Like the malicious, boastful schoolboy he will forever be, Donald Trump smirkingly twists apt descriptions of himself and his often cartoonishly deranged acts against those who point out his transgressions. And as in a game of Follow the Leader, his fellow Republicans continue to project their own psychopathies on the truth-tellers.

Thus the all-too-accurate pejorative "Trump crime family," describing decades of phony charitable and educational scams, purposeful misstatements of property values and massive grifting during the White House years, becomes mock-outraged references to the “Biden Crime Family.”

Call one of his ravings sent out in the wee hours on his social media platform Truth Central deranged, and he’ll latch onto that word to use as invective against his political opponents.

As Salon’s Heather Digby Parton recently noted, Trump is even trying to turn the tables on the increasing number of historians, journalists and politicians who warn that the former grifter in chief is an obvious threat to the continuation of our democracy. Yes, the twice-impeached ex-president who lies about and despises the free press and talks about suspending the Constitution now regularly claims that he is somehow protecting all of us from “Joe Biden’s war on democracy.”

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As it turns out, Trump’s exhortation to insurrection, “Fight like hell or you won’t have a country,” turned out to be a warning to all non-faux patriots, the great majority of Americans, who now are now forced to be conservative, whatever else they may be —conservative about preserving the Constitution, political norms, the rule of law and freedom of the press — because no one else seems willing to do that any longer.

That the 77-year-old former president who is still attempting to overturn the 2020 election simply makes use of the “I know you are, but what am I?” taunt of a pre-teen is laughable (Parton calls it “his latest tribute to the late great Pee-wee Herman”) and also repugnant, because he’s supposed to be an adult. But, like all con men and authoritarians, who are also essentially swindlers, he knows that if you repeat something often enough, an amazing number of people will come to believe it.

Or they’ll believe it because they just want to believe it. As Paul Simon long ago wrote in the classic “The Boxer”: “A man hears what he wants to hear/ and disregards the rest.”

If Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels were here today to witness such rhetoric, he’d no doubt applaud how well it is following form. He might even burst into laughter in delight at how amazingly successful it has been in the United States.

As Rachel Maddow (who likely doesn’t enjoy talking about it, but can tell you a bit about the history of American Nazis) recently noted, Trump uses terms like "fascist" against his critics because, as always, his mission is to obfuscate the truth. As she recently remarked: “He knows he’s going to get called a fascist for talking this way. And he’s calling all of his opponents fascists, too, trying to rob that word of its meaning.”

I thought Maddow’s use of "rob" was well........

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