Why "Waiting Calmly" For Trump to "Moderate" Will Fail

The presidency of Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, is terrorizing many across the globe but perhaps nowhere more than Germany which knows from history the dangers of people like Trump and the price of that complacency and failure to act early to prevent the advance of evil.  Donald Trump has been in office a mere 14 days yet it already seems like an eternity in some ways.  With each day we have seen more autocratic and bizarre behavior coming from the current occupant of the White House. First the Muslim ban - which excludes, of course Muslim nations where Trump has investments - and now a likely license to discriminate law that will give special rights and preferences to Christian extremists.  Then there is the threat to send American troops into Mexico, the threat to take military action against Iran, the threatening and rude telephone conversation with the Prime Minister of Australia, a steadfast American ally for over 100 years. Oh, and let's not forget the threat to take away federal funds from the University of California at Berkley and the appointment of Christian Right extremists Jerry Falwell Jr. to head an education reform task force.  A piece in the German publication Zeit looks at the mistakes made by 1930's Germans.  The same mistakes are now being made on 2017 America.  Here are article excerpts:

Is there reason to worry? No, thought Nikolaus Sieveking, an employee at Hamburg’s World Economy Archive. "I find the act of viewing Hitler’s chancellorship as a sensational event to be childish enough that I will leave that to his loyal followers," he wrote in his diary on Jan. 30, 1933.

Like Sieveking, many Germans didn’t initially recognize this date as a dramatic turning point. Few sensed what Hitler’s appointment as chancellor actually meant, and many reacted to the event with shocking indifference.

The chancellor of the presidential cabinet had changed twice in 1932 -- Heinrich Brüning was replaced in early June by Franz von Papen, who was replaced in early December by Kurt von Schleicher. People had almost gotten used to this tempo. Why should the Hitler government be anything more than just an episode?  In the Wochenschau news programs shown in cinemas, the swearing-in of the new cabinet came last, after the major sporting events. 

This, despite the fact that Hitler had plainly explained in "Mein Kampf" and countless speeches before 1933 what he wanted to do once in power: to abolish the democratic "system" of Weimar Germany, to "eradicate" Marxism (by which he meant both social democracy and communism) and to "remove" the Jews from Germany. As for foreign policy, he made no secret of the fact that he wanted to revise the Versailles Treaty and that his long-term goal was the conquering of "Lebensraum in the East."

German President Paul von Hindenburg’s camarilla, which had hoisted him to power through a series of intrigues, agreed with Hitler’s goals of preventing a return to parliamentary democracy, of cutting the chains of the Versailles Treaty, massively arming the military and once again making Germany the dominant power in Europe. As for the rest of Hitler’s stated intentions, his conservative coalition partners were inclined to dismiss them as mere rhetoric. Once he was in power, they argued, he would become more reasonable.

Hitler’s thirst for power couldn’t have been more grossly underestimated. . . . . Big-business representatives shared the same illusion. In an editorial in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, which had close ties to heavy industry, editor-in-chief Fritz Klein wrote that working together with the Nazis would be "difficult and exhausting," but that people had to dare to take "the leap into darkness" because the Hitler movement had become the strongest political actor in Germany. The head of the Nazi party would now have to prove "whether he really had what is needed in order to become a statesman." The stock market didn’t seem spooked either -- people were waiting to see what would happen. 

The conservatives who helped Hitler rise to power, and his opponents in the republican camp, were wrong in their assessment of the true division of power. 

The big liberal newspapers also argued that nothing truly terrible would happen. Theodor Wolff, the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt saw the cabinet as the embodiment of what the united right-wing political groups had wanted since their meeting in Bad Harzburg in 1931. He opened his editorial on Jan. 31 by writing: "It has been achieved. Hitler is the Reich Chancellor, Hugenberg is the economics dictator and the positions have been distributed as the men of the ‘Harzburger Front’ had wanted." The new government, he argued, would try anything to "intimidate and silence opponents." A ban on the Communist Party was on the agenda, he thought, as well as a curtailing of the freedom of the press. But even the imagination of this otherwise so clear-sighted journalist didn’t go far enough to conceive the power of a totalitarian dictatorship. He argued there was a "border that violence would not cross." The German people, who were always proud of the "freedom of thought and of speech," would create a "soulful and intellectual resistance" and stifle all attempts to establish a dictatorship. 

With their strict insistence on the legalities of the constitution, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) leadership overlooked the fact that the previous presidential governments had already hollowed the constitution and that Hitler would not hesitate to destroy its last vestiges. 

The dangers emanating from Hitler could not have been more grotesquely misread. Most of the leading Social Democrats and unionists had grown up in the German Kaiserreich. They could imagine repression similar to Bismarck’s anti-socialist law, but not that someone would seriously try to destroy the workers’ movement in its entirety. 

The fact that Hitler’s appointment meant that a fanatical anti-Semite had come to power should have made Germany’s Jews, above all, nervous. But that was not the case at all. In a statement given on Jan. 30, the chair of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith said, "In general, today more than ever we must follow the directive: wait calmly." He said that although one watches the new government "of course with deep suspicion," President Hindenburg represents the "calming influence." He said there was no reason to doubt his "sense of justice" and "loyalty to the constitution." As a result, he said, one should be convinced that "nobody would dare" to "touch our constitutional rights." 

