By Andrew McGall in the East Bay Times

Donald Trump’s embrace of Russian President Vladimir Putin bonded the GOP presidential candidate to an oligarchic despot who tolerates no political opponents. They’re exiled, imprisoned, murdered.

Trump will brook no opposition. He’s a thin-skinned bully who takes pleasure in inciting violence and is good at it.

A President Trump would be a banana republic tyrant building up an oligarchic state like the ones we have long inflicted on Latin and South America. We have trained well in places like Chile, Guatemala, Honduras and Costa Rica for Trump’s vision of the United States.

His supporters reveal the twisted politics that tortured the South. Trump’s dispossessed whites threatened by global modernity are like the poor whites who upheld the Southern gentry who treated them nearly as harshly as they did the African slaves.

Trump has no interest in saving the middle class. Oligarchs recognize only their own kind and pay technocrats to control everyone else. They divert public money to their own uses, not to a nation’s needs. A Trump administration could only deepen our economic and class divisions.

So the candidate seeks an ethnic cleansing in a nation rattling with weapons and plenty of people aiming for a new order. It is no wonder that the white nationalists praise him. He speaks their language.

The border wall and mass deportations will require new troops of police and guards. Their new holding camps will await the next batch of losers. Trump’s “deportation task force” will reach into every neighborhood.

Like all such costly bureaucracies, it will find ways to expand its reach and budget. Prepare for more intrusive internal surveillance. Anticipate more militarization of civil society.

Further illuminating the folly of Trumpism is the despicable cynicism of his camp followers elbowing for power in an authoritarian administration.

Aren’t Trump’s troops the worst tinhorn agents for a New Order? Giuliani slavers for a chance to pull out the clubs and guns. Imagine Chris Christie bloated with federal power. They would be the new insiders even more effortlessly ignoring the common good than Congress does now.

The Trumpistas are insurgents for the international oligarchs, raiding toward the While House with Russian support while the public mutters “uhhh…” or exclaims “What? What?”

Naturally, we’re confused. To many, life was, however slowly, improving. Then Trump drew us to a precipice of fear, asking us to rush over it like lemmings.

He is a caricature of the elitist belief that our nation has too much democracy. Some try to revive the Jim Crow South. If they can make voting more difficult, they can silence the poor and minorities. The House GOP shut down government — and every year cripples it — as though it alone rules the nation of us all. Like Trump, the GOP tolerates no dissent.

Donald Trump raised a banner to his party’s hijacking of popular sovereignty when he proclaimed “I am your voice” and “I alone can fix it.” His is the true political correctness the GOP seeks in its ideal one-party state.

Such politics violate representative principles in Congress and are dictatorial in Trump.