For the past few months, I’ve watched Donald Trump and his Project 2025ers inflict their own form of fascism on my part of Pennsylvania. (Strangely enough, they take offense when anyone calls their regime fascist, but it recently classified “Anti-Fascists,” a term that probably describes most people, as “violent left-wing extremists,” one of “three major types of terrorist groups” it aims to “identify” and “cripple.”)
And to keep the U.S. safe from immigrants – many of them day workers and small business people who came to this country for what they thought would be a better life – the Department of Homeland “Security” plans to convert warehouses in Schuylkill and Berks counties into ICE concentration camps. It’s also dangling money at cash-strapped towns to persuade them to let their police officers help its agents meet its quotas for filling those hellholes.
Fortunately, Gov. Josh Shapiro is trying to stop the concentration camps, but 10 Schuylkill County municipalities, including my hometown of Pottsville, have signed onto the 287(g) agreements with ICE.
At a packed meeting on Monday, Pottsville City Council’s GOP majority approved the deal even though nearly everyone who spoke during the public comment period opposed it for moral and practical reasons.
The prospect of masked Gestapo-like agents sweeping people off the street like garbage and tossing them into concentration camps without due process reminded me of the fate of millions of Jews and other people the Nazis deemed undesirable in the 1930s and ’40s.
DHS isn’t executing immigrants, but it’s causing them untold misery in hopes of discouraging people from coming to our country and, I suspect, scaring the regime’s opponents into silence.
Some people, including JD Vance before he went full-on MAGA, have compared Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler.
Trump and his Project 2025ers certainly seem to be modeling themselves on the Nazis, who came to power by making vague but broadly appealing promises and convincing voters that only they could fulfill them. Then they suppressed dissent, censored the media, forced men and women into “traditional” roles, scapegoated certain ethnic groups and LGBTQ+ people, invaded other countries and imposed totalitarian rule.
But there are also important differences between the Third Reich and Trump 2.0.
Hitler inherited an economy devastated by the Great Depression, but his regime engineered a recovery by creating public works programs and building up the armed forces. Unemployment fell, albeit in part by drafting men into the military and forcing women out of the labor market. Still, life improved for Germans who escaped persecution and toed the line.
Throughout the Biden administration, the U.S. wasn’t at war. The inflation that had spiked here, as it did globally in the aftermath of Covid, had calmed down when The Economist proclaimed our economy “the envy of the world” a few weeks before Trump won reelection on promises of a “golden age.”
He said it would start on Inauguration Day. It did — for him, his family and various friendly oligarchs – while the only gold most Americans are seeing is in videos touting his White House décor.
By any other measure, Trump’s second term looks grim. He’s raided clown cars to fill his Cabinet, imposed senseless tariffs and started a senseless war that’s disrupting global trade. Prices for everyday items are higher. His One Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires has put health care out of reach for millions of people, and health czar RFK Jr.’s anti-science policies are paving the way for outbreaks of more diseases.
The immigrant workforce that The Economist writers called “an economic tailwind” in October 2024 has been decimated. Tourism from abroad is down, and our international standing has fallen as Trump and his aggressive consiglieres offend our allies and get played by our frenemies.
Recent polls show Trump’s disapproval rating in the mid-50s to low 60s percentage range, which is still much lower than it should be, given the harm he’s done and intends to do.
If his regime remains on its collision course without completely ruining our country, enough voters just might counteract his multipronged election-rigging scheme and 86 his congressional allies in the November election.That’s a lot of ifs, but one thing is clear: If the American people let him win, it won’t matter what we think of his regime’s rampant waste, fraud and abuse. And instead of handfuls of gold, all we’ll get is a gut punch from an iron fist.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
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