Foreign diplomats also made false assumptions about the nature of the change of power. The American consul general in Berlin, George S. Messersmith, believed that it was difficult to make a clear prediction about the future of the Hitler government and spoke of his assumption that it represented a transitional phenomenon on the road to a more stable political situation. To British Ambassador Horace Rumbold, it seemed like the conservatives had managed to successfully fence in the Nazis. But he also predicted that there would soon be conflicts between the unequal coalition partners because Papen’s and Hugenberg’s goal of restoring the monarchy could not be reconciled with Hitler’s plans. He recommended that the Foreign Office should take a wait-and-see attitude toward the new government. 

Rarely has a political project so rapidly been revealed to be a chimera as the idea that the conservatives would "tame" the Nazis. In terms of tactical cunning, Hitler towered high above his cabinet allies and opponents. In a short time, he had upstaged them and driven them against the wall, dislodging Papen from of his preferential position with Hindenburg and forcing Hugenberg to resign.

Hitler needed only five months to establish his power. By the summer of 1933, fundamental rights and the constitution had been suspended, the states had been forced into conformity, the unions crushed, the political parties banned or dissolved, press and radio brought into line and the Jews stripped of their equality under the law. Everything that existed in Germany outside of the National Socialist Party had been "destroyed, dispersed, dissolved, annexed or absorbed," François-Poncet concluded in early July. Hitler, he claimed, had "won the game with little effort." "He only had to puff -- and the edifice of German politics collapsed like a house of cards."

 I shudder to think where things will be in five months if Americans do not quickly wake up. 

An Open Letter to Trump From the US Press Corps

Sadly, the American media has been failing in its duty to expose lies and untruths for well over a decade and a half.  The consequences have been horrific: the Iraq War that set the stage for ISIS, Republican obstructionism for the entire presidency of Barack Obama, and now the election of Donald Trump, a vulgar, narcissistic bully who my late maternal grandmother would have deemed to be white trash with money, as president of the United States.  Now, faced with continued attacks by Trump and his allies in the fake news industry - think Fox News and Breitbart for starters - the US Press Corps has issued an open letter to Trump and his fellow would be fascists.  The letter sounds great and it would be wonderful if the press delivered on its threats to Trump.  Given the press' past failings, I will not be holding my breath.  Here are excerpts:

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT ELECT:

In these final days before your inauguration, we thought it might be helpful to clarify how we see the relationship between your administration and the American press corps.

It will come as no surprise to you that we see the relationship as strained. Reports over the last few days that your press secretary is considering pulling news media offices out of the White House are the latest in a pattern of behavior that has persisted throughout the campaign: You’ve banned news organizations from covering you. You’ve taken to Twitter to taunt and threaten individual reporters and encouraged your supporters to do the same. You’ve advocated for looser libel laws and threatened numerous lawsuits of your own, none of which has materialized. You’ve avoided the press when you could and flouted the norms of pool reporting and regular press conferences. You’ve ridiculed a reporter who wrote something you didn’t like because he has a disability.

All of this, of course, is your choice and, in a way, your right. While the Constitution protects the freedom of the press, it doesn’t dictate how the president must honor that; regular press conferences aren’t enshrined in the document.

But while you have every right to decide your ground rules for engaging with the press, we have some, too. It is, after all, our airtime and column inches that you are seeking to influence. We, not you, decide how best to serve our readers, listeners, and viewers. So think of what follows as a backgrounder on what to expect from us over the next four years. 

Access is preferable, but not critical. You may decide that giving reporters access to your administration has no upside. We think that would be a mistake on your part, but again, it’s your choice. We are very good at finding alternative ways to get information; indeed, some of the best reporting during the campaign came from news organizations that were banned from your rallies.

Off the record and other ground rules are ours—not yours—to set. We may agree to speak to some of your officials off the record, or we may not. We may attend background briefings or off-the-record social events, or we may skip them. That’s our choice. If you think reporters who don’t agree to the rules, and are shut out, won’t get the story, see above.

We decide how much airtime to give your spokespeople and surrogates. We will strive to get your point of view across, even if you seek to shut us out. But that does not mean we are required to turn our airwaves or column inches over to people who repeatedly distort or bend the truth. We will call them out when they do, and we reserve the right, in the most egregious cases, to ban them from our outlets.

We believe there is an objective truth, and we will hold you to that. When you or your surrogates say or tweet something that is demonstrably wrong, we will say so, repeatedly. Facts are what we do, and we have no obligation to repeat false assertions

We’ll obsess over the details of government. You and your staff sit in the White House, but the American government is a sprawling thing. We will fan reporters out across the government, embed them in your agencies, source up those bureaucrats. The result will be that while you may seek to control what comes out of the West Wing, we’ll have the upper hand in covering how your policies are carried out.

We will set higher standards for ourselves than ever before. We credit you with highlighting serious and widespread distrust in the media across the political spectrum. Your campaign tapped into that, and it was a bracing wake-up call for us. We have to regain that trust. And we’ll do it through accurate, fearless reporting, by acknowledging our errors and abiding by the most stringent ethical standards we set for ourselves.

We’re going to work together. You have tried to divide us and use reporters’ deep competitive streaks to cause family fights. Those days are ending. We now recognize that the challenge of covering you requires that we cooperate and help one another whenever possible. So, when you shout down or ignore a reporter at a press conference who has said something you don’t like, you’re going to face a unified front. 

