Alan Zendell, October 22, 2024

In 2016, many factors combined to enable Donald Trump to defeat Hilary Clinton. In light of all that’s happened since Barack Obama was elected in 2008, an important factor that has critical importance today has been largely overlooked.

The thing that most defined Clinton’s campaign was her adage, “It takes a village,” a message that is the epitome of people working together and cooperating for the common good. It implies a social structure best characterized by the Israeli kibbutz system, wherein villages short on resources but long on responsibilities optimize their effectiveness by thinking and acting communally.

Trump calls this Communism, because it’s the polar opposite of his populism that’s based on dividing people and pitting them against each other. It’s important to understand, as we near the end of the 2024 election, that the hate and fear being generated in this campaign are not incidental side effects of Trump’s antics, but a deliberately intended outcome. He thrives on chaos and discord. He has understood since his days of hobnobbing with mobsters and his mentor, Roy Cohn, that truth is a fragile, malleable thing that is usually the first casualty of chaos.

Reinventing truth is the most common tool used by wannabe dictators and autocrats, as George Orwell brilliantly illustrated in his classic, 1984. It was used by fascists in the 1930s to bring Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini to power. It was used by Josef Stalin to crush the liberal aftereffects of the Russian Revolution and by Vladimir Putin to try to reassemble the Soviet Union, and it is the favorite tool of Kim Jong Un.

Clinton’s and Trump’s contrasting styles truly represented the ongoing struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, between people exercising free will and being subjugated. These things awaken basic atavistic tendencies in all of us, which is why our present circumstances are so shocking to Americans who grew up believing in our Constitution and the basic values that caused our predecessors to revolt against a vicious monarchy.

Trump wants to make this election about personal grievances. He plays on the envy of the Have-Nots for the wealthy, on class struggles and bigotry, and on a basic human need to protect what’s theirs against people who would take it away. Thus, the demonization of immigrants and the odd combination of increased anti-Semitism and fearmongering aimed at Muslims. But the fear and anger that results causes most people to ignore the greater threat. Trump has told us in the clearest possible terms that he is the greatest threat to American democracy since the British tried to take it back in 1812.

I and many others have written about the striking contrast between Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the tactics Hitler used to turn the struggling Weimar Republic into a Nazi dictatorship that nearly destroyed Europe and resulted in the deaths of 75 million people. I thought as I was writing, that the parallels were so clear, I didn’t need to be a historian to understand or communicate them. But that was before I discovered Heather Richardson, a Boston College professor of history whose career has been focused on the evolution of the Republican Party, beginning with Abraham Lincoln.

When I read Richardson’s posting in today’s Letters from an American, I realized that it does take a skilled historian to lay all this out properly so that every American can clearly see the danger posed by Donald Trump. I urge every American, especially those who are still undecided about who to vote for, to read it. Told through the eyes of Dorothy Thompson, a pioneering American journalist who resided in Berlin during Hitler’s ascendancy, it explains why Donald Trump is so dangerous.

We’ve all sat through history lectures that tortuously attempted to make an event that happened centuries ago seem relevant to us. But Richardson’s presentation today is so striking it can’t be ignored. Her comparison of Hitler’s rise to power and his ability to destroy every pillar of a democratic republic in a mere four months in office will shock you, because Hitler’s own words about his intentions sound exactly like Donald Trump’s. Perhaps that’s why Trump’s appointed leader of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, describes Trump as a Fascist to his core.

As entertaining as pundit James Carville can be, he’s wrong this election cycle. It’s not “about the economy, stupid.” It’s also not about the lies about what caused our massive inflation, the importance of NATO or whether we can pressure Benjamin Netanyahu to show humanity toward Palestinian civilians. This election is about one thing: the rule of law and survival of our democratic republic. In seventeen weeks, Hitler abolished his Parliament, destroyed the free press, emasculated Germany’s courts, and outlawed opposition political parties. Anyone Hitler perceived as an enemy was deported, arrested, murdered, or sent to concentration camps.

Please click on the link and read Richardson’s column, then review Trump’s own words which he repeats daily to arouse his base, and form your own conclusions. An occasional dose of real history can be very enlightening.