Saturday Night Live Would Have Pimped Hitler for the Ratings

Donald Trump  Campaigning on Neo-Fascism Platform

I will say this as gently as I can.  Having Donald Trump as a guest  on Saturday Night Live earlier this month was ugly, unfunny and wrong.  But it is just now that the magnitude of that program’s transgression, has struck me.   SNL executives convinced themselves that Trump has unpopular, even loathsome views.  But this is a democracy with an upcoming presidential election.  So why shouldn’t his voice, as the top GOP candidate be heard?

Many tendencies are represented in the American electorate.  There are voters who support lynchings. There are those who believe that their particular religious faith is the only truth that matters, and that all other religions should be outlawed.  Some groups would support the assassination of president Barack Obama because he’s not white.   Yes, in a democracy all points of view have a vote.  But ideologies that a majority of Americans find repugnant because they run counter to the values this nation stand for, are shoved to the fringes.  They lack a platform and thus legitimacy.

The Republican Party, that I once belonged to,  is disintegrating and their top candidate, Donald Trump, is a neo-fascist.  As Michael Tomasky at Daily Beast opined:

[Trump] may think a member of a racial minority being beat up and called a “n***r” by his racial-majority supporters at a rally, and his own joking about it, is just a little incident; something for which there’s no larger historical context.  . . .If they admit that Trump is a fascist, they’re calling one-third of their voters fascist. Will they do that? And this predicament raises the interesting question of how one-third of their voters came to admire a neo-fascist and open racist in the first place. Gee, it can’t have anything to do with the kind of rhetoric and “harmless jokes” about the current president and about the 47 percent that Republican leaders have winked at for seven years, can it?

 Just because a political figure has a constituency doesn’t mean that the person is ipso facto fit to be president of the United States.    Adolf Hitler was appealing to the German people because he articulated German exceptionalism, not genocide against the Jews.   Of course he suggested that they leave the country. What happened next was an inevitable development of the fascist undercurrents of Hitler's electoral victory. By the time anti-fascist Germans realized what was happening, they no longer had a voice.  And SNL executives, blinded by dollar signs and ratings, would have used the same rationale to humanize the Nazi leader him by putting him on their comedy program as well.    

People can vote for whomever they like. But SNL has just used its popular, comedy platform to give legitimacy to a man who advocates identification badges for Muslims, and has never refuted claims that the twice elected president of the United States is a Muslim imposter.     This is happening at a time when the Republican Party may be incapable of doing anything to halt its slide.  GOP politicians built up a base of racists, neo-fascists, and religious fanatics.  And now these folks are running the party. If enough black and other minority votes can be suppressed, which is the GOP’s current strategy, Trump could even win the presidency. Now, wouldn’t that be funny.