Donald Trump praises Russia’s DNC hacking and urges Putin’s regime to keep it up

Clown. Char­la­tan. Big­ot. Pho­ny. Fraud. Don­ald Trump has been called all these things and more (and fit­ting­ly), but now we can add more descrip­tor to the list: Trai­tor. Only a man who puts him­self and his own thirst for polit­i­cal pow­er above his coun­try would make such unpa­tri­ot­ic, reck­less, and irre­spon­si­ble com­ments:

Don­ald J. Trump said Wednes­day that he hoped Rus­sia had hacked Hillary Clinton’s email, essen­tial­ly sanc­tion­ing a for­eign power’s cyber­spy­ing of a sec­re­tary of state’s correspondence.

“Rus­sia, if you’re lis­ten­ing, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are miss­ing,” Mr. Trump said, star­ing direct­ly into the cam­eras. “I think you will prob­a­bly be reward­ed might­i­ly by our press.”

It’s been said many times dur­ing the cam­paign that Don­ald Trump is only for Don­ald Trump. And it’s true. Trump’s slo­ga­neer­ing aside, he is not inter­est­ed in mak­ing Amer­i­ca a more pros­per­ous, free, or safe nation.

What Trump wants is pow­er. He will resort to any means nec­es­sary to get it, includ­ing sell­ing out his own coun­try­men and countrywomen.

John McCain once run on the slo­gan of Coun­try First. Trump’s slo­gan might as well be Trump Above Amer­i­ca. Because that is what he’s real­ly about.

Again and again, Trump has demon­strat­ed through his words as well as his actions that his whole pur­pose in life is to enrich him­self at the expense of others.

Trump is a neo­fas­cist war­mon­ger who, like fas­cist despots of years past, has exploit­ed the fears and anger of mil­lions to seize the nom­i­na­tion of one of Amer­i­ca’s two major polit­i­cal parties.

Fright­en­ing­ly, he has come clos­er to the White House than any fig­ure like him in Amer­i­can his­to­ry. Joe McCarthy and Father Cough­lin were once pow­er­ful fig­ures in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics too, but they were nev­er cho­sen the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee of a major polit­i­cal par­ty. That’s a feat only Trump has accomplished.

Is it any won­der that white suprema­cist orga­ni­za­tions are rejoic­ing? They feel like this is their moment, just as Hitler and Mus­solin­i’s acolytes felt in the 1920s and 1930s when the Nazis and Fas­cists were seiz­ing pow­er in Ger­many and Italy.

“This has to be the first time that a major pres­i­den­tial can­di­date has active­ly encour­aged a for­eign pow­er to con­duct espi­onage against his polit­i­cal oppo­nent,” said Hillary for Amer­i­ca Senior Pol­i­cy Advi­sor Jake Sul­li­van in a state­ment. “That’s not hyper­bole, those are just the facts. This has gone from being a mat­ter of curios­i­ty, and a mat­ter of pol­i­tics, to being a nation­al secu­ri­ty issue.”

This feels like anoth­er moment where, once again, we’re left to won­der how this can pos­si­bly be hap­pen­ing. How can this be real? How did one of Amer­i­ca’s major polit­i­cal par­ties end up with an unpa­tri­ot­ic neo­fas­cist as its nominee?