Trump’s Fascism Is The Haunted House Certain People Want To Ignore
‘That’s peculiar.’
Someone on social media this week shared an article from January 2025 reminding us that Jon Stewart had warned Democrats against calling everything Trump does fascist.
The Daily Show host lamented, “This is the cycle we find ourselves in. First law of Trumpodynamics: Every action is met with a very not equal overreaction.”
As I wrote at the time, it’s impossible to overreact to Trump. It’s like saying you could over-applaud after a Megan Hilty performance. When America’s obituary is finally written, the headline will read, “We Should’ve Overreacted.” (Then I shared a clip of Megan Hilty performing a number from Death Becomes Her, and I’ll do so again because she just left the show and I’m still coping.)
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pointed out this week that the “resistance libs were right.” Trump is clicking off every checkmark for fascism, from masked brownshirts terrorizing citizens to threats of imperial expansion directed toward our own allies.
Of course, by April 2025, Stewart admitted on The Daily Show, “I gotta tell you. I did not think [Trump] would get this authoritarian this fast. I really didn’t … Who could’ve known? Maybe if somebody out there had yelled at me on Bluesky about this, I would have known.”
This was less a mea culpa than a petty jab at those much-maligned “resistance libs.” They raised alarms but were dismissed as “hysterical.” The Trump horror show has played out like an old horror film where the Black housekeeper warns that the house is cursed and haunted, but no one listens. She’s just from one of those countries where everyone’s overly superstitious and carry around talismans made from chicken feet. At some point, she’s told, “This is Whatever the Current Year Is! Stop scaring the kids.” I never liked when she’s the first to die because no one listened to her. I prefer when she’s fired or just quits. I imagine her later reading a newspaper with the headline, “Demonic Forces Slaughter Suburban Family. Black Housekeeper Vindicated.”
Black people were famously the first ones who recognized that Donald Trump could win the presidency. I will never forget when New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos laughed in Keith Ellison’s face because he dared consider Trump a serious political threat. It was so disrespectful they might as well have demanded that he turn in his chicken foot talisman. (Watch below.)
In those old horror films, the suburban moms eventually start to pick up on peculiar events — blood pouring out of faucets, trees trying to eat the kids, demonic voices screaming “Don’t vote for Jill Stein!”
Hillary Clinton warned at a campaign event in Reno: “From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia. He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties. His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous.”
Yet, the mainstream media and liberal pundits frequently argued that Clinton was scarier than the red-eyed demon pig. In April 2016, Maureen Dowd at the New York Times wrote the infamous op-ed, “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk.”
In his new book, “Alter Egos,” Times White House correspondent Mark Landler makes the case that the former Goldwater Girl, the daughter of a Navy petty officer and a staunch Republican, has long had hawkish tendencies, reflected in her support for military action in Iraq and Libya and a no-fly zone in Syria.
“It’s bred in the bone,” Landler told me.
[...]
You can actually envision a foreign policy debate between Trump and Clinton that sounds oddly like the one Obama and Clinton had in 2008, with Trump playing Obama, preening about his good judgment on Iraq, wanting an end to nation-building and thinking he could have a reset with Russia.
Sure, Hillary Clinton favored military intervention, but even if you disagreed, her foreign policy positions were actually sane and rational. Donald Trump was clearly an unhinged lunatic who had already proposed bombing nations that looked at him funny and committing war crimes like targeting our enemies’ family members. Maybe Maureen Dowd was possessed.
The other day, a friend shared this absurd exchange between Ryan Lizza, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, and Brian Beutler. Lizza — known for his excellent judgement — posted on March 3, 2016, “At the rate he’s going by the general election, Trump is going to be the left of Hillary on a bunch of issues.” Hayes agreed, “Absolutely. Without question,” and Beutler added, “Already seems to be on some.”
Christine Pelosi responded to a screenshot of this thread in February 2022, shortly before the Dobbs decision, “The Democratic Party leaders warned that Trump would trample women’s rights and Roe. You and your pals Chris and Ryan weren’t just 3 rando Hillary bashing dudes on twitter — you were 3 men with national platforms to spread these views. WE TOLD YOU SO.”