We’re playing the long game. Best-case scenario, you’re going to be in this job for eight years. We’ve been around since the founding of the republic, and our role in this great democracy has been ratified and reinforced again and again and again. You have forced us to rethink the most fundamental questions about who we are and what we are here for. For that we are most grateful.  Enjoy your inauguration.

The irony is that, had the press corps (and the mainstream cable news networks) followed these standards from the first day Trump announced his candidacy, he would not have won the 2016 presidential election.  Indeed, he would not have won the GOP primary.  I hope the press corp does what it claims it will do going forward.  It has much to atone for and will likely be judged most harshly by future historians.  With freedom of the press likely to soon be at risk, just maybe these media types will at last do their jobs.

IS it Time for the News Media to Ditch Trump Press Conferences

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign the mainstream media provided Donald Trump with free coverage and actively aided in spreading his calls to racism and his outright lies.  Trump's press conference last week was another performance that continued the lies and attacks on the media - indeed, anyone that challenges Trump's dishonest and self-centered agenda. Perhaps the best ting responsible journalist can do is skip the press conferences - assuming Trump has them at all - and simply report on the damage the man is doing and the extremism of a number of his nominees (e.g., Betsy DeVos).  For a narcissist like Trump, few things would hit him harder than simply being ignored.  A piece in Daily Kos argues that the media needs to cease providing Trump with a platform and focus instead on factual news. Here are column highlights:

On the heels of Donald Trump's extraordinarily combative news conference last week came word over the weekend that the incoming administration might relocate the press corps outside of the White House's West Wing.

News outlets, understandably rattled, are searching for traction in a post-fact world so slippery that Trump has turned the term "fake news" against them. The New York Times's Jim Rutenberg deftly diagnosed the problem:

The news media remains an unwitting accomplice in its own diminishment as it fails to get a handle on how to cover this new and wholly unprecedented president.

However, his prescription for White House reporters didn't even come close to reimagining how to approach covering Trump’s presidency. "A united front would have given the reporters stronger footing," he wrote of the melee that broke out during Trump’s press conference. I agree with the sentiment, but as someone who values good reporting and also attended White House briefings for a couple years, I would like to pose something a bit more radical to mainstream new outlets: Why even send reporters to Trump press conferences?

Trump, while a totally repugnant human being, is a master manipulator. The press conferences are sheer sport for him and by continuing to engage in them, reporters are simply setting themselves up as targets on his terrain. A president already has an unfair advantage in the very controlled setting of a presser. The two premises that help level the playing field for reporters when cross examining any president are: 1) that facts matter, and 2) that serving the American people is primary to a president’s own self interests.

Since neither of those two things hold true for Trump, press conferences will be rendered useless for the next four years. They will be nothing but misinformation forums in which Trump spreads lies and feeds his ego by berating and belittling any reporter who asks him a question he doesn't like.

[W]ith a clear sociopath at the helm, leveling shame and guilt will be a little like taking fly swatters to the 800-pound gorilla in the room. . . . the people behind the podium have to buy into the premise that they are there to serve the voters. There has been absolutely no indication—either at the White House or on Capitol Hill—that Republicans believe there should be any check whatsoever on their power. Least of all, a check provided by reporters. 

Here's what a presser would look like [if the mainstream media stayed away]: Breitbart, Infowars, and World Net Daily representatives duking it out to ask Trump or his minion Sean Spicer some eye-popping questions. Talk about must-see reality TV. No joke—this could do a world of good. It would both deprive Trump of the contentious interactions he thrives on, and/or prove deeply revealing to everyone other than the 35-40 percent of Trump followers who are still hoping he guns someone down on 5th Avenue (i.e. sane viewers).

As for what news outlets could do besides be witnesses to a slaughter: They can either go the way of Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, doggedly reporting around Trump rather than trying to report through him. 

Or they could make an honest effort to pour resources into hiring local reporters in order to publicize all the ways in which Trump and Republicans will surely fail voters—even and especially those who voted for them. When coal jobs don't come back, give miners a voice. When millions of Trump voters lose their health insurance, give the uninsured a voice. When the elderly start seeing changes in their Social Security benefits, give them a voice. . . . . how about picking 25 swing districts where GOP congressional members will be particularly vulnerable in the 2018 midterms?

For national reporters and editors, this idea of boycotting Trump news conferences is going to sound radical (even if it doesn't to readers of this site). But the goal isn’t to stop covering Trump, it’s to cover him in ways that don’t distort and serve as a distraction to the truth.

 Weak calls for “solidarity,” even if they get a buy in from members of the press, won't provide any protection against a White House that has no ability or interest to act in good faith. 

I believe that Kerry Eleveld is onto something.  Would that the press would follow this suggestion.
 

How to Remove Trump From Office

In eleven days America will enter into a nightmare phase unlike any other in its history and a man thoroughly unfit for office assumes the office of the presidency.  It is difficult to know how much damage Trump, a/k/a Der Fuhrer, will do to America and the world, but one thing is clear.  Trump cares for no one but himself and establishing his own dynasty of sorts. His paranoia and self-absorption make Richard Nixon look like a normal, truthful and affable guy. Sadly, the House of Representatives is controlled by Republicans, the majority of who are as crazy as Trump and/or who would sell their mothers - and their souls - for pocket change in order to stay in power. Thus impeachment of Trump is unlikely.  A column in the Washington Post points to one other method of removing Trump. Could this happen?  Who knows, but it is certainly within the realm of the imaginable that Trump could do something so insane that even his cabinet might wake up to the danger the man poses. Here are column highlights:

Donald Trump is a one-man basket of deplorables. He is a braggart and a liar. He is a bully and a demagogue. He is an ignoramus and a deadbeat, a chiseler and either a sincere racist or an insincere one, and his love for himself is matched only by my loathing of him. He is about to be president of the United States. A constitutional coup may be in the offing.

