“Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency. … Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.”

— Philip Roth

Comparing Charles Lindbergh's leadership of an "America First" movement with that of Donald Trump, in responses to being asked about foreseeing an America such as now exists in his earlier writings, including his alternate-history novel The Plot Against America (2004) where Lindbergh defeated FDR for the presidency in 1940, as quoted in "No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say" by Charles Mcgrath, in The New York Times (16 January 2018) https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/books/review/philip-roth-interview.html
Context: No one I know of has foreseen an America like the one we live in today. No one (except perhaps the acidic H. L. Mencken, who famously described American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses”) could have imagined that the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U. S. A., the most debasing of disasters, would appear not, say, in the terrifying guise of an Orwellian Big Brother but in the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon. How naïve I was in 1960 to think that I was an American living in preposterous times! How quaint! But then what could I know in 1960 of 1963 or 1968 or 1974 or 2001 or 2016? … However prescient The Plot Against America might seem to you, there is surely one enormous difference between the political circumstances I invent there for the U. S. in 1940 and the political calamity that dismays us so today. It’s the difference in stature between a President Lindbergh and a President Trump. Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency. … Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.

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Philip Roth 95

American novelist 1933–2018

Bradley Burston israeli journalist

Trump's Win, the Greatest Victory for anti-Semitism in America Since 1941 (2016)

“By winning his party’s nomination, Trump has rewritten the rules. Until this year, no openly racist candidate in modern times has reached such a height in American national politics. Trump has carelessly, perhaps jubilantly, maligned Mexicans and Muslims. … His success results from sheer intuition. He realized, as others did not, that there are many thousands of people ready to vote for a candidate preaching anti-Mexican, anti-Muslin bigotry, while also blaming America’s failures on the Chinese and on free trade.”

Robert Fulford (journalist) (1932) Canadian journalist

Until Trump, no openly racist candidate in modern times has reached such a height in U.S. politics (August 5, 2016)

“I have made my condemnation of the white supremacist and racist view of this group, or any group, clear.”

Trent Lott (1941) United States Senator from Mississippi

Source: To The Washington Post (1998), as quoted in The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi http://www.pdfarchive.info/pdf/N/Ne/Newton_Michael_-_The_Ku_Klux_Klan_in_Mississippi.pdf (2010), by Michael Newton, p. 195.

“Trump is going to go under an electron microscope. And everything I know about Donald Trump, and I know a fair bit about him going back to my Jersey days when he was operating in Atlantic City – that’s where I first kind of encountered him – he is one of the least likely people to survive an electron microscope into his life, I believe, and his business life of anybody. So, my instincts are strongly that they are going to find some stuff.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

2010s, 2018, Interview with Bill Kristol (2018)

“By the end of the Second World War, every American past the age of 40 had been subjected to some 25 years of anti-communist radiation, the average incubation period needed to produce a malignancy. Anti-communism had developed a life of its own.”

William Blum (1933–2018) American author and historian

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Introduction

“Our sin is that we are ideologically anti-imperialist, but this coup won’t make me change ideologically… We are very grateful to the president of Mexico, because he saved my life.”

Evo Morales (1959) Bolivian politician

Quoted by Clifford Krauss https://www.nytimes.com/by/clifford-krauss, in ‘I Assume the Presidency’: Bolivia Lawmaker Declares Herself Leader https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/world/americas/evo-morales-mexico-bolivia.html, The New York Times, (12 November 2019)

“…I said yesterday on Fox & Friends, I think the president is a racist, I think he has race issues. Don't know if he hates white people, but there's something going on with the president. Well, I stand by that. And I deem him a racist based on really his own standard of racism, the standard of the left.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2009-07-29
Beck "stands by" Fox & Friends remarks that "I think the president is a racist"
Media Matters for America
2009-07-29
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200907290012
2000s, 2009

“Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness. In just this same way anti-Semitism for us has not been a question of ideology but a matter of cleanliness.”

Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) Nazi officer, Commander of the SS

Quoted in "Conscience and Memory: Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust" - Page 29 - by Harold Kaplan - History - 1994
1940s

“Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat. His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

2016, Remarks on Donald Trump and the 2016 race

“Anything short of radical change to the Republican party’s war on voters of color is merely feigned outrage. Even if the white supremacists are condemned, even if the entire Republican party rises up in self-professed outrage at white supremacists, if voter suppression and other such racist policies survive, the white supremacists are winning. And America is losing.”

Russ Feingold (1953) Wisconsin politician; three-term U.S. Senator

Commenting in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in [Feingold, Russ, How the Republican party quietly does the bidding of white supremacists, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/19/republican-party-white-supremacists-charlottesville, 20 August 2018, The Guardian, August 19, 2017]
2017

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