Lawyers galore have fled the prospect of representing Donald Trump at his upcoming Impeachment Trial (the sequel).

So his pardoned consigliere Steve Bannon (who knows his Nazi history) wants The Donald to testify in person. It’s a serious Hitlerian scenario.

In 1923, Adolf tried to overthrow Bavaria’s state government. His violent rant at a Munich beerhall sparked an armed conflict that killed eight (Adolf dislocated his shoulder, then hid at a friend’s house).

His high-profile trial jump-started Hitler’s quest for fascist power.

Trump’s own “beerhall putsch” left five dead, plus two police suicides. He pledged to “be there with you” but hid like Hitler.

Trump’s paramilitary Death Squad meant to murder the likes of Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Bernie Sanders. They crushed the skull of one cop and gleefully assaulted others. Many were professionally trained and heavily armed.

Trump is currently hiding in a Floridian Elba, barely seen or heard.

For his neo-Nazi cult, Trump’s return to the global spotlight would likely trigger waves of armed assault.

A brain-numbing tsunami of bloviating blather would swamp the global media. The wonky details of Biden’s bid to stop the pandemic, revive the economy, and save the planet would pale before the moronic bombast of the former Orange führer.

No matter how badly Trump comports himself in the eyes of his haters, his cultist legions will lap up every drop of insane blather. Once back in the spotlight, Donald Trump need merely open his mouth and the madness will march.

That’s what paved Hitler’s road to power. After his riveting post-putsch courtroom performance, Adolf spent eight months in a posh prison compiling his ghastly blueprint for global conquest. Mein Kampf was his very own Art of the Deal.

No matter what Trump might say at his impeachment, he’ll emerge unconvicted and unscathed. Chuck Schumer’s Senate Dems are simply too dull to compete for airtime with this media master of the Big Lie.

Mitch McConnell’s knot of GOP toadies will embrace his every addled word. They will pompously blast the loser libtards he so recently sent his minions to murder.

But even if Trump doesn’t testify, the Republican road to power is clear. Hitler built his entire career around the false narrative that Germany had actually won World War One, only to have that sacred victory stolen by traitors and Jews.

Trump will forever bleat how he really won two presidential landslides. The traitorous back-stabbers who denied his 2020 dictatorship are not only the liberal Democrats … but also Pence’s fake Republicans, who certified those fake electoral votes even as Trump’s Christian soldiers came so close to killing him.

The GOP blitzkrieg against any future fair election is already underway. That so many citizens who were young and of color could cast hand-marked paper ballots and have them counted was the core of Trump’s defeat. Should it happen again, he says, no Republican will ever win another election.

So gerrymandered GOP state legislators in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona want it made clear that only the reliably rich and the white may register to vote, get a ballot, return a ballot, or have one reliably counted.

And after gerrymandering the districting maps to their permanent advantage during the infamous 2010 REDMAP Coup, the ultimate GOP vision is that only a Red US House and super-majority GOP state legislatures may continue to exist.

(The Democrats’ parallel vision is to lock down their own safe districts, preventing progressives like Bernie Sanders or AOC from ever winning a presidential primary.)

With 6-3 control of the US Supreme Court, Trump’s GOP is positioned to win bans on paper balloting and competitive representational districts while protecting the Electoral College and the power of Big Money.

Trump’s January 6 Capitol killers’ costumes advertised RWDS (“Right Wing Death Squad”) along with“Camp Auschwitz” and 6MWE (“6 Million Weren’t Enough”). They laud Pinochet’s Chile and Putin’s Russia … and want them here.

But grassroots campaigns have won epic victories for paper ballots and against gerrymandering in places like Iowa, California, and Michigan.

Diverse turnouts shifted the US Senate in places like Georgia.

About half the states have the initiative and referendum and could win Constitutional amendments that could well hold up in the long term.

Democracy advocates must now learn how to protect free and fair elections while facing an armed fascist cult that hates them.

However it happens, the impeachment circus will be bigly ugly.

But it’ll be a fleeting prelude to the Great Democracy War of the 2020s, which we must win.

Original at Reader Supported News

Harvey Wasserman’s People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org. He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition’s Monday 5 p.m. EST zooms via