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THE LEADER NEVER APOLOGIZES, EVEN TO GOD  
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Carl Davidson
November 17, 2024
LeftLinks Newsletter [[link removed]]

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_ Donald Trump, our President-elect, is the head teacher of the
Führerprinzip, the ‘Leader Principle.’ We only get to have one of
them, nor do we need any more. ‘The Leader’ is all-knowing and
infallible. _

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_Führerprinzip_ is an odd and relatively unknown word to most
Americans. Perhaps a few have heard of it in passing as devotees of
old anti-Nazi popular front movies and newsreels of the 1940s. A
smaller number would be those in the academy who specialize in German
or Italian history. They undoubtedly know exactly what it means.

But this week a good majority of Americans are getting a crash course
on the Führerprinzip in real time and in real life. A smaller but
still large number might miss out. Why? Because they are deeply
trapped in those media siloes where any mention of such things is
_verboten_, that is, forbidden, as in prohibited by law or worse.

Donald Trump, our President-elect, is the head teacher of the
Führerprinzip, the ‘Leader Principle.’ The first thing we need to
know is that _the term is always singular._ We only get to have one of
them, nor do we need any more. ‘The Leader’ is all-knowing and
infallible. He doesn’t make mistakes, and never apologizes, even to
God.

This puts Trump even a notch above the Pope. Our Francis, for example,
is only infallible when he speaks ‘ex Cathedra,’ or ‘from the
Throne in the Cathedral.’ Francis has never done so, so far anyway.
And he frequently asks God’s forgiveness, and forgiveness from the
rest of us, too. The last Pope who spoke infallibly was Pius XII 1950,
declaring the Bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven. It's a rather
weird concept, but for Catholics, it's dogma, and has its own Holy
Day.

But Trump is now making new dogmas for us. We get to watch 'Donald the
Infallible' at work every day. Do we think it weird to name an accused
molester of 17-year-old females as Attorney General? If so, think
deeper. The Führerprinzip allows for Unterführers, or subordinate
underlings. If they do their job correctly, the glory reflects upward.
If not, their inglorious trouble is their own.

So Florida's Congressman Matt Gaetz as AG makes perfect sense as
Trump's underling. How so? His job is twofold. First, get rid of the
Department of Justice. All of it, save for the FBI. Then remake the
FBI as an organization of Unterführers, who pledge fealty only to the
Führer. Forget the Constitution. Thus Gaetz as the Creep-in-Charge is
not weird at all.

Naming _Fox News_ commentator Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense was
another stroke of Führerprinzip genius. Never mind he has zero
experience with a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy and that he’s
only 44 years old. What counts is that he started off his military
career in Guantanamo cracking down on imprisoned but unindicted
Muslims. Later he was a platoon leader in Iraq for a spell, then
hopped to Kabul to teach ‘counter-insurgency,’ to ill effect,
judging by the results. But what really attracted Trump was his
post-military career boosting far-right veteran’s groups and causes.
This included advocacy of a ‘frontal assault' against 'the top
brass’ and urging pardons for those imprisoned for engaging in the
Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. Far from lacking judgment, our
Führer can spot exactly what he needs in his Unterführers.

By now the ‘Leader Principle’ should be much clearer. Tulsi
Gabbard as National Intelligence Director? She’s mastered the
ability to be a chameleon with as many disguises as needed. She
started as a Bernie fan and peace candidate, fooling even us for a
while. Then she becomes a friend of Syria’s Assad, then a defender
of Putin at times, then of India’s strongman Narenda Modi, as she
finally flips to the GOP and Trump. A top spook must be an expert at
disguise and misdirection.

How about Robert Kennedy, Jr. as head of Health and Human Services?
Again, it makes perfect sense if your goal is to take the agency down,
and wreck Medicare and Medicaid in the process. Start with an
anti-vaxxer in charge, one who thinks all the top health and medical
scientists are just robbing you of your tax dollars anyway. There's
always a method to the Great Leader's madness.

And former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee as Ambassador to Israel?
Another astute pick. He’s known for claiming ‘there’s no such
thing as a Palestinian.’ This fits perfectly with the Likud's
‘from the Sea to the River’ effort to ‘transfer out’ all those
suffering under the delusion that they are Palestinians who have lived
there for centuries. (Those who thought of Biden-Harris as the
pinnacle of evil on Gaza might take a note here, not that the Dem
policy was acceptable). Huckabee is even deeper and better than Team
Blinken. Why? Huckabee also holds the Christian Zionist belief that
Israel's all-sided war is the start of Armageddon, ‘The Rapture’
and 'the Second Coming.' Not too soon, though. We wouldn’t want
Jesus’s rule to begin when Trump might have to submit to His
Theocracy.

How about 'checks and balances'? Some might argue that even GOP
Senators might object to having their powers curbed. Not if they know
what’s good for them. The Führerprinzip is not only about the Great
Leader. It’s a political philosophy rooted in the idea that all
government and all institutions of civil society are best maintained
as hierarchies within hierarchies. This matches what Trump promised to
all those voting for him because of ‘the economy’: They get a spot
on a rung of a ladder in an economic hierarchy where they would always
have ‘the other’ to look down upon, even if their own economic lot
isn’t much better.

Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt defended the purges and crimes of the Reich
in 'the night of the long knives' and _Kristallnacht_, the 'night of
broken glass.’ He exempted the party members from any guilt,
individually and collectively, because the Führerprinzip stipulated
that the Führer’s will superseded any contradictory law. Now recall
Trump asserting all he had to do was declare ‘the border is
closed’ and it was so, no legislation required.

Italy's Benito Mussolini also fancied himself as a fascist theorist,
borrowing from Nietzsche’s ‘Ubermensch’ (Superman) for his ‘Il
Duce.’ The rationalism of science was to be confined within a larger
irrationalism of a mystical nation-state and a sole leader that made
reason itself subordinate: “The Fascist conception of the State is
all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist,
much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and
the Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all
values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a
people. (Benito Mussolini on _The Doctrine of Fascism_, 1935.)”

In the months ahead, we will encounter a tendency in some quarters to
limit all-round resistance to the Trump regime. We will hear arguments
for letting some measures pass, or even be helped along, so we might
defeat a few others. We might hear that arresting and expelling
criminal ‘illegals’ without due process can be overlooked so we
might protect those appearing as more harmless 'good immigrants.'
Don’t fall for it. Once it starts, there is no end to the division
of people into ‘dangerous’ and ‘less harmful,’ or ‘real
Americans’ from ‘the Other.’ When we get to the root, we will
find that all or nearly all of us are ‘The Other.’ We will do
better to weed our gardens of fascists persistently and constantly,
whenever and wherever we can. Do it wisely, but do it.

_Carl’s LeftLinks Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To
receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or
paid subscriber [[link removed]]._

* Donald Trump
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* Fascism
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* Anti-Fascism
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