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    • Mike Braun and Jim Banks promote Trump’s fascism
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    Mike Braun and Jim Banks promote Trump’s fascism

    Pabio Posted on

    Richard Gawthrop
    | Opinion contributor

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    In early 2021, Senator Mike Braun joined 10 other Republican senators in declaring his intention to reject the results of the presidential election, citing unfounded claims of voter fraud. In doing so, Braun made clear his support for then-President Trump’s claim that he won a “rigged” election that was unfairly taken away from him.

    After the riot at the Capitol on January 6, Braun withdrew his objection to the election results. But Rep. Jim Banks, a candidate for Braun’s Senate seat, nonetheless voted in the House with other MAGA Republicans to block the peaceful transition of presidential power to Joe Biden.

    Briggs: In the hunt for Republican electoral fraud, whoever smelled it distributed it

    The challenge to Trump in the 2020 election did not end with Biden’s inauguration, of course. Even though Trump never produced credible evidence of fraud and lost every legal battle to overturn the election, even before the judges he appointed, he continued to push his “big lie” that the election had been “stolen”. Allegiance to the “big lie” has become the litmus test of loyalty to Trump among Republicans. Even those who know Biden won must publicly refuse to contradict that idea.

    Trump’s relentless promotion of this lie about the 2020 election may have numbed many of us to the radical implications of the “big lie.” To this day, Trump and his die-hard supporters maintain the fiction that Trump is our president. In their alternative vision of political reality, they thus reject the very legitimacy of the Biden administration.

    This position, in turn, constitutes the ideological basis not only of Trump’s campaign to regain the presidency, but also of a campaign of “retaliation” against those who perpetrated and continue to defend the “Great Robbery.”

    According to Trump’s campaign statements, one of his first actions if elected would be to arrest and prosecute his political opponents. This “purge” would also be followed by a radical transformation of the federal government and American society. As Project 2025 explains, this revolutionary change would replace our democratic government with an authoritarian, theocratic system.

    In recent weeks, Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly, who served under Trump during his presidency, have called Trump a Hitler-like “fascist,” an accusation now echoed by the Harris campaign and discussed to some extent by the mainstream media . . However, given the centrality of the “big lie” to Trump’s current campaign, the question arises whether, historically, it played a comparable role in Hitler’s successful attempt to overthrow German democracy in the 1990s. 1920s and early 1930s.

    The answer is that it was Hitler who coined the term “big lie” in “Mein Kampf.” In this work, he further emphasized that for propaganda based on a “big lie” to be effective, it must be repeated constantly. He also noted that it is the absurd nature of such a lie that makes it credible in the eyes of the “masses”, who, once they have internalized it, will adhere to it tenaciously.

    The “Big Lie” that Hitler used to seize power in 1933 concerned the reason for the collapse of the German war effort in the fall of 1918, which led to Germany’s defeat in World War I. worldwide. In 1919, conservative elites started this lie by proclaiming the (false) theory that what ended the war was not the defeat of the German army on the battlefield, but the fact that army was “betrayed” by pro-democracy politicians, who “stabbed the army in the back”.

    Over the next few years, Hitler made this lie his own, adapting it to his ideological position by blaming the betrayal on the Jews and the Marxist left. Ultimately, he convinced enough Germans of his truth that he became the Führer of the German nation, with all its disastrous consequences.

    The parallel is clear: by delegitimizing our democratic institutions through the “big lie” to rally support for his campaign, Trump is following the extremist example of Hitler. The German tragedy should be a lesson for all of us.

    Richard Gawthrop is Professor Emeritus at Franklin College, where he was the Hon. Roger D. Branigin Chair of History and taught for 26 years. Specialist in modern German history, he is the author of “Pietism and the creation of Prussia in the 18th century”, a book published by Cambridge University Press.

    Pabio
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