For the last nine years, people have been saying what’s been known about our last president since he was in second grade and gave his music teacher a black eye (or lied later to his ghostwriter about having done so, I don’t know which is worse, but either way he was a confirmed menace): he has the instincts of a bully. He conducts himself like one in his business career and personal life and, when he had the chance, tried to run the country like one.
“Bully” is not exactly “fascist,” but it’s not really far off: a fascist is a bully the people of a country foolishly allow to be in charge of it. For the last nine years some very educated people have argued that he’s not one. Now that there is no more quiet part, he’s straight out telling us he is. And the other objection–not that he doesn’t have fascist instincts but that he’s just inept–never held water, and really won’t now. Last time, there were people around him to stop him from doing the worst. Because we’ve allowed him to run again and because the court he built has taken away the legal guardrails, if he wins, by hook or more likely by crook (nobody actually knows the origin of that phrase, so I can use it however I want), he will be able to do what he’s always wanted, for his rich friends and to everyone else. And millions of us will cheer him on until we feel the boot on our necks too rather than just on those of the neighbors we’d mocked and hated along with him.
And if he doesn’t win the election–and the institutions stand and our nerve holds so that he can’t steal it–we have to do everything we can to change things so we never find ourselves here again. We have to figure out how to show ourselves what he is and what we’re cheering for. And we have to build new and better guardrails. We’re close enough to it happening here to know, finally, that it can.
Samuel Cohen 
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