Alan Zendell, August 3, 2023

However Donald Trump’s legal problems and the 2024 election turn out, he will have achieved a couple of things that no other American has. He has sucked all the air out of every political discussion since his famous escalator descent in 2015, and he has corrupted our national belief in truth and the principles on which our Constitution was founded. He’s not the first politician to have done so, but he is the first since the Civil War to bring the United States of America to a national crisis of confidence that threatens our democracy and our future as a world leader.

We’ve seen his playbook before. Adolf Hitler used it to come to power in 1932, much like Trump did in 2016. Hitler won office in a country whose economy had been destroyed in a fit of revenge by the rest of Europe for the devastation caused by World War 1. The Weimar Republic was founded on democratic principles, but it was weak and impoverished, and the German people were suffering from massive unemployment and near starvation. Hitler understood that the key to victory was providing them with a scapegoat. He was able to use The Big Lie that all his nation’s problems were caused by traitorous Jews, to destroy its fledgling free press, undermine its constitution, castrate its legal system, and turn its legislature into a rubber stamp.

It’s been clear from the outset that Trump’s ambitions mirrored Hitler’s, but the American republic has a lot more staying power than the one Hitler decimated. Hitler accomplished in four months what Trump couldn’t in four years, though he came dangerously close. And now we’re about to witness his endgame, but we’re not just spectators. The stakes for all of us are as high as they can be – only the prospect of nuclear war has greater potential to destroy our country.

It’s easy to understand how Hitler succeeded. Conditions in Germany were abysmal, and it was easy to control the flow of news and information in Hitler’s Germany. What is shocking to many Americans is that in spite of what we have all experienced with our own eyes and ears, two-thirds of Republicans still believe Trump’s Big Lies. Trump may be the most dangerous criminal in our history, yet he has managed to convince a third of the country that he is the victim of a widespread conspiracy and persecution. The most rabid among his base see him as a martyr.

With classic Orwellian and Nietschian logic, Trump has changed the meanings of words, claimed that everyone else is guilty of what they accuse him of doing, and whined publicly as if he were about to be crucified. That has to be the ultimate Big Lie. Is there a public figure in America less Christ-like than Donald Trump? Are all those Christian warriors who would give their souls to pass a national ban on abortion blind to the fact that Trump has no moral principles or belief system, that he only uses them to pander to others to accrue power and wealth?

That’s the conundrum Trump has created. We live in a world that is more controlled every day by a massive, unregulated database of information. The Internet, which has revised almost every aspect of our lives in a single generation, has also given us the tools of our own self-destruction. Anyone with the desire and the financial wherewithal to use it, can influence the minds of millions of people, and there are no truth or accuracy filters to protect us. The AI nightmare that brought us the Terminator stories is already in use today. Didn’t some sage (British novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton) once say the pen is mightier than the sword?

It turns out that words can do more damage than sticks and stones no matter what our first-grade teachers told us. In the hands of an unscrupulous, shameless power-mad politician with the gift to tap into people’s worst natures, words might as well be plague viruses. There’s no vaccine to protect us from the Trump virus. The only way to keep from being infected is to turn off our self-serving social media and go back to thinking for ourselves.

According to some of our best legal experts, Trump’s best defense against the dozens of felonies he’s been indicted for may be that he really believed the lies he spread, and he thought he was acting in the best interests of the country when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, although countless people close to Trump, most recently his Vice President, Mike Pence, and his Attorney General, Bill Barr, have told DOJ investigators that he fully understood that he had lost, and his actions were criminal. Trump is the very definition of a cancer eating away at everything we value. If he cannot be excised by our justice system, it will be up to the voters in fifteen months. This is our country, not Trump’s. If we want to keep it that way, we all must rise above the noise and chaos that are Trump’s most powerful allies and do the job ourselves.