Since winning the election, Trump has not moderated his behavior. He still behaves like a brat — his childish tweet zinging Arnold Schwarzenegger for failing to get Trumpian ratings on “The New Celebrity Apprentice” being the most amusing example. Many of the others were just plain lies, the most serious being his earlier troubling statements regarding Russian efforts to affect the election. As always, Trump made this about himself — not, as it should be, about a foreign power meddling in our democracy.

Trump lives in a hall of mirrors — but not alone. Reince Priebus, the outgoing Republican National Committee chairman and now another of the moral eunuchs in Trump’s court, said on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that the release of the intelligence community’s finding was “clearly politically motivated to discredit the victory of President-elect Trump.” Priebus, as my grandmother used to say, knows which side his bread is buttered on.

It is folly to think that aides such as Priebus are going to be able to moderate Trump. They are enablers, emptying their consciences and stuffing their egos, and it is even sillier to think that Trump himself will change. He is 70, into the years of ossification, and his political triumph has only convinced him of his inerrant correctness. He thinks he is infallible, a kind of secular pope. Things will go from bad to worse.

One remote remedy is impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate. It is, as it should be, a laborious process and requires provable acts of treason, bribery or other “high crimes and misdemeanors” . . .

There is, however, another way. Under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, the vice president, together with a “majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide” can remove the president for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

[T]hey [cabinet nominees] should all be asked whether they are aware of the 25th Amendment and, if need be, whether they would be willing to implement it. Some would say that they do not respond to hypotheticals, but a willingness to abide by the Constitution is not a hypothetical. It is, instead, a grave duty.

Is this going to happen? Probably not. We’ll just muddle through a Trump presidency, as we have some others. But the nature and malevolence of Donald Trump have to be borne in mind. He has shown little regard for the Constitution,

Since his election, Trump has done nothing to allay the concern that he is unfit for the presidency. In about a week, he’ll assume the presidency with all its awesome power. Maybe the only thing that will constrain him is his own Cabinet. Trump goofed. There are some good people in that room.

Electoral College Elector: Why I Will Not Cast My Vote for Trump

I have addressed the founders' purpose in writing the Electoral College into the United States Constitution - to protect the nation from a demagogue who would undermine the constitutional order. Yes, Alexander Hamilton had his issues not withstanding the hit musical Hamilton.  But he and other members of the authors of the Constitution tried to guard against all contingencies, including efforts by foreign rulers to bribe America's political leaders.  The so-called Emoluments Clause had this specific purpose and with every passing day Trump has revealed his intention to ignore the Emoluments clause and to enrich himself and his family members as much as possible.  On December 19, 2016, the Electoral College electors will cast their votes to finalize the 2016 election results.  One Texas elector has an op-ed piece in the New York Times explaining why he will not cast his vote for Donald Trump.  Here are op-ed highlights:

DALLAS — I am a Republican presidential elector, one of the 538 people asked to choose officially the president of the United States. Since the election, people have asked me to change my vote based on policy disagreements with Donald J. Trump. In some cases, they cite the popular vote difference. I do not think presidents-elect should be disqualified for policy disagreements. I do not think they should be disqualified because they won the Electoral College instead of the popular vote. However, now I am asked to cast a vote on Dec. 19 for someone who shows daily he is not qualified for the office.

Fifteen years ago, as a firefighter, I was part of the response to the Sept. 11 attacks against our nation. That attack and this year’s election may seem unrelated, but for me the relationship becomes clearer every day.

George W. Bush is an imperfect man, but he led us through the tragic days following the attacks. His leadership showed that America was a great nation. That was also the last time I remember the nation united. I watch Mr. Trump fail to unite America and drive a wedge between us.

Mr. Trump goes out of his way to attack the cast of “Saturday Night Live” for bias. He tweets day and night, but waited two days to offer sympathy to the Ohio State community after an attack there. He does not encourage civil discourse, but chooses to stoke fear and create outrage.

This is unacceptable. For me, America is that shining city on a hill that Ronald Reagan envisioned. It has problems. It has challenges. These can be met and overcome just as our nation overcame Sept. 11.

The United States was set up as a republic. Alexander Hamilton provided a blueprint for states’ votes. Federalist 68 argued that an Electoral College should determine if candidates are qualified, not engaged in demagogy, and independent from foreign influence. Mr. Trump shows us again and again that he does not meet these standards. Given his own public statements, it isn’t clear how the Electoral College can ignore these issues, and so it should reject him.

I owe a debt to my children to leave them a nation they can trust.

Mr. Trump lacks the foreign policy experience and demeanor needed to be commander in chief. During the campaign more than 50 Republican former national security officials and foreign policy experts co-signed a letter opposing him. In their words, “he would be a dangerous president.” During the campaign Mr. Trump even said Russia should hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. This encouragement of an illegal act has troubled many members of Congress and troubles me.

