Trump or Hitler?

Donald Trump’s Truth Social account referenced a “unified Reich” while featuring what the former president would do if he won a second term. It was immediately withdrawn.

As I embarked in the reading of Hitler by Volker Ullrich, I was impressed by the review he made in his introduction of the main characteristics of the Fuehrer that apply to Donald Trump from the most significant biographies of Adolf Hitler over the past half century. The 1000-page book refers to the period between 1889 and 1939, i.e. before the Second World War. I tried to extract the most significant ones and leave to the readers the care of drawing their own conclusions.

· The fellow is a catastrophe, but that’s no reason not to find him interesting as a personality and a destiny (Thomas Mann);

· The difficulty is to decipher the correspondence between the man and the times and the times and the man (Joachim Fest);

· Without the readiness of people to work for the man in charge, there would have been no way he could achieve his murderous aims. His sole talent is his ability to excite the basic instinct of the masses. In a sense he was an empty shell. Hitler is present-not as a living figure, but as an eternal cautionary monument to what human beings are capable of (Ian Kershaw);

· Hitler has stirred up the masses more than anyone else I human history. He is neither a superman nor a puppet (Konrad Heiden);

· A completely unprincipled opportunist driven only by lust for power at its most raw and pure, a revolution with various slogans that he was always willing to change (Alan Bullock);

· Hitler did maintain a consistent world view, no matter how extreme or insane, and that his perspective guided his actions. (Eberhardt Jaekel);

· He was not even honest towards his most intimate confidents. He was so untruthful that he could not even recognize the difference between lies and truth. (Lutz von Grosigk);

· To depict Hitler in human terms is not to elicit sympathy for him or to downplay his crimes, his schizophrenia. Hitler’s path to power was anything but inevitable. In 1933 it would have been possible to prevent his nomination as Reich chancellor. Hitler’s unusually improvisational and personal style was anything but an expression of political incompetence. (Volker Ullrich);

· I don’t want to forget what a massive effect he had on people. That would be to make things too easy for us. (Leni Riefenstahl);

· It was a joyous expression of hundreds of thousands of despondent, cowed, mistreated, desperate people who saw a glimpse of hope of liberation from enslavement and destitution. (Nuremberg Furth police department).

Let’s make sure history is not repeating itself.