more reminiscent of the authoritarian regime my family fled more than 40 years ago than the country I have devoted my life to serving.” So, is Trump just an authoritarian wannabe or is he in fact a fascist? We like to use the word fascist for all kinds of authoritarian regimes, but what does it really mean to be a fascist? Scholars generally agree that there are 14 characteristics of fascism:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism 
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights 
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause 
4. Supremacy of the Military 
5. Rampant Sexism 
6. Controlled Mass Media 
7. Obsession with National Security 
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined 
9. Corporate Power is Protected 
10. Labor Power is Suppressed 
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts 
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment 
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption 
14. Fraudulent Elections 

Does Trump fit the characterizations of a fascist? Some but technically not all. He is not a mass murderer like Hitler, but he is a bully like the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and shares some similarities to the fascist corporatism of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. (1) Trump claims a powerful and continuing nationalism but his seeming loyalty to Vladimir Putin says otherwise. (2) He definitely has a disdain for the recognition of human rights: immigrant children in cages, transphobic and racist rhetoric, etc. (3) Without a doubt, Trump identifies his enemies and those he uses as scapegoats as a way to unify his base. Trump ALWAYS has someone else to blame for everything. (4) Trump claims to fully support the military but his actions when dealing with soldiers such a Vindman who have showed criticism of his policies or Capt. Brett Crozier, who was relieved of his command because he sounded the alarm about an outbreak of COVID-19 aboard his ship, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, while the government denied the pandemic was a problem. The military knows that it cannot trust Trump, a man who knew that Putin had paid bounties for the death of American soldiers yet did nothing and says he did not know about the bounties, contrary to what those closest to him have reported. (6) The next characteristic is rampant sexism. Do I even need to elaborate on that one? 

(7) While Trump does not control the mass media, except he has the support of most of Fox News and the One America News Network, he really wishes he could control the media, but that pesky First Amendment stands in his way. (8) Only when he wants to deflect from another disaster he has caused, does Trump seem to become obsessed with National Security. He seemingly worries about China but not the more dangerous Russia or North Korea. (9) Trump has pandered to and protected corporate power, especially when it pertains to his own business interests. The Republican Party elite is made up of an industrial and business aristocracy, who put Trump into power and created a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and an even more powerful elite. (10) Trump has been no friend to organized labor or the average American worker, especially evident during the pandemic when the country has reached record highs in unemployment and his administration is trying to cut needed relief packages for unemployed workers. 

(11) Trump has always shown his disdain for intellectuals, while claiming to be a genius and the smartest person in the room, yet he had to cheat to even get into college. He has consistently dismissed scientist over climate issues and dismisses legitimate scientific and medical experts when dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. Yes, he did support Dr. Stella Immanuel, a doctor and pastor who claims include blaming medical conditions on witches and demons who have “astral” sex with humans, alleging that alien DNA was being used in medical treatments, and that scientists were cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. The preeminent infectious disease expert in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, stated that most European countries shut down their economy by 95%, while functionally the U.S. only shut its economy down by 50% and that this is part of the reason the U.S. has continued to see a surge in cases while European countries have seen a sharp decrease. Trump responded in a tweet, “Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country, 60,000,000. If we tested less, there would be less cases.” Last week, Trump retweeted a message that said Fauci had “misled” Americans on a number of issues. Fauci disputed that claim: “I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances.” Earlier, Trump had characterized Fauci as “a little bit of an alarmist.” Fauci also pushed back on that assertion, saying he considered himself “more a realist than an alarmist.”

(12) With Trump’s current campaign message as being the ‘law and order” candidate and his violent suppression of protesters, he is certainly showing an obsession with crime and punishment, except when it comes to his friends. He cares nothing about following the rule of law himself, yet he had crowds chanting “lock her up” referring to Hillary Clinton during his 2016 campaign and even continued encouraging the chant during his time in office. (13) The Trump administration has been one of the worst administrations in American history for rampant cronyism and corruption. Usually the top of the list of corrupt administrations are those of Grant, Harding, and Nixon (though Reagan’s administration should also rank near the top), but Trump seems bound and determined to outdo them all. A staggering number of people in the Trump administration and his associates have been convicted of crimes and sentenced to jail. A few of these criminals, Trump has distanced himself from but others such as Roger Stone, he pardoned or continues to support. (14) We also know that Trump encouraged the Russians and even the Chinese to interfere with the 2016 election and then did everything he could do to block the investigation into how much election tampering Russia accomplished. Now he is claiming that the coming 2020 election will be fraudulent so he can question the legitimacy of the election, even going to so far as to call for moving the date of the election. All of his election tactics in 2016 and 2020 has been meant to call into suspicion any election that he might not win.

In 1933, Salazar stated: “Our Dictatorship clearly resembles a fascist dictatorship in the reinforcement of authority, in the war declared against certain principles of democracy, in its accentuated nationalist character, in its preoccupation of social order. However, it differs from it in its process of renovation. The fascist dictatorship tends towards a pagan Caesarism, towards a state that knows no limits of a legal or moral order, which marches towards its goal without meeting complications or obstacles. The Portuguese New State, on the contrary, cannot avoid, not think of avoiding, certain limits of a moral order which it may consider indispensable to maintain in its favor of its reforming action.” Trump will never be as blatant as Salazar had been about his authoritarian regime because at the end of the day, he does have to answer to the US Constitution and the American people. He may not like it, and he may threaten to circumvent the Constitution and the will of the majority of Americans. He doesn’t understand the rule of law or care anything about knowing the rule of law, but at the end of the day, we have a Supreme Court that has stood up to him (though not always), and we have a House of Representatives that will hold him in check as much as they can. We also have an election coming up that he cannot stop or postpone. We have some governors and mayors who are fighting tooth and nail against his oppression in their states and cities and his ineptitude in dealing with the current pandemic.

So, while like Salazar, he is not a fully-fledged fascist because American laws prevent him from going too far, Trump is without a doubt a wannabe authoritarian. He may have the religious right backing him simply because he’s a Republican and against abortion (he cannot claim to be pro-life due to his lack of sympathy for the death of over 150,000 Americans due to his own ineptitude). He may even have fringe militia groups and hate groups ready to fight for his political survival. What he does not have is the heart and minds of American troops or a positive approval from the majority of Americans. He will never be able to force the United States to reject the election results if he loses. When November 3, 2020 comes and the American people vote him out of office, his term will end at noon on January 20, 2021. For all the Americans who read this blog, it is imperative, it is your duty, and it is your ability to vote Trump out of office that will save the United States. Because if we do not defeat him in November, I fear there will not be a United States to see him reach the limit to his terms of office in 2025. If we want our republic to survive, we must vote for Joe Biden as president on November 3. We need stability and progress in the United States, and we need someone who will respect the laws of this country. So, while you’re at it, vote against every Republican on the ballot and let’s make this a Blue Wave in November.