Hamilton also reminded us that a president cannot be a demagogue. Mr. Trump urged violence against protesters at his rallies during the campaign. He speaks of retribution against his critics. He has surrounded himself with advisers such as Stephen K. Bannon, who claims to be a Leninist and lauds villains and their thirst for power, including Darth Vader. “Rogue One,” the latest “Star Wars” installment, arrives later this month. I am not taking my children to see it to celebrate evil, but to show them that light can overcome it.

Finally, Mr. Trump does not understand that the Constitution expressly forbids a president to receive payments or gifts from foreign governments. We have reports that Mr. Trump’s organization has business dealings in Argentina, Bahrain, Taiwan and elsewhere. Mr. Trump could be impeached in his first year given his dismissive responses to financial conflicts of interest. He has played fast and loose with the law for years. He may have violated the Cuban embargo, and there are reports of improprieties involving his foundation and actions he took against minority tenants in New York. Mr. Trump still seems to think that pattern of behavior can continue.

The election of the next president is not yet a done deal. Electors of conscience can still do the right thing for the good of the country. Presidential electors have the legal right and a constitutional duty to vote their conscience. I believe electors should unify behind a Republican alternative, an honorable and qualified man or woman such as Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. I pray my fellow electors will do their job and join with me in discovering who that person should be.

Fifteen years ago, I swore an oath to defend my country and Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. On Dec. 19, I will do it again.

New Hitler Book Could As Easily Describe Trump

I have been blasted by some for my comparisons of Donald Trump and Adolph Hitler.  In my opinion both represent narcissistic demagogues subject to tempestuous love affairs with themselves.  Both pandered/pander to hate and bigotry and viewed scapegoating others as a means to power. Trump may have come a background of wealth and comfort whereas Hitler came from a meager background, yet the self-importance ascribed to themselves is remarkably similar.  Likewise, temper tantrums and violent out bursts follow criticism or  suggestions that they were not always right.  If you don't believe me, you need to read a new New York Times book review of “Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939,” by historian Volker Ullrich, and think of Trump as you read the review.  The book could as easily describe Trump's tactics today as those of Hitler in his rise to power.   Here are review highlights:

How did Adolf Hitler — described by one eminent magazine editor in 1930 as a “half-insane rascal,” a “pathetic dunderhead,” a “nowhere fool,” a “big mouth” — rise to power in the land of Goethe and Beethoven? What persuaded millions of ordinary Germans to embrace him and his doctrine of hatred? How did this “most unlikely pretender to high state office” achieve absolute power in a once democratic country and set it on a course of monstrous horror?

A host of earlier biographers (most notably Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest and Ian Kershaw) have advanced theories about Hitler’s rise, and the dynamic between the man and his times. Some have focused on the social and political conditions in post-World War I Germany, which Hitler expertly exploited — bitterness over the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles and a yearning for a return to German greatness; unemployment and economic distress amid the worldwide Depression of the early 1930s; and longstanding ethnic prejudices and fears of “foreignization.”

Other writers — including the dictator’s latest biographer, the historian Volker Ullrich — have focused on Hitler as a politician who rose to power through demagoguery, showmanship and nativist appeals to the masses.

In “Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939,” Mr. Ullrich sets out to strip away the mythology that Hitler created around himself in “Mein Kampf,” and he also tries to look at this “mysterious, calamitous figure” not as a monster or madman, but as a human being with “undeniable talents and obviously deep-seated psychological complexes.” This is the first of two volumes (it ends in 1939 with the dictator’s 50th birthday) and there is little here that is substantially new. However, Mr. Ullrich offers a fascinating Shakespearean parable about how the confluence of circumstance, chance, a ruthless individual and the willful blindness of others can transform a country — and, in Hitler’s case, lead to an unimaginable nightmare for the world.

Mr. Ullrich, like other biographers, provides vivid insight into some factors that helped turn a “Munich rabble-rouser” — regarded by many as a self-obsessed “clown” with a strangely “scattershot, impulsive style” — into “the lord and master of the German Reich.”

• Hitler was often described as an egomaniac who “only loved himself” — a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization and what Mr. Ullrich calls a “characteristic fondness for superlatives.” His manic speeches and penchant for taking all-or-nothing risks raised questions about his capacity for self-control, even his sanity. But Mr. Ullrich underscores Hitler’s shrewdness as a politician — with a “keen eye for the strengths and weaknesses of other people” and an ability to “instantaneously analyze and exploit situations.”

• Hitler was known, among colleagues, for a “bottomless mendacity” that would later be magnified by a slick propaganda machine that used the latest technology (radio, gramophone records, film) to spread his message. A former finance minister wrote that Hitler “was so thoroughly untruthful that he could no longer recognize the difference between lies and truth” and editors of one edition of “Mein Kampf” described it as a “swamp of lies, distortions, innuendoes, half-truths and real facts.”

• Hitler was an effective orator and actor, Mr. Ullrich reminds readers, adept at assuming various masks and feeding off the energy of his audiences. Although he concealed his anti-Semitism beneath a “mask of moderation” when trying to win the support of the socially liberal middle classes, he specialized in big, theatrical rallies staged with spectacular elements borrowed from the circus. Here, “Hitler adapted the content of his speeches to suit the tastes of his lower-middle-class, nationalist-conservative, ethnic-chauvinist and anti-Semitic listeners,” Mr. Ullrich writes. He peppered his speeches with coarse phrases and put-downs of hecklers. Even as he fomented chaos by playing to crowds’ fears and resentments, he offered himself as the visionary leader who could restore law and order.

