If I'm being honest, I don't really have a lot more to add here, but I wanted to highlight a specific section of this article about the rhetorical style employed by Trump and the Pork Reich because much of our mainstream establishment, even the portions of it that are opposing Trump (and I don't think that represents a LARGE portion of said establishment) either doesn't know how this works, or doesn't care to identify it and work to counteract it:

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/musk-ponzi-scheme-social-security

Musk, Social Security, and the Ponzi-Scheme Boomerang

"Trumpism as a discourse most prominently features three verbal maneuvers: gaslighting, coopting, and boomeranging. All three are intertwined in the disingenuous effort to overturn our liberal democracy and further the move toward a more illiberal autocratic political system, where Trump and his followers get to claim they are saving us from the failures of the current political system. Gaslighting is where you deflect a criticism by saying that the problem is something other than what the critic alleged, thereby insulating yourself from that criticism. For instance, the January 6th attack on the Capitol was actually an inside job perpetrated by the FBI. Coopting is where you adopt the language of your critics so that you are the one with the just cause and they are the one who is deserving of condemnation. The January 6th attack on the Capitol was an instance of Trump supporters standing up for democracy, not trying to undermine it. Boomeranging is where you send criticism directed at you right back at your critics. In this case, the claim is that the critics of the January 6th insurrection are actually the ones who are threatening democracy. These are all lies, aided by disinformation, consciously deployed to pollute public discourse and open the door to allowing Trump and is supporters to overthrow the existing constitutional order."

Setting aside the fact that the author and I clearly have wildly divergent opinions about to what degree the American system under free market fundamentalism actually represents a democracy, this is a fairly accurate assessment of the rhetorical style deployed by Dowmarket Mussolini, his mandarins, and the "America First" fascist movement in modern politics. I would have liked to see Schram point out that this style of discourse is always employed by fascist movements throughout history, without variation, and some comparison to the DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) tactics employed by abusers because I think both of those things are quite instructional in the context of Americans being woefully unprepared to recognize and combat fascist politics in a country where fascist ideology has been normalized for decades and decades. For example, this is French philosopher, playwright, and political activist Jean-Paul Sartre writing in 1946:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

Now obviously Sartre focuses his analysis on antisemites in this quote, but objectively speaking antisemitism is such an inherent part of the larger fascist zeitgeist that he was in fact also discussing the larger fascist argument style. Furthermore, as you can see, Sartre has somehow predicted in slightly different words, the same rhetorical techniques, as deployed by Trumpists, America First fascists, the larger alt-right and pretty much every "conservative" that's happily thrown their lot in with the nazis they always wanted to be. It is in my studied opinion, not at all some sort of accident that the Trump administration's ideological arguments and justifications perfectly mirror those of the literal Nazi Party and um, rapists, of which there are many in Trump's administration.

Finally, I should hope at this point it goes without saying that I do NOT support starving senior citizens and poor people so Elon Musk and the other rich nazis who own Trump can steal literally trillions (no, really, with a T) of dollars from the US treasury and by loose extrapolation, the American people - but if you needed that pointed out here, there it is.