Former New York Times columnist Frank Rich has a long history of extreme TDS, including fantasizing in January 2020 about "Trump's collaborators" whom he labeled as "Vichy Republicans." Time has certainly not mellowed Rich whose bizarre vengeance porn fantasies have gone into overdrive as you can see in his New York magazine rant on Wednesday, "The Collaborators."
The subtitle reveals Rich's deep deep desire for vengeance upon those who dare to work for or with President Trump: "The cronies of Trump’s second term are more brazen than the old ones. They’re also heading for a harsher comeuppance." Rich then went on to go Full Mental Jacket right away in the first paragraph:
As the bottom falls out of Donald Trump’s second term, I find myself trying to imagine what’s going through the minds of his collaborators during the endgame. Not so much the thugs, mad dogs, buffoons, and rabid ideologues like Hegseth, Miller, Patel, and RFK Jr. — their conscience-free inner swamps leave nothing to the imagination. What’s more intriguing are the elites among this gang who did have some reputation for probity, independence, or at least sanity before enlisting in MAGA Republicanism: Cabinet members like Todd Blanche, Scott Bessent, Doug Burgum, and Jay Clayton and Trump’s billionaire cheerleaders on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. These guys — they are mainly guys — used to be thought of as the adults in whatever room they occupied (with the exception of Elon Musk, that is). You’d think they would have wanted to protect the good names they had once worked hard to build.
The room these collaborators find themselves in now is a bunker retrofitted to serve as a toddler’s gilded playpen. The lame-duck president they cater to is running amok in a second childhood of ceaseless tantrums and slobbering irrationality.
Rich later concedes that "Trump is not Hitler" ...and then spends much of the rest of his extended rant disguised as an essay comparing Trump to Hitler or what he categorizes as like Hitler-Lite. Here are but a few examples:
...That Trump falls short of Hitler does not let his collaborators and enablers off the hook. To use the Third Reich as a yardstick to measure a government’s criminality is to define deviancy down. Trump’s White House is a crime scene even if the likely sum of its felonies hasn’t approached the high bar set by the Nazis.
That 6 million detainees have not been exterminated in the ICE incarceration network doesn’t neutralize the reality that in Trump’s second term, an estimated 57 have died in government custody under circumstances shrouded in secrecy.
...What drives a member of America’s elite to aid and abet a regime like this? Sheer greed can never be underestimated — whether the profits are personal or corporate. The historical record of business collaborators during the Nazi era is instructive; German industrial tycoons raced to sign on in Germany in 1933, just three weeks after Hitler became chancellor.
Despite Rich's lame disclaimer about making a Hitler comparison, the name of the Nazi dictator appears in his screed a dozen times. And when not invoking Hitler/Nazi comparisons Rich urges lawfare vengeance upon those he labels as Trump "collaborators."
Let’s assume, as many of those in the crosshairs seem to, that most everyone can escape a Democratic Congress’s scrutiny scot-free however excruciating the hearings. That is hardly the end of the saga. The unprecedented scale and variety of misdeeds in the Trump presidency are bound to usher in an avalanche of civil litigation, post-Bondi-Patel-Blanche federal investigations, tell-all memoirs, tranches of unsealed and leaked documents, heretofore hidden archives, and more investigative journalism of the high quality that has been surging nearly everywhere except CBS News in Trump’s second term. The revelations will play out for years in the courts. The costs in legal fees, humiliation, and time for those swept up in the ensuing dragnet will be astronomical.
...While there’s a statute of limitations to the legal fallout, there is none to reputational damage for the big fish in the Trump regime. Todd Blanche’s daughter and granddaughter should live long enough to judge for themselves if he came clean in his sworn testimony about his Epstein and Maxwell dealings, whether the full story emerges within his lifetime or not.
...The postwar fate of the elite American and English Nazi appeasers and collaborators offers a glimpse of what may come. None of them were implicated in the Third Reich’s crimes against humanity. But that didn’t free them from taint and guilt.
...It’s small compensation for the damage Trump has inflicted on America, but as the full record of his reign is uncovered, there may be a public reckoning not just for the legally guilty. Consequences may arrive for somebodies like Schwarzman who didn’t break the law but supported Trump’s plundering of democracy and nonstop cruelty with dollars and silence.
The leftists promised this same reputational ruin in 2021, and Trump was re-elected. As for Rich, as the famous Gary Larson cartoon stated, "Just plain nuts!"