• Hitler increasingly presented himself in messianic terms, promising “to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness,” though he was typically vague about his actual plans. He often harked back to a golden age for the country, Mr. Ullrich says, the better “to paint the present day in hues that were all the darker. Everywhere you looked now, there was only decline and decay.”

• Hitler’s repertoire of topics, Mr. Ullrich notes, was limited, and reading his speeches in retrospect, “it seems amazing that he attracted larger and larger audiences” with “repeated mantralike phrases” consisting largely of “accusations, vows of revenge and promises for the future.” But Hitler virtually wrote the modern playbook on demagoguery, arguing in “Mein Kampf” that propaganda must appeal to the emotions — not the reasoning powers — of the crowd. Its “purely intellectual level,” Hitler said, “will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach.” Because the understanding of the masses “is feeble,” he went on, effective propaganda needed to be boiled down to a few slogans that should be “persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”

• Hitler’s ascension was aided and abetted by the naïveté of domestic adversaries who failed to appreciate his ruthlessness and tenacity, and by foreign statesmen who believed they could control his aggression. Early on, revulsion at Hitler’s style and appearance, Mr. Ullrich writes, led some critics to underestimate the man and his popularity, while others dismissed him as a celebrity, a repellent but fascinating “evening’s entertainment.” Politicians, for their part, suffered from the delusion that the dominance of traditional conservatives in the cabinet would neutralize the threat of Nazi abuse of power and “fence Hitler in.”

• “Many Germans jumped on the Nazi bandwagon not out of political conviction but in hopes of improving their career opportunities, he argues, while fear kept others from speaking out against the persecution of the Jews. The independent press was banned or suppressed and books deemed “un-German” were burned. By March 1933, Hitler had made it clear, Mr. Ullrich says, “that his government was going to do away with all norms of separation of powers and the rule of law.” 

• Hitler had a dark, Darwinian view of the world. And he would not only become, in Mr. Ullrich’s words, “a mouthpiece of the cultural pessimism” growing in right-wing circles in the Weimar Republic, but also the avatar of what Thomas Mann identified as a turning away from reason and the fundamental principles of a civil society — namely, “liberty, equality, education, optimism and belief in progress.”

Sound frighteningly familiar?  I hope and pray that a majority of voters will wake up and save America from repeating the tragedy of Germany.  Having read a great deal about Hitler's rise to power, I continue to be amazed at how the man manipulated people and played to their ugliest instincts - just like Donald Trump.

Trump’s Hitler Like Disregard for the Truth

Fact checking has shown that close to 75% of what Donald Trump says is either completely or largely false.  The man lies with abandon.  More frighteningly, he seems to believe whatever the lie is that is rolling off his lips at any given moment in time.  Trump's apologists argue that all politicians lie.  While this my be true to some extent, especially in today's Republican Party, in fact, no one lies as much and dangerously as Donald Trump.  Only among the conservative professional Christian set does one find even a close level of dishonesty (which may help to explain evangelical Christian support for Trump).  As a column by Richard Cohen suggests, there are historical comparisons to Trump, and none good.  In the column, Cohen compares Trump and Adolph Hitler's similar levels of lying and apparent belief in the truth of whatever the lies may be that they are promoting.  Here are highlights:

I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance. Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking. He thinks the truth is what he says it is.

Soon after becoming chancellor, Hitler announced that the Jews had declared war on Germany. It was a preposterous statement because Jews were less than 1 percent of Germany’s population and had neither the numbers nor the power to make war on anything. In fact, in sheer preposterousness, it compares to Trump’s insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States — a position he tenaciously held even after Obama released his Hawaiian birth certificate.

At the time, people tried to make sense of Hitler’s statements by saying he was seeking a scapegoat and had settled on the Jews. Not so. From my readings, I know of no instance in which Hitler confided to an intimate that, of course, his statements about Jews were, as we might now say, over the top. In fact, he remained consistently deranged on the topic. He was not lying. For him, it was the truth.

Trump’s fixation on Obama’s birthplace is similar. It was not, as far as he’s concerned, a lie. It was a strongly felt truth that he abandoned only last week and then only under intense pressure — not out of conviction. . . . Like a child, he had his fingers crossed.
 Just as Hitler’s remarks about Jews were deeply rooted in German anti-Semitism, so was Trump’s birtherism rooted in American racism — with some anti-Muslim sentiment thrown in. Trump’s adamant insistence on it raised issues not, as some have so delicately put it, about his demeanor, but instead about his rationality. It made a joke out of the entire furor over revealing his medical records. I’m sure that Trump is fine physically. Mentally, it’s a different story.

It’s a mistake to make the unreasonable compatible with the reasonable — to think, say, that Trump cannot be serious about this birther stuff or building a wall or likening the difficulties of becoming a billionaire to the loss of a son in Iraq. That was the authentic Trump, a man totally unburdened by concern for anyone else.

There is no lie that cannot be believed. Even after Germany had murdered most of Europe’s Jews, allied investigators at the end of World War II found that many Germans believed, as historian Nicholas Stargardt put it, that their country’s defeat only “confirmed the ‘power of world Jewry.’ ”

Germany was not some weird place. At the advent of the Hitler era, it was a democracy, an advanced nation, culturally rich and scientifically advanced. It had a unique history — its defeat in World War I, the hyperinflation of the 1920s — so it cannot easily be likened to the contemporary United States. But it was not all that different, either. In 1933, it chose a sociopathic liar as its leader. If the polls are to be believed, we may do the same.

