TRUMP’S FAVORITE TYRANTS by Terence Lenahan
How does the 45th American President compare to history’s cruelest autocrats? Alexander, Attila, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and the Kims of Korea comprise a formidable roster, each responsible for incalculable misery. The bloodthirsty Henry VIII is a relative small fry among mass murders, credited with the deaths of 67,000–75,000 of his subjects by beheading, burning, boiling, and the executioner’s gruesome trifecta in which the condemned was hanged, drawn, and quartered.
Donald Trump soon will have presided over the deaths of more Americans than the combined total in all our foreign wars, and may even exceed the Civil War before the pandemic fades. The cliché is that history repeats itself, and apathy in face of catastrophe is not new. Nero, another arrogant spoiled brat, proclaimed his artistic genius and strummed his lyre while Rome burned. Now his latter day reincarnation bizarrely demands credit for vaccine development while shirking responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of deaths resulting from his intransigence, inertia, and inaction, because he was “not a fan of masks” and believed it would all “go away, like a miracle.”
Plato and Aristotle defined a tyrant as a person who rules without law, using extreme and cruel methods against his own people as well as others. Tyrants have common traits and Trump has happily learned from them all. Edward Sexby’s 1657 pamphlet, “Killing, No Murder,” written to justify assassinating Oliver Cromwell, identified the traits of tyranny as attaining power by fraud rather than force, defamation of formerly respectable persons, rejection of critical thinking in state affairs, distracting the public, and feigning religiosity with pretenses of divine inspiration, all characteristics of the man who blasphemously proclaimed “I am the chosen one.”
Many observers have noted similarities between Trump and Mussolini, the founder of modern fascism. Professor Mark Bickhard identified ten “scary parallels” between them including: (1) arrogant ignorance and incoherence; (2) pretending to be an expert on everything; (3) denigrating the press; (4) creating a political religion; (5) rewriting history so that he has never been wrong or made a mistake; (6) acting like a gangster; (7) responding to criticism with extreme anger; (8) combining thin-skinned ignorance with arrogant contempt; (9) being a fraud in every conceivable way; (10) and being “a vain, blundering boaster without either ideas or aims.”
What attracted Trump most to fascism was its sole principle — blind loyalty to the leader as a national father figure, the avatar of a politico-cultic religion. Opposition to the leader’s will becomes tantamount to treason, those daring to cross him punished now not by torture but by loss of livelihood. Fascist ideologues long ago realized that propaganda — spin — is more powerful than truth and that any lie can be sold if sufficiently repeated, including pretended respect for democratic norms until the need to maintain power requires them to be cast aside. As graphically depicted in Orwell’s 1984, hatred for a minority is the dynamo of totalitarianism, as Trump has demonized desperate refugees as the nation’s direst problem.
An Internet search for images of Mussolini produces photos juxtaposed with Trump, highlighting fascinating similarities in their features and stage presence. Bizarrely, there is even a similarity in their oddly-shaped, box-like craniums. One website markets T-shirts with complementing profiles of the men with an identical cold sneer under the caption, “Separated at Birth?” It is easy to conclude that Trump studied the Duce, adopted his philosophy, copied his strategy, and mimicked his defiant posturing and in-your-face presentation on the podium.
Mussolini compared his people to sheep who craved domination by an authoritarian leader. He had only one core belief — his own apotheosis. Like Trump, he had few fixed ideas and relied on repetition of simple, emotionally charged phrases. It should not be forgotten that Mussolini’s autocracy developed out of a democratic coalition government — during three years as prime minister, he excoriated the press, incited violence against the left, eroded faith in the nation’s institutions, and “joked” that he would wield power for 20 years through a rubber-stamp parliament in thrall to him, all echoed by Trump.
Mussolini and Hitler met several times. Hitler initially looked up to Mussolini as a sort of older brother, while the Duce disparaged him as a Johnny-come-lately until a daring German commando raid freed him from a mountaintop prison. Comparisons of contemporary politicians to Hitler are routinely dismissed out of hand because the monstrosity of the Holocaust defies equivalency. Trump is of course not Hitler, but it would be a mistake to fail to learn from the experience of Italy and Germany that democracy is fragile and can be destroyed.
