Editor’s Note: As the days of the Trump travesty dwindle down, it becomes increasingly difficult to see how any decent person could ever have voted for this pig of a president. At the time I was writing this piece, there was talk of impeachment for the Trump-led assault on the Capitol; however, there really isn’t enough time left in his administration for this to be practical. There has also been a lot of discussion of invoking the 25th Amendment to declare Trump incapable of finishing out his term. However, the problem is that this would need to be initiated by Vice President Mike Pence, and about the only way Pence could ever work up enough spine to stand up to his Dear Leader would be if Trump shot his wife right in front of him, and I’m not even sure that would do it.
I’ve never heard any historian describe Adolph Hitler as stupid. A surfeit of confidence in his military abilities may have caused him to make some poor strategic decisions during World War II, but no one could have become the dictator of 1930s Germany while lacking smarts. Brutally insane, probably. Monstrously evil, certainly. But not stupid.
Hitler
comparisons tend toward hyperbole, and are always a tough sell, as are
Mussolini analogies (despite the Orange Man’s uncanny physical
resemblance to the Italian tyrant and their nearly indistinguishable
mannerisms). Although inhumane, separating Hispanic toddlers from their
parents, then caging them, is not equivalent to Auschwitz. Regardless,
Trump’s tactics since his landslide electoral defeat and Hitler’s
during the fall of the Reich in 1945 show some disturbing similarities. Like a spurned husband who doesn’t want anyone else to have his woman, because he can’t have her, Hitler ordered Paris destroyed before it fell to the Allies. However, General Dietrich von Choltitz, the city’s German commandant, disobeyed his orders, and Hitler was denied the response he hoped for to his infamous query, “Is Paris burning?” Subsequently,
the Fuhrer decided the German people had let him down, and didn’t
deserve the modern, industrialized, thousand-year empire he’d stolen for
them, so he demanded that loyalists, such as Albert Speer, oversee the
destruction of the Fatherland’s infrastructure. This was not just to
prevent the Allies from seizing it, but to deny it to the German populace
that had failed him.
Today’s
Brownshirts — e.g., the thuggish Proud Boys (note: “boys,” not men)
— and the other red-hatted terrorists who attacked the Capitol spew
white supremacist rhetoric reminiscent of the past century’s fascists.
And like Trump’s 1930s antecedents from Germany and Italy, he’s
undermining the very democratic processes that brought him to power in the
first place. He’s attacked the free press as an “enemy of the
people,” and suppressed the vote by reducing the number of polling
places in minority areas and hamstringing the Postal Service to hinder
safer mail-in voting during the pandemic. That being said, I have an idea I’d like to see discussed. What if widespread voter fraud actually happened, only not by the Democrats? Think about it: The Republicans run most of the state houses, including those in the swing states; they own the executive branch and the courts (including the Supreme Court); and they run the Dept. of Justice as if it were Trump’s personal law firm. Which party is in a better position to rig an election?
In
1945, many in Germany’s “deep state” resisted the Nazi party’s
suicidal “scorched earth” policy. Similarly, the Georgia GOP officials
who resisted Trump’s seditious phone calls to find illegal votes — an
effort as treasonous as his incitement of the mob to seize Congress —
put democracy and their country ahead of loyalty to the party and its
Duce. However,
none of this means Trump has behaved stupidly. Just as Hitler and Herman
Goering looted Europe of a fortune in artworks at the end of World War II,
so too is Trump using his fictitious campaign against nonexistent voter
fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for himself. If anything is
stupid, it’s that ordinary citizens feel an urge to send their money to
a millionaire and a traitor. |
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