WASHINGTON—With the November election now two weeks away, Republican nominee and convicted felon Donald Trump is turning up his outrageous, fascistic rhetoric and his threats against “political enemies,” as are his acolytes and allies. And much of the corporate media is not just ignoring the unprecedented fascistic rants of the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States but is actually aiding and abetting the convicted criminal.
In one big example, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, in an Orwellian twist, calls the Democrats dictators. The Journal’s editorials are squarely under the control of editors named by the Rupert Murdoch empire—the same empire that rules Fox “News.” And since the Journal is the bible of the corporate class, and a barometer of its attitudes, its analyses carry weight.
Their latest edict yesterday defended Trump against accusations that he’ll be a dictator, though he, himself, told Fox commentator Sean Hannity late last year he would be “a dictator on day one.” He gave Hannity examples of rules he would dictate, among them closing the U.S.-Mexico border, “drill baby drill” for oil and gas from one end of the country to the other, and taking retribution against and even jailing of political opponents.
Just this week, Trump said he’d send in the National Guard and/or the military against “radical left lunatics,” Communists, and “the enemy within.” He specified that Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker Emerita, and Adam Schiff, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate from California, were among those “enemies from within.”
Most believe Trump when he makes those threats, having seen that when he was in the White House he carried out threats he had made during his campaign. The exception there was the Journal’s editorial page. It went even further and constructed an argument that the Democrats are the dictators and constitutional lawbreakers:
“Whatever his intentions, the former president was hemmed in by American checks and balances…Mr. Trump’s worst attempt at stretching executive power—reallocating military construction money to build the border wall—was small beer compared with Mr. Biden’s lawless $400 billion student loan forgiveness,” the Journal said. So Biden’s attempt to relieve student debt is worse, in the view of the Wall Street Journal, than the very real crimes for which Trump has been convicted.
Then the Journal, the trumpet of the corporate class, really went to town by trying to explain why it is the Democrats, not Trump, who are the fascists: “Fascism historically was ‘national socialism’—government control over much of the economy.”
We know that fascism is the naked control of the government by the corporate class. In Germany, big industries used the inmates of the concentration camps as free, unpaid labor. The mouthpiece of corporate America on Wall Street would have us believe the regulation of corporations by lawmakers elected by the people is not economic democracy but instead, the real fascism.
After they give their false definition of fascism by turning reality on its head they say: “By that definition, Democrats today are the national socialists, using regulation, mandates, law enforcement, and trillions of dollars in subsidies to coerce Americans to follow their dictates on climate and culture. Mr. Trump was a deregulator in his first term and promises to be more so in a second.”
Deregulation, of everything, is the favorite cause of the corporate class, as it would give them unbridled power over the rest of us, in effect killing democracy. It’s also the predominant theme of the Republican platform, also known as Project 2025.
“Democrats tried to keep Mr. Trump off the presidential ballot this year. Democrats have used the law in no fewer than five cases to disqualify him…This subverts a basic principle of American justice,” the corporate caterers of the Journal’s editorial page continued.
“Democrats—including Ms. Harris—are also candid in saying they want to compromise the independence of the Supreme Court with new political rules and supervision…That in our view is a greater threat to the Constitution than anything Mr. Trump might be able to do in a second term.”
Just in mid-October, Trump went from denouncing Democrats to demonizing them. And a top Trump surrogate and aide, former Gen. Michael Flynn, openly called for mass executions.
Stepped up his rants
In October Trump stepped up his rants about the “enemy within.”
“It is the enemy within. They’re very dangerous. They’re Marxists and Communists,” he repeated. “The thing that’s tougher to handle (than alleged outside enemies) are these lunatics that we have inside.”
Two days before pontificating to Bartiromo, in Aurora, Colo., the site of a mass shooting 12 years ago, Trump—who has been enthusiastically endorsed by the fanatical National Rifle Association—called his Democratic foe, Vice President Kamala Harris, “a criminal.” He also called her a “s—t vice president” to the cheers of fanatical followers at a rally. “She’s a criminal. She’s a criminal She really is, if you think about it,” Trump said about Harris.
Noted mainstream historians are among those calling out Trump for his fascism. “This is out of the autocratic playbook. As autocrats consolidate their power once they’re in office, anything that threatens their power becomes illegal,” responded historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who has analyzed the rise of dictators from Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini onwards.
