Trump Cancer Spreads To Brazil, Italy, Israel With Darkly Similar Results
The far right, authoritarian, xenophobic, racist and homophobic cancer that drives trump and his toxic acolytes is metastasizing across the globe, most recently to Brazil, Italy and Israel.
The symptoms are frighteningly familiar.
Thousands take to the streets, opposing alleged widespread voter fraud, demanding martial law be imposed and reinstatement of the former president, who was criticized by many for his racism and violent rhetoric and inaction that led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands to COVID-19.
A keynote speaker at a far right conservative conference rails against woke politicians and warns against a total assault on gender, family and religion. The speaker is praised by the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., and Tucker Carlson.
A former far right wing president feeds on fears of chaos caused by immigration, returns to power, against all odds, like the legendary phoenix.
In Brazil, the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, reluctantly agreed to a transfer of power after 45 hours of silence following his loss to a leftist former leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But a day later, tens of thousands of angry Brazilians set up road blocks to disrupt the country in protest and gathered outside military bases demanding that the armed forces take control of the government, and the Congress and Supreme Court be disbanded drastic measures needed to reinstate Bolsonaro to save Brazil’s democracy from a rigged election.
After the election, Bolsonaro did not acknowledge his loss, and said he supported peaceful protests inspired by “feelings of injustice in the electoral process.”
In the U.S., trump lost the presidential election to Joe Biden but also, did not accept defeat while he incited mobs to return him to power even as they stormed the Capitol, in a bloody, violent rampage. At the time, some members of Congress had called on trump to impose martial law in order to retain power.
Bolsonaro has long claimed, without proof, that Brazil’s elections are rife with fraud while the right wing media and politicians have cited circumstantial evidence, unattributed reports and inaccuracies. The public was frequently shown videos of voting machines malfunctioning, and other signs of suspicious activity. Bolsonaro told Brazilians to be suspicious if he doesn’t win the election with at least 60 percent of the vote. Last week a Bolsonaro ally opened fire on federal officers who had come to arrest him over online comments he made about a judge.
“What we saw on Sunday could well be the prelude to a new wave of political violence, in particular amongst groups who won’t accept the election result if President Bolsonaro loses,” Mauricio Santoro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, told Reuters.
In the U.S., trump has long led a drumbeat claiming the Democrats had fixed the 2020 election while he and supporters made unsubstantiated and wholly debunked claims along with so-called documentaries that claimed to prove fraud, using inaccurate reports and interviews with far right media personalities.
Trump bellowed that proof of his real victory was the tens of thousands who attended his rallies.
In the midst of the mayhem, Bolsonaro released a video calling on supporters to stop blocking the roads, saying it was disrupting lives and hurting the economy.
“I am as upset and sad as you are, but we have to put our heads in the right place,” he said. “Other demonstrations that are taking place across Brazil in public squares are part of the democratic game. Let’s do what has to be done. I’m with you.”
Late on Jan. 6, 2021, trump urged rioters to “go home now,” while he offered sympathy to the rioters and repeated lies that his reelection was stolen.
“I know your pain, I know you’re hurt,” trump said. “So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home, and go home in peace.”
Bolsonaro has claimed that the opposition party is communist much like trump has labeled Democrats to be socialists and dangerous threats to democracy.
Trump has consistently backed Bolsonaro and called him “one of the great presidents of any country in the world,” a title that trump usually kept for himself. Before the election, in typical trump fashion, he implored Brazilians “Don’t let the Radical Left Lunatics & Maniacs destroy Brazil like they have so many other countries. President Bolsonaro has done a fantastic job, has my Complete and Total Endorsement, and deserves your VOTE. He will NEVER let you down!!!”
Those pro-trump, Republican “Had Enough” lawn signs found on front lawns of red states around the county have spawned similar sentiment in Israel, with the nearly identical message of “That’s it. We’ve had enough.”
And that is far from the only similarity in the dangerous, far right wing politics in the two countries.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said the current state of Israeli leadership is akin to trump being reelected in 2024 and naming Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Michael Flynn for defense secretary, Steve Bannon for commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman.
It’s that bad.
In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, a hard line, right wing, former prime minister and strong ally and confidant of trump, has been brought back to power by the most far, far right coalition in the nation’s history. Friedman wrote that the coalition is “a rowdy alliance of ultra-Orthodox leaders and ultra-nationalist politicians, including some outright racist, anti-Arab Jewish extremists once deemed completely outside the norms and boundaries of Israeli politics.”
According to Friedman, Netanyahu can’t build a necessary majority coalition without the support of extremists and some are likely to be named cabinet ministers, a la Giuliani, Flynn, Bannon, Dobson, Tarrio and Greene.
The extremists see Israeli Arab citizens as the enemy not to be trusted; they vowed to take control over judicial appointments; they want Jewish settlements to expand so there is no land left for a Palestinian state; they want new laws to freeze on the corruption trial of Netanyahu; and they have only contempt for LGBTQ rights.
Before his political demise last year, Netanyahu had governed Israel for nearly a quarter century, while the country drifted further to the right. Netanyahu has supported expanding occupation in the West Bank, the home of millions of Palestinians; he has stoked the fires of fears by Jews of Palestinian violence.
Far right leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, wants to deport “anyone who works against the State of Israel” and to give soldiers more freedom to shoot Palestinians. Ben-Gvir was convicted by an Israeli court in 2007 of incitement to racism and supporting a Jewish terrorist organization.
