It would be a grossly false-equivalency to equate Donald J. Trump to Adopt Hitler. Hitler was a fascist, ideologue, and totalitarian. Donald J. Trump is a "mere"authoritarian, with no hardcore values except self-interest, power, and money. Hitler probably did care about Germany and the German people, wanting to 'make Germany great again,' though in a misguided and perverse manner. Donald J. Trump could care less about America and the American people. "Make America Great Again" is just the marketing pitch for the great con. Hitler was evil. Donald J. Trump may not be evil, but has advocated for doing evil things (e.g., torture; breaching international law by taking the oil from countries to prevent funding of ISIS; committing the war crime of bombing and killing the families (that is, omen and children) of ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups; reinstating the constitutionally suspect policy of stop-and-frisk) and cause a great deal of harm to America. With Hitler, great dangers rested in the man himself. With Donald J. Trump, the danger rest less in the man himself, but with the people he is surrounded. Hitler was a thinker, murderous as his thoughts were. Donald J. Trump is not a thinker, not a reader, not an appreciator of nuance. He is simple-minded, He follows his guts, not his (mental) intuitions but his (bodily) guts. Yet, I suggest to you that an appreciate of the rise of Hitler and the way Hitler governed may well provide value insights into the rise of Donald J. Trump and his approach governance. To that end, read the books mentioned below as cautionary tales of the potential ramifications of Donald J. Trump and his presidential administration. Let me assert here and now,that if, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "The arch of history is long, but it bends towards justice," then history will not be kind to Donald J. Trump. Notwithstanding his success in the 2016 Presidential Election, Donald J. Trump is on the wrong side of history.
Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev'd ed. (New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1962) ("In speaking of the Nazi movement as a 'party' there is a danger of mistaking its true character. For the Nazi Party's no more a party, in the normal democratic sense of that word, than the Communist Party is today; it was an organized conspiracy against the State. The Party's program was important to win support, and, for psychological reason which Hitler discussed quite frankly in Mein Kamfp, the programme had to be kept unalterable and never allowed to become a subject for discussion. But the attitude of the leaders towards the programme was entirely opportunist. For them, as for most of the old Party members, the real object was to get their hands on the State. They were the Catilines of a new revolution, the gutter elite, avid for power, position, and wealth; the sole object of the Party was to secure power by one means or another." "The existence of such an organization was in fact incompatible with the safety of the Republic. No state could tolerate the threat which it implied, if it was resolved to remain master in its own house. Why then were no effective steps taken by the German Government to arrest leaders of the Nazi Party and break up their organization? [R]ecommendations to this effect, with legal grounds for the action proposed, were submitted by the police authorities to the Reich Attorney-General even before the Nazis' electoral triumph of September 1930. Yet no action was taken." Id. at 176. Think of organizations associated with the Alt-Right. Not a "party" party, but a loose and informal affiliation of the like-minded intent on taking control of and, ultimately, undermining the America Republic from within. "Before he came to power Hitler never succeeded in winning more than thirty-seven per cent of the votes in a free election. Had the remaining sixty-three per cent of the German people been united in their opposition he could never have hoped to become Chancellor by legal means; he would have been forced to choose between taking the risks of a seizure of power by force or the continued frustration of his ambitions. He was saved form this awkward dilemma by two factors: the divisions and ineffectiveness of those who opposed him, and the willingness of the German Right to accept him as a partner in government." Id. at 253. Query: Will the Democrat Party, and liberal and moderate Republicans be divided and ineffective in opposing Donald J. Trump's administration? Will the Republican Party, the Republican Establishment, the American Right, etc., accept Donald J. Trump and his administration as their partner in government? ""It does not lie within the scope of this study to present a picture of the totalitarian system in Germany, roof its manifold activities in economic and social policy, the liberation of the police State, control of the courts, the regime's attitude towards the Churches ad the strait-jacketing of education. Hitler bore the final responsibility for whatever was done by the regime, but he hated the routine work of government, and, once he had stabilized his power, he showed comparatively little interest in what was done by his departmental Ministers except to lay down general lines of policy." Id. at 313. Sound like this may well be Donald J Trump's approach to government except, I suspect, he will not even bother with basic policy. Rather, he will be manipulated by his immediate "advisers".).
