The U.S. inauguration of a convicted criminal Donald Trump will be remembered in history as an obscene fascist spectacle, in which the incoming president delivered a vile, hate-filled diatribe against the outgoing administration, immigrants, broad swaths of the US population that he views as enemies, the people of Latin America and, finally, the world’s population beyond the Western Hemisphere.
In a grotesque example of life imitating political fiction, Trump himself (backed by billionaire Musk brazenly delivering Nazi salutes) appeared as the incarnation of President Buzz Windrip, the brutal media con man and demagogue imagined by the great American writer Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 anti-fascist novel 'It Can’t Happen Here'.
Lewis’s dystopian novel was intended as a warning against the rise of fascism in the United States. In defense of a crisis-torn capitalism and in pursuit of profits and unlimited wealth, the American ruling class would place in power its own national version of Germany’s Hitler. Ninety years later, the grotesque inaugural ceremony of January 20, 2025 has vindicated Lewis’s warning.
Not a single Democrat walked out or objected to the barrage of fascist threats made by Trump in the course of his inaugural address.
www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/21/hpol-j21.html
www.goodreads.com/book/show/11371.It_Can_t_Happen_Here