It’s not as if Pelosi did the “I Told You So” dance, but Beutler was still pissed. He responded, “For years, a group of sycophants has passed around this out-of-context screengrab of a correct observation [Lizza, Hayes] and I made RE Trump lying his way to Clinton’s left on some issues. Was happy to ignore them, but now the speaker’s daughter is getting in on it.”
Nowhere in that thread is it clear that they think Trump is lying. The media made the same error when covering Trump’s repeated campaign lies in 2024. They were treated like serious, policy proposals rather than shameless, obscene lies. Beutler didn’t explain how the screenshot is “out of context.” Pelosi specifically talked about Trump’s assault on reproductive freedom. He was never to the left of Hillary on abortion, and he was openly to the right of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and George W. Bush on every major issue impacting women, minorities, and anyone with a passing interest in liberal democracy. The same month Lizza, Hayes, and Beutler made their remarks, Trump told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, “There has to be some form of punishment for the woman [who has an abortion.] Yeah, there has to be some form.”
Lizza, Hayes, and Beutler were like the suburban dads in the obviously haunted house who’ve spent the entire movie ignoring the “superstitious” minorities and the “hysterical” women. It didn’t matter that every way Trump appeared to the left of Clinton was rooted in xenophobic white nationalism. They gullibly accepted Trump’s faux populism like a personal item from the dead.
Beutler had also argued in March 2016 that “Trump’s nomination will have real, lasting upsides — well-intentioned but misguided liberals shouldn’t try to stop it.” Trump had just won commanding victories on Super Tuesday — a true “blood cascading from the Overlook Hotel’s elevator” moment — yet Beutler wrote:
The downside risks of a Trump nomination are undeniable. But they are far smaller than the salubrious effect his primary victory would have on the country if it forced upon Republicans the kind of reckoning the 2008 and 2012 elections didn’t. If the politics of resentment were no longer readily available to them—lost to disgruntled Trump voters, or rendered toxic by the fact that they gave rise to Trump in the first place—Republicans might no longer interpret governing with Democrats as surrender.
He could not have been more wrong than if he’d argued it might improve your marriage if your daughter gets trapped inside a haunted television.
These people still have jobs that pay them (well) to provide opinions. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but in my more generous moments, I tend to agree with Kevin Smith, who’s said that we can spend too much time thinking about the past, which we can’t change, or the future, which hasn’t happened yet.
Of course, people should actually learn from the past and avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. That is the challenge with our sad-ass present. No one has learned anything. For instance, back in June 2018, Amy Siskind posted on social media, “Border Patrol has set up check points on Rt. 1-95 in New Hampshire and Maine, and are asking people, ‘What country are you a citizen of?"‘ We are a few steps from The Handmaids Tale.”
Former CNN correspondent Brian Stelter responded with all the certainty of the suburban dad whose choices will doom his family: “We are not 'a few steps from The Handmaid's Tale.' I don't think this kind of fear-mongering helps anybody.”
Siskind, of course, was correct. She even wrote, “When Dems take control of the House and hopefully Senate, one of the first things we need Congress to push for is the dismantling of ICE — being used now as Trump’s Gestapo.” They really should have listened to her.
Stelter would later delete his condescending post in September 2021, just hours after Texas passed a draconian abortion ban. That’s not learning from the past. That’s erasing it. I’m not asking that Stelter wear a scarlet “A” (for either abortion or a suitably descriptive epithet), but he should consider why he was so quick to dismiss the fears of people who — unlike him — would suffer the most in any Handmaid’s Tale reality.
I’ve watched enough horror movies to know we should listen to the minorities and women first. By the time the Jon Stewart dads come around, the haunted house has already been sucked into another dimension and everyone’s dead.
amen, Stephen. sucks being a Cassandra, you know the truth and nobody believes you.
The pricktator gets the benefit of legitimacy because of willfully credulous pundits afraid to anger their millionaire and billionaire owners. The millionaire and billionaire owners would really love those Republican tax cuts and regulatory capture. And of course, the pricktator's maladministration gives them plenty of Chaos Click$.
As this one asshole from CBS said (was it Moonves?), "[Pricktator] is bad for America, but great for CBS!"