“Thank God you didn’t make the “Hitler” comparison. Once someone does that, their intellectual credibility disappears.”
Oh?
Trump persecutes illegal aliens and wants to deport them. Hitler took German citizenship away from Jews (making them illegal aliens) so he could deport them far to the east on reservations in the Soviet Union (he must have got this idea from the way we treated native peoples). Of course, he had to defeat Stalin first and the Red Army prevented that.
Trump wants to make American great again and Hitler wanted to establish the Third Reich (the Roman Empire was the First Reich and the Holy Roman Empire was the Second Reich; Adolph apparently was not aware that Voltaire said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was not holy, nor Roman, nor an empire).
Trump believes in American Exceptionalism and Hitler told Germans they are the master race.
Trump runs as an outsider and bashes the established politicians. Hitler bashed the government for stabbing the German Army in the back because it signed the armistice ending WWI.
The big difference is that the German people were not so stupid as to elect Hitler to power. The German industrialists were deathly afraid of a Marxist Revolution and convinced President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor (the head of government) because Hitler was a rabid anti-communist. They actually told Hindenburg that they could control Hitler. It was a case of not heeding that old warning: “Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.”
So, the question is: are Americans more stupid than Germans if enough Americans elect Trump president? If Mencken is right that “Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard,” we just might bring Trump to power in a democracy.
What is worse than Trump are Trump’s followers who all have authoritarian personalities. This means they see everything as black and white and want a strong leader (der Fuehrer) as an authority figure. People with authoritarian personalities can’t abide people who disagree with them and persecute them as heretics. Hence, Trump’s followers beating up protesters as Hitler’s brown shirts did in Germany. If there are enough people who have authoritarian personalities in the US, then we just may have the Fuehrer Trump as our next president.