Just a day after comparing supporters of President-elect Donald Trump to Nazi fanatics, leftist Salon magazine is now drawing parallels between Trump’s private security — or “goon squad,” as Salon puts it — and and the SS, Adolf Hitler’s infamous paramilitary force that was cited as a criminal organization by the Allies after the Second World War.
“There are historical parallels that make people very uncomfortable. … We now have Trump supporters hurling the Nazi word Lügenpresse (German for ‘lying press’) at the media at rallies, with Newt Gingrich giving seminars on how to smooth out the rough edges of the fascist rhetoric so Americans can feel comfortable only believing what they’re told by their own leadership,” Salon’s Heather Digby Parton wrote Tuesday. “This private security service, and its function as a suppressor of dissent is reminiscent of the same period. Obviously, it’s nothing like what the SS later became, but its origins are similar enough to make one feel nervous.”
The article was entitled “Donald Trump’s goon squad: as president Donald Trump will maintain private security force to crack down on protest,” and it was a summary of a Politico report on Trump’s use of private security at his rallies.
Salon’s writer worried that Trump will soon be “bringing down the hammer on dissent. Where the Secret Service concentrates on keeping the president safe, these ‘special bodyguards’ concentrate on protesters.”
This makes for a highly toxic political broth in the hands of “demagogue” president, according to Parton: “But what makes people nervous about this arrangement is the idea of a political leader having his own security guards and a growing group of fanatical followers who are being worked up and fed propaganda by the president — who happens to be a demagogue.”
Salon also imagined Trump “telling his crowds that the CIA is plotting against him or that authoritarian policies are necessary to fight whatever enemies he decides are keeping America from being great again.”
Keith Schiller, Trump’s security chief, was also maligned as a “full-blown conspiracy theorist” because he criticized some of the highly questionable donations received by the Hillary Clinton campaign and accused President Barack Obama of encouraging illegals to vote.