Through America's Looking Glass

It probably hasn’t dawned on you yet. But it will. Because what happened to Alice is happening to us all.

Our news screens have become our Looking Glasses. And we are being sucked in by our own news screens. Just as Alice climbed onto her mantle and stepped into the world inside her own Looking Glass. (That is, her mirror, in “Through the Looking Glass,” Lewis Carroll’s 1871 sequel to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”)

No wonder our news seems so nonsensical, non-decipherable and backward. That’s how it seemed to Alice when she was inside her own mirror. Time happened in reverse and people rhymed in Jabberwocky.

And that’s the way our world looks and sounds today, as we see and hear it from inside America’s Looking Glass.

Look at what has gone so wrong and seems so backward in the Republican Party founded by Abe and forged by Ike (who saved Europe from being conquered by Hitler) and Ron (who gloriously praised the Greatest Generation that made the world safe for democracy).

But we’ve just seen and heard the new standard bearer-apparent of the Republican Party – Donald Trump – lavishing praise on Europe’s only democracy-snuffing, free-speech-stifling, dictatorial autocrat: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. And we’ve heard all about his love of all sorts of dictators – and even praise of Adolf Hitler.

In his opulent Mar-a-Lago, Trump, speaking in his own dialectical Jabberwocky, declared: “There's nobody that's better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán … He's the boss and he's a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.” (No they don’t.)

Inside our news screen/Looking Glass, we see Trump repeatedly bragging he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. Now Orban helped Trump make more news by explaining the not-so-secret how of what he called Trump’s “quite detailed plans.”

Detail No. 1: No money for Ukraine. Detail No. 2: Let Putin’s invaders win – the first conquest of a European nation since Hitler.

Orban told Moscow’s TV1: “He says the following: First, he will not give a single penny for the Russo-Ukrainian war. That’s why the war will end, because it’s obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own two feet…. The Europeans won’t be able to fund this war alone. And then the war will end.”

But, inside America’s Looking Glass, we are belatedly seeing and hearing even worse from the generals, policy makers and insiders who served America’s 45th president.

CNN’s national security expert and anchor Jim Sciutto has just come out with a book that’s chock-full of abhorrent revelations about Trump. Former Marine Gen. John Kelly, who was Trump’s White House chief of staff, told Sciutto that Trump “likes dictators so much….He was shocked that he didn’t have dictatorial type powers to send US forces places or to move money around within the budget. And he looked at (Vladimir) Putin and Xi (Jinping) and that nutcase in North Korea (Kim Jong Un) as people who were like him in terms of being a tough guy.”

Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton also wrote in his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” that Trump supported Xi’s incarceration of more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs: “Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do.”

Kelly said Trump repeatedly admired things about Hitler. He said Hitler “rebuilt the economy.” Also that Trump admired what he perceived as the “loyalty” Hitler received from his generals and top staff. Kelly told Sciutto: “…when I pointed out to him the German generals as a group were not loyal to him (Hitler) and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, he didn’t know that.”

These are patriotic Americans who witnessed Trump say and do things they considered abhorrent while president. But they kept the worst to themselves. Some kept it until they could sell it to us in books. But at least we finally know.

And so do Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and all the many wise old birds of what has sadly become a Grim Old Party. They know America and the world would be safer if they had voted to convict Trump when he was impeached – so he would be constitutionally barred from ever again being president.

But no. Today they are even endorsing for president a standard bearer of the party of Abe, Ike and Ron who loves and admires present and past dictators – and even Adolf Hitler.

That thumpity-thump you hear is Ike and Reagan spinning. And the huge marbled Abe, immobile in his monument chair, sits silently weeping for his party that has lost its soul.