Until recently an accepted rule of political debate was that the first person to mention Hitler automatically lost the argument. Hitler was regarded as such a special case that nobody alive could be mentioned in the same breath. Among the many special achievements of Donald Trump may be the redundancy of this long-standing rule.
Donald Trump isn’t Adolf Hitler, though I suspect in some ways he might like to be.
Many people these days are making the Trump-Hitler comparison, but it doesn’t stand up to close examination.
Sure, Trump’s a populist, but his appeal isn’t anywhere near as wide as Hitler’s was, at his peak.
Like Hitler, Trump appeals most to those who feel aggrieved, ripped off, left behind. Who feel they are part of a master race that has been unfairly held down by corrupt and cunning “elites”. Who are keen to avenge the wrongs that they believe have been done to them.
Also like Hitler, Trump promotes a narrative that his nation has been betrayed by enemies at home and abroad and that he alone has a program to rebuild and repair the damage that these enemies have caused.
Like Hitler, Trump is an enthusiastic and unrepentant liar, falsifying, fabricating and distorting with scarcely a pause for breath. Trump rivals Hitler as a manipulator of the gullible masses through targeted propaganda, seeing it – like Hitler did – purely as a means to the end of securing his goals.
Like Hitler, Trump says the way back to greatness is through military might projected abroad and by ruthless suppression of “traitors” and enemies at home. Hitler subscribed to the concept of “lebensraum” – which meant taking over other people’s territory to help Germany increase its wealth and power. Trump blatantly subscribes to the same idea.
Also similarly to Hitler, Trump and his followers appear to be building an intimidatory paramilitary force that owes its loyalty to the regime and not necessarily to the nation per se. Hitler had his Brownshirts and Trump has ICE and its ilk.
Trump is currying favour with industrial interests, as Hitler did, merging the corporate and the military. Like Hitler, Trump is loved by grifters in the world of finance and business and like Hitler, Trump has apologists in the media who excuse and encourage his excesses. Like Hitler, Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-people, laying waste to principles of accountability.
Like Hitler, Trump is a xenophobe. While Hitler focused his hatred on Jews, Slavs and Gypsies, Trump despises immigrants in general.
It is true that both men produced at least one book each. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), while Trump claims authorship of The Art of the Deal.
Hitler had a staunch ally in Italy’s fascist Mussolini. Trump has Netanyahu, the extremist right-wing leader of Israel. (Which of the two is the senior partner in the obviously close relationship may be a matter for debate in some circles.)
Hitler was appeased by cowardly leaders of other nations who watched him as he rose and inflicted misery. Trump has until very recently been enjoying much similar kowtowing appeasement from many world leaders.
Those who claim to see history repeating itself in the USA certainly have some points in favour of their argument. But it must be said that there are also differences between Hitler and Trump.
Hitler – who hated Jews – tried to force most of them to leave Germany before herding those who didn’t or couldn’t leave into concentration camps, exploiting them for labour and executing millions of them. Trump has been trying to make undocumented immigrants leave the USA but while tens of thousands have been herded into an archipelago of prisons across the country and offshore, few among his critics imagine he or his followers would ever resort to murdering those prisoners en masse. Not even those who hate Trump the most believe that would ever be his style.
Hitler reportedly had a covert hunger for riches, hiding hefty donations from arms-makers and others in a network of slush funds. Open lust for personal gain, however, transparently permeates almost everything Trump does.
Unlike Trump, I don’t think Hitler had a long and shameful record of malpractice and incompetence in business before he became national leader – other than being a lifelong tax-dodger.
Also unlike Trump, there does not appear to be any credible suggestion of lurid sexual misconduct on Hitler’s part. True, Trump may not have partaken of illicit sexual activities with minors via his long and close association with the mysteriously deceased pedophile Geoffrey Epstein. But the furious efforts of he and his allies to suppress evidence in the Epstein case have done little to allay suspicion.
Hitler was beyond doubt an accomplished speaker, capable of holding huge crowds spellbound with his impassioned rhetoric. Trump, on the other hand, often dribbles idiocy when he speaks, and his written words are usually banal and stupid.
It appears from history that Hitler may at least have attempted to better the circumstances of his favoured “Aryan” constituency – albeit at the cruel expense of his victims. Trump’s largesse is mostly directed to his donors. Many of the deluded souls who voted for him are learning that his professed concern for their welfare was mostly empty lies.
So there are differences as well as similarities between Hitler and Trump.
To my mind, the thing that – more than anything else – makes the pair similar may be their inevitability. Both were summoned or pushed to power by their times and their societies. Leaders like these are easy to see in retrospect as the cause of all that their regimes bring to pass, but they are actually themselves symptoms of whatever malaise of time, place and circumstance created and empowered them. They and their ascension are part of a process.
Trump is in power because of what the USA had already become before he emerged from the swamp of greed and corruption that he pretended to hate. He, or somebody like him, was inevitable. If US society had been healthy there is no way a man like Donald Trump could have become president, any more than Adolf Hitler could have risen to rule a healthy Germany.
People will, and do, debate the nature of the economic and social diseases that brought the USA to where it is now. Perhaps it has to do with capitalism and a doomed and damning quest for eternal growth of profits. Probably there are many factors.
The more pressing question is what happens next, and that is also unclear. What seems certain is that nothing can return to what used to pass – until relatively recently – as “normal”. The forces that brought Trump into being will play themselves out whether he stays or goes.
The USA is monstrously in debt. Trump parading around the world with a begging bowl and a loaded gun only makes this situation clearer than ever. From its longtime self-portrayal as the “world’s policeman”, Trump’s US is an openly declared gangster state, behaving exactly like a mob boss on the way out.
The social contract between state and people is increasingly tattered. Americans have been becoming accustomed to more surveillance, more censorship, more suppression of dissent, more corruption, more cronyism, more poverty and more dishonesty in government. They should probably anticipate even more of the same, in increasing doses.
US allies and empire vassals can expect more bullying, more demands for wealth transfers in cash and kind and more interference in their domestic affairs.
US opponents, for their part, have no choice but to prepare in earnest for the deadliest eventualities. History suggests that this empire, like others before it, might gamble that more warfare will help it stave off decline and prevent the rise of rivals.
With or without Trump other nations – whether “friend” or “foe” – will be thoroughly re-examining their positions and preparing for military, economic and diplomatic contingencies that would before now have been considered unthinkable. They should probably have already been doing so, but Trump has irrevocably forced their hands.
Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler, but even so . . .
