Chris Cuomo, media personality, brother to New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and no friend of Donald Trump, was responding to a caller on his radio show. “Trump is like Hitler …” the caller began.
Cuomo cut him off instantly. “No! No, I won’t have anything like that on this show. Trump is nothing like Hitler. Talking that way doesn’t do any good at all.”
Cuomo is right. Trump hasn’t started a world war. He isn’t killing millions of people. He doesn’t command a personal murder squad. Any suggestion that Trump can or would do those things is wildly out of place, today, and doesn’t advance any reasonable understanding of what is happening, today, in America.
Cuomo is missing the point. Hitler did all of those things after seizing absolute power. For a decade before 1933, Hitler was just the leader of a right-wing political party in Germany. During that entire decade, Hitler followed exactly the same strategy that Trump is following today.
I thoroughly recommend Peter Ross Range’s excellent history, “The Unfathomable Ascent: How Hitler Came to Power.” This well-researched and disciplined history doesn’t mention Trump anywhere. Not even once. It is strictly a history and is not a political tract in any way. Yet, I challenge anyone to read it and not see Trump in almost every paragraph. The methods that Hitler/Trump have used are a formula for gaining power at any cost that worked before and are working again.
Some hallmarks …
Absolute loyalty is the one thing that the party members must have. Absolutely anyone lacking in absolute loyalty is kicked to the curb.
Apart from enemies, there was and is no political program. The Nazi party (National Socialist) started as a left-wing organization not that much different from communists. They became ultra-right wing without ever actually changing a party platform written in a decade earlier. The recently concluded Republican convention didn’t even bother to write one.
The greatest skill that Hitler had was his ability to whip up a crowd of supporters, the bigger the better, to fanatic excitement. He used this skill to create violence in the streets, paralysis in the legislature and the division of the entire country against itself.
Trump isn’t the Hitler who plunged Germany and the world into war. But that isn’t the only Hitler in history. Read Range’s book. It frightens me to see how much Trump is like the Hitler who knew no bounds in his thirst for power before 1933.
Dan Mabbutt
Dan Mabbutt graduated as an electrical engineer from the University of Utah and retired from a career in data processing in Salt Lake City. He now lives in the Zion National Park gateway town of Springdale.
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