Trump Versus Hitler: Learning From Weimar Germany

I have read a great deal about Adolph Hitler's rise to power and the horrors he eventually inflicted on Europe's Jewish population, Germany itself, and much of the rest of the world.   In part my interest in that period is a horrified fascination perhaps with how an advanced, educated and civilized nation like Germany could succumb to Hitler and the Nazi Party.  The period and what happened ought to be a textbook for others throughout history of how regular humans can be turned into monsters if lead by the right manipulative demagogue who plays upon their fears and prejudices.  Nathan Stoltzfus, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Florida State University and the author of Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany, has a piece at the Daily Beast that compares the end of democratic Weimar Germany and America as it faces the rise of Donald Trump.  While the parallels are not 100% complete, there are similarities between Hitler and Trump and their racism, uncontrollable narcissism and demagoguery that thinking Americans should see clearly that Trump MUST be defeated in November.  Here are op-ed highlights:

While commentators have increasingly likened Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler as a convenient condemnation—others assure us that we (Americans) are better than that. So far there are, in fact, some instructive points of comparison, most significantly in the relationship between these men and their followers, as well as in the compromises that established political leaders are willing to make with these two men, under the assumption that they will be able to control them once they reach office.

Like those who helped Hitler to power, politicians and operatives have decided that they can harness Trump to their own purposes. Polls consistently show that two thirds or more of Americans have a negative impression of Trump. But he still could become our next president as Republican politicians and operatives help maneuver him into power.

In September 1930, as the Nazis surged in the polls to become Germany’s second largest party, German president Paul von Hindenburg was confronted with how to handle Hitler, founder and leader of the Nazis. General Hindenburg initially scorned Hitler as a “Bohemian Corporal,” in reference to his Austrian origins and lowly rank in World War I.
With the election of July 1932, the Nazis formed Germany’s most popular party, and conservatives convinced Hindenburg to appoint Hitler chancellor, amusing themselves with the belief that they would soon push him into a corner so hard he would squeak.

The United States is not now facing a “Weimar moment,” because the sense of crisis is not nearly as palpable and widespread as it was in Weimar Germany. Trump also does not seem driven like Hitler to slip history itself into a straightjacket cut to his own ideology, and his criminal cunning is less acute. Still, if helped into power by a combination of mass popularity and political operatives hoping to help themselves, Trump could do massive harm to democracy, considering his racist demagoguery, unbridled self-confidence, and authoritarian hostility toward a free press, to name just a few factors. 

Like Hitler, Trump likes to promote the image of a great leader that no one has to question. Many, eager to believe in an easy solution, appear eager to embrace it. Both encouraged a direct popular dependency on a man rather than a system or constitution. Both have encouraged unity at the expense of outsiders. Both have issued a license for the crowds to unite in feeling like they can set their emotions free from social constraints. . . . . At his stadium-size rallies, supporters unite in signaling to Trump’s bullyboys that someone in the crowd doesn’t belong. “Trust me, they are not good people,” Trump says as the outsider is carted off. His supporters also respond to Trump’s invectives against the press by unleashing their own pent up fury.

In the 1930s, such a symbiotic relationship between a growing number of Germans and their leader proved to be the bedrock foundation of Hitler’s power, a relationship of the masses to their great leader that served as the foundation of Germany’s crimes. Coming to power by promising to make Germany great again, Hitler convinced more and more Germans to yield to him as a spectacular Leader. Then he drew them further and further into collaboration with the crimes resulting from his racism, a process that continued to develop a sense of insider-belonging and a new sense of power for his followers.

There are strong forces in this country against Trump such as Hitler did not face. Yet history shows that the more people come together in the belief that they have found an urgently needed super-politician to bail them out, the harder it becomes to stop others from joining the bandwagon.

As Weimar warns, constitutional protections can crumble in the face of majorities amassed by a demagogue. Sure Trump is a racist, but the fundamental threat in his use of racism to incite the crowds, illustrated in his case attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel, is the possibility of gathering popular support sufficient to abrade the constitution and its balance of powers. Hitler had also aimed to remake law according to the will of his “racial” German people, once they followed him unquestioningly.

The more Trump wins, the more people once reluctant to support him will want to attach themselves to him—like the established Trump enablers who hope to use him. It is, however, unlikely that they will be able to exercise any more control over him, should Trump continue to whip up his crowds with the help of the presidential bully pulpit.

The Dangerous Exceptance of Donald Trump

Having grown up in a Republican family and held a position on the GOP city committee for Virginia Beach, I witnessed a slow decline of the party's morality over the years.  With the rise of the Christofascists within the party, the moral bankruptcy accelerated.  Now, with the ascendancy of Donald Trump as the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, the moral bankruptcy is now complete. Equally chilling has been witnessing the willingness of Republicans who know better to close their eyes and sell their souls for what they believe will be the self-promoting expediency of jumping on the Trump band wagon.   Most frightening, however, is the willingness of these individuals to put the national future at risk by backing a man whose entire platform has been based on racial hatred, support of white privilege, nativism, and a preference for mob rule that would trample on America's constitutional order.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at this dangerous trend underway.  What I find equally disturbing is Bernie Sanders' willingness to put his ego and vanity first and aid and abet Trump by refusing to end his campaign.  Here are article  highlights:

The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump. First merely endured by those in the Republican Party, with pained grimaces and faint bleats of reluctance, bare toleration passed quickly over into blind, partisan allegiance—he’s going to be the nominee, after all, and so is our boy. Then a weird kind of pity arose, directed not so much at him (he supplies his own self-pity) as at his supporters, on the premise that their existence somehow makes him a champion for the dispossessed, although the evidence indicates that his followers are mostly stirred by familiar racial and cultural resentments, of which Trump has been a single-minded spokesperson.

