The candidate’s fiscal policies don’t matter

Trump is a fascist. We should never not be talking about that.

I recently got to write a couple of articles comparing presidential candidates for respected publications — student loan policies for CNET and tax policies for Salon. I’m new to the roster for both, and it’s cool to be sanctioned to mix politics with personal finance for a national audience.

Except, the day I set out to write the tax comparison, I read this update on Trump from

Heather Cox Richardson

that reminded me how little these details matter:

By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed, with the help of the military…Trump’s speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.”

Richardson went on to detail Trump’s gruesome hate speech against immigrants and people of color from just that past weekend, a culmination of the disrespect that’s been escalating for his whole life. She put Trump’s promises to detain and deport and “denaturalize” people in the U.S. into historical context, noting how central dehumanization is to fascist control.

This was a month after Trump knowingly broadcast a racist lie about Haitian immigrants in the September presidential debate, a cruel antic that wreaked havoc on a small town in Ohio and threatens the safety of its immigrant and non-white residents.

The Trump/Republican Party platform I had to read to write these pieces includes 20 “core promises.” Seven villainize immigrants, people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. They don’t mince words.

That’s 35% of a major party platform focused explicitly on bigoted vitriol to scapegoat and dehumanize our fellow Americans to cement power into the hands of a man who worships dictators and has promised to act as one himself.

One of those 20 points promises tax cuts for workers, but no specifics are written into the platform. To write my comparison, I relied on reports throughout the campaign of Trump spouting half-baked ideas he didn’t understand from podiums at rallies or on social media. I, like so many journalists this year, had to piece together “concepts of a plan” into something that seemed cohesive alongside the Harris campaign’s actual plans, in an attempt to make this square peg of a candidate fit into our round hole of both-sides journalism.

We are stupid, journalists.

We have to stop this.

An honest, fair comparison of Trump’s fiscal policies against Harris’s isn’t taking seriously a jigsaw puzzle of rants as if the man behind them has any intention to implement ideas to benefit anyone in our country. The only fair comparison is: She has plans we can like or not; and he doesn’t care because he’s mainly focused on vanquishing his enemies and feeling love his father never gave him.

Trump is a narcissistic, racist fascist, and that isn’t a scared exaggeration from a swing-state leftie. It’s the assessment of Trump’s own former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his former White House chief of staff, among many, many others who were (for some ungodly reasons they’ll never be able to justify) close to him throughout his first term.

Trump is, General Mark Milley told author Bob Woodward in 2023,¹ “the most dangerous person ever…a fascist to the core.” The retired marine general John Kelly said this month that Trump fits the definition of a fascist and “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

There may have been a time when parties could quibble over the details of fiscal proposals.² This isn’t that time.

We’re voting next Tuesday — if you haven’t already voted, make your plan! — between fascism and democracy. Everything else is a distraction. Any “balanced” comparison between these two candidates is an attempt by a wayward media ecosystem (I know! I’m part of it!) to find some semblance of normalcy and relevance amid a very real threat to our existence. We’re trying to do the job we know, but this job simply isn’t needed right now.

As we continue to pump out this nonsense that’s meant to help you decide, remember that one candidate is calling your neighbors “animals.” He’s calling your friends “the enemy.” He’s calling your children’s friends, your nieces and nephews and niblings, your in-laws, your school teachers, your colleagues the “worst people.” If he’s not already calling you a “stone cold killer” to further his quest for power, he won’t hesitate to do it when it suits him.

He doesn’t care about cutting your taxes. It shouldn’t matter, anyway, because of the racism and fascism of it all, but he doesn’t, and dummies like me ought to stop writing as if he might.

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1. We could have used this information a year and a half ago Bob! Please stop hoarding details for book releases when they can save us from fascism.

2. Not really, though. There’s pretty much always been one major party in this country that wants to abuse us all for financial gain, and for some reason voters are always like, “but what about the price of eggs?”