Peter Fritzsche, An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 2016) (From Chapter 8, The Destruction of Humanity: "At a conference at Wayne State University in 1970, a young rabbi angrily asked, 'How is it possible to believe in God?' He directed the question to Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and author of the autobiographical novel Night, who replied, 'That is not the question. After Auschwitz, the question is how can one believe in man?' Wiesel's response suggested that the focus of any consideration of the Holocaust must be the collective moral compass of Europeans in the 1940s. Could human beings be trusted, and their compassion relied upon, when the powerless were persecuted? Wiesel insinuated that the crimes of the Germans in occupied Europe could not be understood in terms of the Germans or Nazis alone. Both Germans' actions and the response of civilians across Europe, both Jewish and Christian, to those actions challenged basic assumptions about what it meant to be human. It was not difficult to demonize German perpetrators and dwell on the 'yawning gap' that separated 'a Gestapo man from myself,' as French critic Leon Werth admitted in 1942. But such an easy exercise displayed 'the sin of pride.' Werth contemplated that 'the distance was perhaps no greater than the greatest differences imaginable between any two men.' The fact that the positions might be reversed 'is what is frightening.' Werth's line of inquiry into the reversal of positions became pertinent fifteen years later when France's counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria transformed former 'victims into executioners." Id. at 237 (citations omitted).).
Konrad Heiden, The Fuhrer, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim, introduction by Richard Overy (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1944, 1999) (From the "Introduction": Konrad Heiden 1901-66 was Adolf Hitler's first serious biographer. There have been many other fuller, scholarly biographies since, but Heiden shaped the whole biographical approach to the subject, form Hitler's early life in Austria to the political trump of 1933 and the establishment of a harsh dictatorship. Moreover, he did so as a witness to the events he was describing. Unlike more recent accounts, The Fuehrer was written by someone who watched Hitler's meteoric rise and felt moved to explain to contemporaries how it was possible." "Heiden was a young socialist student in Munich when he first saw Hitler speak. It was 1923, the year of inflation and political chaos in Germany. Heiden was not impressed by what he saw: a self-centered demagogue at the head of what he called the 'any of Uprooted and Disinherited.' Yet ten years later this same Hitler was German Chancellor and Heiden was forced into exile. . . " "Above all Heiden wanted to explain how it was possible that a man he found laughable and contemptuous in 1923 could exert such extraordinary power over others--''the greatest mover of the masses in world history'. This is a question that has been asked many times since. Heiden's explanation is as powerfully imaginative and intellectually convincing as anything produced since the war. He was keenly aware that Hitler's political triumph had no been preordained. Hitler may have been 'the man of the hour', as Heiden put it, but that did not necessarily mean it was the 'hour of the man'. He shows how much Hitler depended on chance and opportunity, on the feebleness or self-interest or ambition of other German politicians, in order to win power." Id. at 5. So with Hitler, so with Donald J. Trump? How feeble will the Democrats and right-minded Republicans be? How impotent will be the America people? How high will they jump to serve their leader?).
David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich's Road to the Third Reich (New York & London: Norton, 1997).
Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent 1899-1939, translated from the German Jefferson Chase (New York: Knopf, 2016) ("The Frankfurter Zeitung wrote of an 'election of embitterment,' in which the majority of voters had articulated their dissatisfaction with 'the methods of governing or rather non-governing, the indecisive parliamentary palaver of the past few years.' The journalist also believed that economic hardship had pushed many desperate Germans into Hitler's waiting arms. [] Another Die Weltbuhne writer tried to explain Hitler's success as the result of a 'deep depression' that had gripped 'the apolitical segments of society' in particular: 'They were beyond salvation, Kessler thought, although they could 'bring unspeakable misery upon Europe as they resist their demise.' But interpretations of Nazism that viewed the phenomenon as a sociological by-product of the decline of this or that class ignored what was new about the movement: its diffuse character as a populist party enabled it to integrate heterogeneous interests and subordinate them to the charismatic figure of the Fuhrer." Id. at 234 (citations omitted).).