Netanyahu has allied himself with Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party and Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionism party. Smotrich has suggested that Israeli Jewish mothers should be separated from Arab mothers in the maternity wards of Israeli hospitals. He has claimed that there is “no such thing as Jewish terrorism” when it comes to settlers retaliating on their own against Palestinian violence.
Trump, meanwhile, has survived two impeachment attempts while he is currently under numerous state and federal investigations which he has repeatedly labeled as political witchhunts or worse. Trump courted Netanyahu by supporting the ongoing occupation and moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, greatly angering Palestinians who claim Jerusalem to be their capitol.
In the U.S., trump has brazenly supported violent white supremacist groups, empowering far right politicians and others to violently oppose Democrats, who they claim are stoking immigration to upend the white majority. Trump has labeled as patriots, the supporters who led a bloody, assault on the Capitol on Jan.6, 2021, and failed to condemn the white supremacists who led a bloody 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Netanyahu said he would lead a “a national government that will look after everyone” and pledged to heal the divisions within Israeli society, adding that the country “respects all its citizens.”
After trump’s 2016 election, trump had similar words that have turned out empty, proclaiming that he would be the “president for all Americans” while he proceeded to become the most divisive leader in the nation’s history.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy, a party with neo-fascist roots, became Italy’s first far-right leader since the end of World War II. Her election drew praise from Victor Orbán, Hungary’s far right president and a friend of trump, who won a fourth consecutive term in power last year.
In a video issued after her election, Meloni warned of a global attack by the so-called leftist “woke” agenda against gender, family and religion, carried out by unnamed forces seeking a world where forms of identity cease to exist.
“I can’t define myself as Italian, as Christian, mother, woman — no!” Meloni said. “I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2.”
Meloni offered more comments to far right conservatives at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla.
“I see the ‘woke’ ideology destroying the foundations of the natural family, attacking life, insulting religion, changing words and even imposing new graphic signs,” Meloni said. “Just a few months ago, European Union bureaucrats wrote a document of hundreds of pages telling us that in order to be inclusive we had to exclude all references to Christmas. Jesus, Mary and all Christian names had to be removed from all official communications. Will we surrender in front of this? No, we will not. We will fight it. We will fight it head on!”
Her comments went viral while trump and his supporters, who have campaigned on the alleged evils of the woke agenda, were in rapture.
“So beautifully said,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who has become known for her wild, far right, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic comments.
“Spectacular,” said another far right politician, Sen. Ted Cruz R-Texas. Steve Cortes, a former trump campaign adviser, called Meloni’s sentiments, “A model for Nov 8th candidates here.”
Kari Lake, a Republican candidate for Arizona governor who insists that trump lost re-election because of unproven voter fraud, said that Meloni was “somebody who I can relate to, because they’re doing the same thing to me.”
After the Italian election, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that Italy has been “destroyed” by neoliberalism and its open-border policy, with some parts of the country becoming “flat-out dangerous” because of migrant crime. Carlson said that Meloni was one of the “very few politicians … who has been willing to say the obvious — the truth — out loud.”
Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a supporter of trump’s voter fraud lies, said that Meloni was a “common sense conservative” and had been incorrectly labeled as far right.
“[It’s] the left-wing media doing what they do best, labeling common-sense conservatives as far-right,” Norman said. “Giorgia Meloni is a breath of fresh air. It’s a preview of coming attractions” in the U.S. midterms this month.
Among his more infamous moments, in 2018, Norman was at an election debate when he joked about sexual assault allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
At a public meeting for constituents on April 6, 2018, Norman was speaking with representatives from “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America” when he placed a placed his .38-caliber handgun on the table to illustrate his belief that “gun violence is a spiritual, mental or people issue, not a gun issue.”
In 2019, Norman joined a small group of House Republicans who sought to reinstate Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, on House committees after King had made a series of racist and white nationalist remarks. King later lost a re-election bid.
Orbán also was a featured speaker at the 2022 CPAC meeting in Dallas, Texas. Orbán congratulated Meloni on her election and posted on Facebook that she is “a woman who never gives up.”
Before his CPAC speech, Orbán had spoken out against “race mixing” in a speech condemned as “pure Nazi” by his own adviser. At CPAC, he was greeted with huge applause when he offered his hard-line, far right views on immigration, reminiscent of trump.
“We were the first ones in Europe who said no to illegal migration and stopped the invasion of illegal migrants,” Orbán said. “To stop illegal migration, we actually built that wall.”
Trump has led the great lie about voter fraud while blaming Biden’s alleged lax immigration policies for rampant crime, particularly in Democratic cities.
Orbán was applauded when he quoted lines from the Hungarian constitution that marriage should be between a man and a woman. That was followed by even louder cheers when Orbán spoke about rejecting the notion that people can identify as the gender they were not assigned at birth.
Elsewhere during his speech, the crowd booed when Orbán mentioned the billionaire Democratic philanthropist George Soros, often the victim of anti-Semitic attacks.
In yet another example of the international far right movement trump has supported Spain’s far-right Vox party, representing candidates in next year’s Spanish elections.
“We have to make sure that we protect our borders and do lots of very good conservative things,” Trump said. “Spain is a great country and we want to keep it a great country. So congratulations to Vox for so many great messages you get out to the people of Spain and the people of the world.”