Now for the embrace. One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his proper name—who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control him.’ No, you can’t. One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. Ted Cruz called Trump a pathological liar, the kind who does not know the difference between lies and truth. Whatever the clinical diagnosis, we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place. He’s not Hitler, as his wife recently said? Well, of course he isn’t. But then Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis.  The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger. Bernie Sanders wouldn’t mind bringing down the Democratic Party to prevent it from surrendering to corporate forces—and yet he may be increasing the possibility of rule-by-billionaire. There is a difference between major and minor issues, and between primary and secondary values. . . . . What we all should agree on is that the one thing worse would be to have no constitutional order left to argue about. If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over. This is not a hyperbolic prediction; it is not a hysterical prediction; it is simply a candid reading of what history tells us happens in countries with leaders like Trump. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. 

Donald Trump: American Demagogue

A piece in Salon looks at movie that looks at the late Hannah Arendt who has been gone for many years.  What is interesting about the movie is how it demonstrates similarities to Adolph Hitler's fascism and what is being peddled by Donald Trump.  Both play on human ignorance and baser instincts.  It is important to never forget how Hitler came to power and how he played on Germans' sense of victimhood and promised to bring back greatness to the German Reich.  Here are article highlights: 

Arendt’s central obsessions — war, totalitarianism, genocide, mass migration and displacement, and the ambiguous nature of human rights — are at least as relevant as ever. In the dismal and farcical age of Donald Trump, we badly need something like the scathing, cleansing force of Arendt’s intellect. There are moments in “Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt,” an urgent and often startling documentary from Israeli director Ada Ushpiz, where I could feel her trying to reach across the decades and talk to us.

Arendt didn’t have a high opinion of human nature or human group behavior, and given her life experience that’s understandable. She was a woman of extraordinary intellectual gifts at a time when there was essentially no such thing as a female philosopher, or even a female academic. As Ushpiz’s film lays out in detail, Arendt was a child of privilege in pre-war Germany and then a Jewish war refugee and then an increasingly controversial celebrity who became widely viewed as a traitor to her own people. 

In a passage quoted by Ushpiz, which I believe is from the 1951 “Origins of Totalitarianism,” Arendt proposes that regimes like Nazism or Stalinism thrive by creating narratives that confer imaginary order upon the chaos and randomness of history. Human beings long for coherent stories that explain why bad things happen, Arendt says, even when those stories are delusional and dangerous. When fueled by enduring political or psychological currents like nationalism and racism, such fictional narratives become the justification for war and genocide and other historical crimes. To cite the obvious example from Arendt’s lifetime, if the social chaos and struggling economy of Germany in the 1930s was caused by a predatory Jewish conspiracy that had drained the German people of their life force, then everything made sense and the nation could be united toward a common goal and against a common enemy.

I doubt I need to belabor the point: There is one 2016 presidential candidate who has prospered beyond anyone’s wildest dreams by constructing just that kind of narrative, albeit an especially shapeless and nonsensical one.

Trump’s famous promise to build that wall along the southern border — and somehow make Mexico pay for it — at a time when the population of undocumented immigrants is steadily declining, is more like an infantile fantasy than a policy proposal. His vow to bar Muslims from entering the country, in the face of irrational panic and an exaggerated terrorist threat, is pandering of the worst kind.  . . . those are like plot points in the amorphous Trumpian movie-narrative that whatever went wrong in America is somebody else’s fault, indeed almost anybody else’s. It’s more like a field of generalized suspicion and loathing than a coherent story: America’s innate greatness has been chewed away by the Muslims, the Mexicans, the blacks, the gays, the feminists, the transgender bathroom users, the liberal elite, the intellectual elite, the bipartisan political establishment and damn near everybody else who isn’t Trump or his downscale white audience.

Ushpiz makes a number of bold choices in “Vita Activa” that might not have been possible in an Israeli documentary even 10 years ago. She begins with newsreel footage of the Nazi death camps and the immediate postwar period, much of it from U.S. Army color films I’ve never seen before. . . . In this film we hear Hitler talk, with subtitles — and he sounds a lot more like Donald Trump than I expected.

If you believe the Führer’s legendary oratory was all fervent, strident screeching about the evils of the Jews and the perfidy of the Allied nations, well, it wasn’t. Hate speech is a key ingredient of the fascist dictator’s rhetorical mix, as Arendt might put it, but far from the only one. In a speech Ushpiz shows us, Hitler’s approach is strikingly Trumpian: a few nonspecific references to the enemies who are besieging and undermining the Reich, blended into a glowing portrait of a paradisiacal future of full employment and universal prosperity, dominated by a rising generation of healthy, strong and “peace-loving” young Germans. It was relentlessly upbeat, and strongly resonant of Trump’s vow to “make America great again” without defining what that means or what it might involve, or his promises that his leadership will bring a new era of “winning” after decades of “losing,” if irritating impediments like the constitutional separation of powers can be overcome.

[Trump]  reflects the all-too-human currents of vapidity and weakness that made Hitler possible, and that drove Hannah Arendt nuts.