Race killings, would-be assassins, and the largest anti-Semitic massacre in US history

Hate murders in Kentucky and Pittsburgh, and mail bombs to Trump's adversaries. Ten days till the mid-terms and Trump is determined to make the election about foreign vermin and rootless cosmopolitans. It can happen here. It is happening here. No, Trump isn't Hitler--he's a two-bit hustler with a rotting brain. But he is taking us down a path that we would recognize immediately if it was happening somewhere else.Ridiculously, I have been taking some of this week's events personally, as in, why did I bother to write all those words about right wing populism for all of the difference they made? And was I too easy on America's right wing political class? I argued that while they were cynically using age-old hate tropes to energize voters, what they really cared about was keeping the rich rich. Now I’m not so sure. I really do think the Trump core is white supremacist--and by "core" I don't mean those blue collar guys in diners (though lots of them are too), but Federalist Society-approved judges, Congress-people, TV propagandists, think-tank presidents, political consultants, and an embarrassing number of professional writers.While Bowers brought home how virulent anti-Semitism still is in some of the cesspits of the US--and how commonplace its vilest tropes are on Fox News and in Trump's twitterstream--I don't think it's healthy or reasonable to make this weekend's events about "the Jews." They're about hate and xenophobia writ large, and they have less-than-nothing to do with Israel's ghastly politics. Jews should be championing the rights of refugees everywhere, whether they are Central Americans or Palestinians.At the same time, I'm pretty sure that if Trump switched out his economic policies for Bernie's tomorrow, most of his followers wouldn’t notice the difference, as long as he kept that same note of contempt in his voice and continued to ridicule and deride the elites, "foreigners," and people of color. What matters to them is his us-against-them mentality.I don’t see anyone restoring a sense of comity to this broken country. Countries do heal from civil wars, but one side has to lose first.