We had four years to see Donald Trump’s “fascist dictatorship” in action. And what we saw from 2017 into 2021 was, well, not a fascist dictatorship. In fact, Trump reduced federal interference in various spheres of American life. Another critical point is that the number of political opponents he locked up was ZERO, even when Black Lives Matter rioters were burning down American cities in a fit of racist anarchy.

Trump speaks with New York bravado, of course, which opponents love to interpret as literally as possible. There will be an economic bloodbath if he loses, he said. There will be a literal bloodbath, leftists reimagined him saying. He recently mused about using the military to quell BLM-level civil unrest by “sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Leftists tell you he means deploying the Army against run-of-the-mill political opponents.

That setup brings us to two men with Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS): Joe Biden and John Kelly.

“Our democracy is at stake,” Biden said for the zillionth time. “I know this sounds bizarre. It sounds like if I said this five years ago, you’d lock me up. We gotta lock him up.” Though the audience immediately applauded, Biden caught himself and quickly added, “Politically lock him up. Lock him out.” This was after Biden had said the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling meant Trump could “eliminate, physically eliminate, shoot, kill” his political opponents. What ridiculous hyperbole.

I look forward to the Leftmedia hysterics akin to the “bloodbath” comment or the “lock her up” tease Trump threw out there about Hillary Clinton, who actually committed serious crimes.

Back here in reality, the only administration locking up political opponents — literally, not politically, whatever that means — is Joe Biden’s administration. January 6 protesters and pro-life activists have found themselves in jail for political actions. Not one but four trumped-up criminal cases against Trump are at various points in the court system, and that’s not counting other cases. Biden’s Justice Department, through its cutout Jack Smith, is trying to lock up Trump literally, not “politically.”

Locking up political opponents is what fascists do.

Fascists are national socialists — creatures of the radical left. NAZI was a German acronym for National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Fascists aim for totalitarian government control, with a focus on nationalism instead of internationalism or globalism, which differentiates them from Marxist socialists or communists. Nazis and communists hated each other not because of ideological differences but essentially because of turf disputes. The common thread between national socialism and Marxist socialism is tyranny.

Leftists act like nationalism and racism are what make modern American conservatives fascists, but this is revisionist fiction. Conservatives advocate for Liberty and limited government, emphasizing merit, not race. Fascism is almost by definition antithetical to anything on the Right, and the idea of a right-wing fascist is something of an oxymoron.

Sidebar: Back before Jonah Goldberg went off the rails with his own case of TDS, he wrote a fantastic book explaining this truth. We dumped Goldberg’s syndicated column years ago, but the Patriot Post Shop still has one copy of his book. Act now!

This brings me to John Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general who served as Trump’s homeland security secretary and then chief of staff. In a three-part interview with The New York Times published yesterday, Kelly admitted that he was, as the Times falsely framed it, “deeply bothered by Mr. Trump’s recent comments about employing the military against his domestic opponents.”

The Times should have asked Kelly what he thinks of Biden’s repeated threats toward gun owners.

The Times asked Kelly if he thinks Trump is a fascist. First, Kelly located an online definition of fascism: “It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy.” As I already said, remove the term “far-right,” and that’s not far off. But it describes today’s Democrat Party, not the Republican Party or Trump.

Nevertheless, after suffering a serious case of TDS, Kelly sees Trump. “Certainly, the former president is in the far-right area,” he said. “He’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Admittedly, Trump does have an odious penchant for heaping praise on foreign dictators, and he can sound rather authoritarian when opining about what he’d ideally like to do. He is not a dyed-in-the-wool ideological conservative. He’s a get-things-done CEO, which even Kelly acknowledged. “I think he’d love to be just like he was in business,” Kelly said. “He could tell people to do things, and they would do it and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot.”

The constitutional system of checks and balances works, as we saw clearly during Trump’s first term. Maybe Kelly forgot that.

A couple of years ago, Kelly supposedly confirmed the lie that Trump called American soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg — the same guy who wrote that bogus “suckers” story — reported Tuesday that Trump said “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had” because “they were totally loyal to him.” Goldberg says Kelly told him of numerous similar instances.

Trump has undoubtedly made careless comments about the military and many other things, and it’s obvious why someone with Kelly’s pedigree and decorum would chafe. Trump’s random and sometimes bizarre comments are often indefensible, and they make defending him more generally all that much more difficult.

Moreover, our Mark Alexander wrote a Profile of Valor on Kelly last year. The general served his country admirably in his own right, and he endured the loss of his son, Robert, in combat in Afghanistan. Yet even honorable men aren’t always right.

Trump kept America strong and out of foreign wars — even righteous ones like the one in which Robert Kelly made the ultimate sacrifice. With all due respect to John Kelly, the general would do well to remember that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris disgracefully ended that war with a surrender and retreat, demeaning the sacrifice of his son and thousands of others. They’re also presiding over the kinds of social experimentation on the military that are devastating to morale and recruitment.

Trashing Trump over differences in style and rhetoric is helping them, not America or her Armed Forces.

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