Shades of Richard Nixon vowing to use government agencies “to screw our political enemies,” in the words of a memo from his then-counsel, John Dean, 52 years ago. Only these threats are worse.
Another major fascistic campaign by Trump is his call for shutting down much of the media. Right now, the FCC, which controls licenses for television stations hooked up to the major networks, has a three to two Democratic majority. If the Dems lose the Senate and Trump is elected he can change that, making his threats of closure very serious. He has threatened to pull CBS’s broadcast licenses for editing a Harris interview. Nixon threatened that against the Washington Post’s TV stations due to the paper’s Watergate reporting.
“Joe Biden is a criminal and you’re a criminal for not reporting it,” Trump told one broadcast journalist about his then-Democratic foe, now the president, four years ago as Trump was boarding his airplane.
Sound familiar?
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page isn’t the sole media apologist for Trump’s autocracy. When the Trumpite insurrection and invasion occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the staff at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote the stories straight. The right-wing Block brothers, the paper’s ruling family, personally came down to the newsroom and ordered revisions to sugarcoat the invasion. The staff was so angry it staged a mass byline strike, just as their union contract allowed.
The second irony is that Trump’s threats and rants haven’t stopped the corporate class from returning to his fold via their campaign cash, cheering him on with money as well as the Journal’s words.
By contrast, when a credible major figure, such as retired Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, pronounces the former president “a fascist to the core” in Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, the mainstream media, with two exceptions, ignored it.
One was Woodward’s employer, The Washington Post. The other was NBC’s Meet the Press. Interviewer Kristen Welker asked former Rep. Lynn Cheney, R-Wyo., about Milley’s comment.
“I would agree with that,” replied Cheney, a Trump foe and an otherwise very conservative, but traditional, Republican. Cheney lost her GOP leadership post and then her House seat for daring to oppose Trump and help prosecute his second impeachment hearing by the House.
Meet the Press was the exception. There are few exceptions in the corporate class. In campaign dollars, they’ve come crawling back to Trump and his congressional champions.
Called them the “sedition caucus”
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported 249 major corporations cut off campaign contributions to 147 Republican election “deniers”—CREW called them “The Sedition Caucus”– following the Trumpite insurrection and invasion of the Capitol almost four years ago. Of that corporate crowd, only 37 still do so.
“Since January 2023, 28 companies reversed course on funding the Sedition Caucus, including companies such as Microsoft, Meta, Pepsico, and Bank of America,” CREW reported in July.
“This brings the total number of companies who have reversed their position to 212. The consequences are significant. As a result of these retreats from earlier commitments, an additional $33.5 million has been injected into the accounts of seditionist lawmakers.”
And that doesn’t count multi-billionaire Elon Musk, a worker hater and one of the world’s richest people. Musk has given at least $75 million to Trump, who’s offered him a post-election commission chairmanship on “reorganizing” government.
Now Musk offers million-dollar checks but only to registered voters who cast ballots—an offer he proclaimed at a Pennsylvania Trump rally. That led Gov. Josh Shapiro, D-Pa., a former state Attorney General, to wonder whether Musk’s checks were borderline bribes.
Besides donations to Trump’s campaign, and CREW did not have that figure, the top Sedition Caucus recipient is, ironically, no longer in Congress: Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., booted out of his chair for defying the radical right in his own party and cutting a budget-cutting deal with House Democrats.
The biggest corporate giver to the Sedition Caucus, through July, was also one of the biggest corporate exploiters of workers and haters of unions: Amazon. It’s donated $139,500 to 36 seditionists, CREW reports. Microsoft is second, at $102,500, also to 36 seditionists.
The Brennan Center for Law and Justice adds the corporate contributions to Trump’s drive understate the case. A better barometer, it contends, is advertising spending, especially on Internet platforms.
“In the 2024 election cycle through the end of August, advertisers who spent at least $5,000 on Google and Meta bought $619 million in political ads, with at least $248 million focused on the presidential race,” it says.
In that reported figure, Harris out-trumps Trump by a four-to-one ratio in ad spending: $182,146,990 for Harris and $45,344,373 for Trump. Of course, Trump has his own competing platform, Truth Social, and doesn’t need to put ads on that. He just tweets.
Total ad spending via the platforms was approximately double that take, the Brennan Center calculates. But the laws covering such spending are fuzzy and contributions—including dark money corporate contribution-are opaque.
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