Reprinted from hartmannreport.com
The crisis for any Republican who wants to run against Trump is that they'll have to run to the right of fascism. But what occupies that space? Pure, raw, genocidal dictatorship that ends America...
Ron DeSantis has a problem. No matter how hard he tries to kill off The [Black] Little Mermaid by taking down the company that brought her to life, it's not going to help him beat Donald Trump in the GOP primary.
Nobody in the Republican Party, in fact, can successfully "run to the right of Trump" because Trump is running as an open fascist. And the only thing to the right of an open fascist is a total dictator who has utterly shattered even the façade of fascist democracy (remember that Putin and Hitler were both "elected" repeatedly).
Donald Trump is running to be something between Viktor Orba'n and Vladimir Putin -- what Orba'n calls "illiberal democracy" and I'm calling "fascism" -- and the only way to successfully beat him, to "run to the right of him," would be to run as an absolute autocrat like Saudi Arabia's MBS or China's Xi.
Which, apparently, is of interest to a large portion of the GOP base, particularly Qanon followers and, more significantly, rightwing billionaires who -- like German steel industrialist Fritz Thyssen (who wrote the book I Paid Hitler) -- believe themselves to be immune from the GOP turning on them once a Republican strongman leader takes over.
This is why DeSantis has been so aggressive about destroying the voting and educational rights of minority groups in Florida while ruining the careers of government employees who've dared speak up against him.
It's why he's relentless -- to the point of destroying tens of thousands of Florida jobs -- in his war against Disney.
It's why he's launched a jerimiad against queer people and given every hater and bigot in the state the ability to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.
Proving he can get away with such authoritarian behavior with impunity shows, he appears to believe, that he's even more capable of being an authoritarian tyrant than Trump.
Because that's what DeSantis and Trump are actually running for right now: both want to be America's first fully fascist autocrat, an Americanized version of Mussolini or Putin.
DeSantis is doing his very best to prove he can defy the will of the people, as he just proved with his six-week abortion ban in Florida, and do it enthusiastically, because he's running for the job of strongman despot rather than president. Democracy be damned.
It's also why both he and Trump are behaving like they can say or do anything to get into the White House -- because neither thinks, once he's sworn in, that he'll ever have to run for election again.
Like Putin in Russia, Erdo?an in Turkey, or Orba'n in Hungary -- with DeSantis' early successes in Florida shutting down polling places, purging voter rolls, and arresting Black people who've voted; and with Trump's embrace of open Nazis while marshaling an army of armed "election monitors" -- both plan to rig our national electoral system so heavily that no future Republican will ever lose.
Just like the playbook used by Mussolini, Hitler, and Pinochet.
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