Trump: Does he remind us of someone?

The New York Times’s recent review of Hitler: “Downfall, 1939-1945”, a new book about Adolf Hitler by German historian, Volker Ullrich, reveals striking similarities in the actions taken by Hitler and those taken by our current president, Donald Trump. The review was written by Jennifer Szalai, the nonfiction critic for the Times.

Here are some excerpts from the newspaper’s review of “Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945.”A comparison with the United States and the president follows each.

From the review:

“Downfall” begins just after Hitler’s 50th birthday, with the Führer entertaining thoughts of invading Poland as if it were a present to himself. “I have overcome the chaos in Germany, restored order and hugely increased productivity in all areas of our national economy,” he bragged to the Reichstag.

The parallel with America today:

• Disregarding the drastic economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic, the president continues to tout the strong economy that he claims resulted from his action. “As we continue to confront the China virus, we’re rebuilding America’s economy like nobody thought possible,” he claimed in an August 13, 2020 press conference. This claim does not acknowledge the economy remains stagnant and the U.S. unemployment rate continues above 10%.

In his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January 2020, the president claimed this: the economy was in “a dismal state” when he inherited it in 2017 and that the economy now is “the greatest” in US history.”

From the review:

At first, Hitler’s standard approach — lying, blaming others and launching surprise attacks — made for a successful wartime strategy. Nobody seemed willing to believe that he would be so greedy and foolish as to start an expansionist conflagration until he did.

The parallel with America today:

Though the U.S. is not engaged in a military conflict, it is, however, in a state of conflict domestically due to the polarization between the right and left. The president likes this discord and encourages his followers to engage in violence and often disregards their actions and instead blames their victims.

From the review:

To read “Downfall” is to see up close how Hitler lashed out — compulsively, destructively — whenever he felt boxed in. He had the instinct of a crude social-Darwinist who also liked to gamble, experiencing the world only in terms of winning and losing. As he told one of his skittish field marshals, “I have gone for broke all my life.” . . . And he felt boxed in all the time.

The parallel with America today:

So does our president. When violence erupts from confrontations between his supporters and those protesting yet another death by the police, the president unleashes a barrage of tweets against “agitators,” his favored word for protestors.

He did this again when violence flared up in Kenosha, Wis. after police shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, in the back on August 23. The president mentioned the shooting four days later on August 27 when he accepted the Republican nomination and said, “In the strongest possible terms the Republican Party condemns the rioting, looting, arson and violence we have seen in Democrat-run cities all, like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Chicago and New York, many others, Democrat-run.” He did not mention Jacob Blake.

From the review:

Hitler sometimes suggested he would be sated by exclusion and exploitation. “We will construct a gigantic wall separating Asia from Europe,” he promised.

The parallel with America today:

Our president, too, has a wall in the making on the country’s southern border with Mexico. Ironically, the advent of the coronavirus pandemic has erected another “wall.” Americans are pariahs in many countries. We are now locked inside our borders and allowed to enter only a few countries because of the high COVID-10 infection rate.

From the review:

Hitler was a scattershot, undisciplined leader, prone to tardiness and meandering monologues, but the one unwavering constant was his virulent, fanatical anti-Semitism . . . As the war dragged on, he started painting himself as the savior of Europe, fulminating nonsensically but lethally against “the Jewish-capitalist-Bolshevik plot.”

The parallel with America today:

Our president’s railing against Muslims and immigrants.

From the review:

Ullrich points out that Hitler never issued a written order to exterminate the Jews, because he didn’t need to: He preferred to traffic in generalities instead of specifics, verbally making his wishes known so that careerist minions could figure out the rest. “Part of his style of rule was to blur areas of responsibility and encourage rivalries to remind everyone concerned of his position as the sole ultimate arbiter,” Ullrich writes ... It was a method that allowed Hitler to feed his vanity while also preserving the option to deflect any blame onto others.

The parallel with America today:

Our leader too is known for not reading his briefings, micromanaging, saying things without thinking, quick to dismiss those who don’t follow his dictates. His White House is in a constant game of musical chairs with staff coming and going. He is now in his fourth chief of staff in his final year of his first term

From the review:

By 1941, Ullrich writes, Germany’s defeat was already assured, but Hitler would have none of it, getting rid of any military experts who challenged him. He doubled down on his own pitilessness, even toward his own people, saying that if they didn’t fight “they deserve to die out.” Following Hitler’s lead, Goebbels (propaganda minister) treated Germans like chumps to be duped. “There are so many lies that truth and swindle can scarcely be distinguished,” he noted with satisfaction in his diary during the early stages of Barbarossa (the invasion of Russia). “That is best for us at the moment” . . . The truth did emerge in the end, but only after years of mass death and cataclysmic destruction. Hitler had peddled so many lies that the fantasy he created was stretched impossibly thin.

The parallel with America today:

The president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he refused to acknowledge and when he couldn’t ignore it, tried to soft-peddle it.

* Madison is a pseudonym for an Anchorage writer who uncomfortable with the use of their real name because of possible reprisals by supporter of the president. In the early days of our republican founding fathers like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton published essays using pseudonyms