Trump Cards, Con't

And speaking of dinosaur fan fiction:

Brownshirts!
Meet the Brownshirts!
They're The Donald's own security!
Will he
Still have these goons
If he wins our presidency?

One night last week, dozens of chanting activists filed into the lobby of a hotel here, demanding that it cancel a Donald Trump town hall set for the following day. Within minutes, three members of Trump’s advance security team were in the lobby, and things escalated quickly. 

An official with the Trump advance security team, a 61-year-old former FBI agent named Don Albracht, began circling the room, putting his phone in the faces of protesters and filming them. As they chanted “build communities, not walls,” Albracht ripped a sign out of one protester’s hands, jutting his phone within inches of her face, as her comrades shouted objections.

When some of the protesters tried to return the favor by filming Albracht at close range, one of Albracht’s associates pulled a protester away, screaming at her and wagging a finger in her face, an exchange captured in a video taken by activists with the group Stand Up For Racial Justice. 

Neither the Trump campaign nor Albracht would comment on the protest or the role of private security personnel like Albracht on Trump’s campaign. After a Trump speech on Wednesday in Appleton, Wisconsin, Albracht explained “our policy is that we’re not going to comment, because you just never know whether you’re going to get a fair shake.” 

The fracas in Janesville was only one example of the aggressive tactics Trump’s security has been using to tamp down even peaceful protests. A POLITICO investigation revealed that Trump has assembled a privately funded security and intelligence force with a far wider reach than other campaigns’ private security operations: tracking and rooting out protesters, patrolling campaign events and supplementing the Secret Service protection of the billionaire real estate showman during his nontraditional campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. 

The investigation ― which utilized Federal Election Commission reports, state licensing records, court filings and interview accounts or testimony from more than a dozen people who’ve crossed paths with Trump’s security ― found that the tactics of Trump’s team at times inflamed the already high tensions around his divisive campaign, rather than defusing them.

I honestly believe the comparisons of 2016 America to 1939 Germany have been made so often at this point that they have lost nearly all meaning, but let's try to appreciate the fact that Trump's private security goons are there to "track and root out protesters" while the guy is running for president of an ostensible representative democracy.  Please let that sink in for a bit about what that really means.

All the loud nonsense from the right (and the Useful Idiot Left) about Obama "crushing dissent" and all that is actually what Trump is doing here, and nobody seems very concerned about it.  Luckily, somebody figured out this might be illegal and is actually trying to do something about it.

The Trump campaign could be forced to publicly justify its security tactics in June when a New York state court is set to hear a little-noticed case brought by a handful of protesters who allege they were assaulted by five Trump security officials during a raucous protest outside the campaign’s Manhattan headquarters in September. The protesters’ lawyers have asked the Trump campaign to release its contracts for security, its guidelines for use of force, its security team’s personnel records, and complaints against its members ― including for excessive force, assault, battery or “violation of any federal or state constitutional right.” 

Among Trump critics who’ve had run-ins with his security, complaints include unnecessary force, discriminatory profiling and removing people from events based on little more than their appearance. Some question whether the force’s members are properly trained and certified for the work they’re doing, while others assert that the force acts as if it has the power of the law behind it. 

“It was this privatized mercenary force that seemed to have state sanctioning, and that’s something that I haven’t seen before,” said Josh Jenkins, a Madison, Wisconsin, auto mechanic and veteran protester who served as the liaison with police at the Janesville hotel protest.

This is what "crushing dissent" actually looks like, and Trump is happy to do it whenever he can.

Now combine the above with the following, and you get...well...you know.

A total of 80 percent of Trump supporters strongly or somewhat agree with this. Only supporters of Ted Cruz come close, at 76 percent; keep in mind that Cruz has edged towards Trump on immigration by ruling out legalization for the 11 million forever. Seventy two percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents also believe it, but John Kasich supporters are evenly split. 

Now, “minority groups” is a pretty loose term. But it seems reasonable to speculate that for a lot of Trump supporters (and for a lot of GOP voters) undocumented Latino immigrants constitute one of those groups. Indeed, this idea is perhaps bolstered by other polling: A recent Post survey found that 54 percent of Trump supporters believe that whites losing out to Hispanics and blacks is a bigger problem than the other way around. 

Anecdotal evidence has suggested that Trump supporters are resentful of government benefits that go to undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, polls have shown that GOP voters and Trump supporters also support his call for mass deportations. 

Today’s Quinnipiac poll also finds that 78 percent of Trump supporters say they are “falling farther and farther behind economically,” a larger percentage than any other candidate. Meanwhile, 85 percent of Trump supporters say that “America has lost its identity.” This suggests the possibility that the “economic anxiety” often described as the source of Trump’s success does matter, but it’s one side of the coin, while the resonance of Trump’s suggestion that he’d turn back the demographic tide through sheer force of will is the other. As Wonkblog’s analysis of recent polling data concluded, Trump supporters tend to believe their “losses are being caused by other group’s gains.”

I mean yeah, we've destroyed Godwin's Law months ago on Trump, but let's really stop pretending that a violent private security force and a campaign run on punishing those people doesn't evoke these awful parallels, guys.

And let's not pretend the rest of the GOP isn't as bad at its core.  Trump's just saying what the racist bloc wants to hear.