According to Tim O’Brien, Trump kept a volume of Hitler’s speeches on his nightstand and studied them carefully. Trump lacks Hitler’s oratorical talent, but he sometimes seems to be emulating the Führer — his salute from the balcony after his discharge from the hospital was eerily similar to Triumph of the Will, a masterwork of Nazi propaganda. Never referenced by the media during the 2016 campaign was the fact that Trump took his entire playbook from Hitler, who crisscrossed Germany by air using the slogan “Make Germany Great Again,” which Trump adopted without attribution.
Hitler rose to prominence using a strategy of race baiting and rabble rousing, again adopted by Trump. In pursuit of his goal to attain absolute dictatorship, Hitler mercilessly criticized democratic institutions, whipping his followers into an angry frenzy by decrying the “Stab in the Back” that betrayed Germany, just as Trump portrays himself as the victim of a stolen election.
Hitler recognized propaganda as the key component of his plan to destroy the Weimar Republic. After assuming control of the German Workers Party, he immediately took charge of propaganda, delegating it only years later to the talented Josef Goebbels who adored him as so many idolize Trump. In the age of the Internet, Trump has used Twitter to transform propaganda into a round-the-clock tool of thought control, beyond the imaginings of Hitler and Goebbels.
The primary goal of America’s Founding Fathers in drafting the U.S. Constitution was to preclude rule by a tyrannical monarch. George Washington refused the title of king, making it ironic that innermost desire of Trump’s heart is now revealed by his willingness to destroy American democracy in favor of a dynasty in which Don Jr. would presumably be anointed crown prince. In this the tyrant he most resembles and who in his heart of hearts he would most love to emulate must be Henry VIII.
There are many similarities between the men. Henry was the visionary who first realized that spin can outweigh facts — when his youthful invasion of France produced insignificant results, he launched a propaganda campaign to portray it as a triumph throughout the courts of Europe. If Henry were alive today, he would want us to see things his way, tweeting like Trump, but under his more lyrical alias, Coeur Loyal.
Both men are famous for a hair-trigger temper. Former White House Counsel Don McGahn nicknamed Trump “King Kong” because he “goes ape” with explosions of umbrage. When Sessions recused himself from the Russian election interference investigation, long-time friends said that they had never seen him in such a fury. More than a year later, his anger at Sessions resurfaced with a vengeance as he threw tantrums at his television, his rage having simmered until it could no longer be contained. Trump appeared on Fox News to decry the notion that he was consumed by anger, but in the next sentence reversed directions, as he often does, admitting that he was in fact quite angry at the American press even as he envied the “nice things” state-controlled media says about Kim Jong Un. He has expressed a desire to drive his own car, but it is fortunate that he is chauffeured — otherwise, a Henrician explosion of road rage could at any moment erupt from the emotional cauldron roiling beneath the surface.
Like Trump, Henry sought retribution against anyone who did not humor his every whim or who crossed him in any way, executing harmless monks, the Cardinal who preached at the funerals of his father and grandmother, and two chief ministers who had served him faithfully for years. It is easy to imagine Trump overcoming his anger at Sessions by ordering the removal of his head, just as Henry did with Wolsey and Cromwell, or in a gesture of merciful benevolence allowing Clinton and Comey to rot in adjoining cells in the Tower. As he has expressed admiration for every 21st century despot, Trump might characterize Henry, as he did the congressman who body slammed a reporter, as “a tough cookie.”
It is in the closing days of Trump’s presidency that lessons learned from the Third Reich become truly frightening. When it became clear even to the delusional Führer that the war was lost, he blamed the German people who had proven to be unworthy of him. In an effort to punish his own people, Hitler issued his “Nero Decree,” ordering the destruction of all German infrastructure — railroads, factories, power plants were all demolished. In the final days of his term Trump ispursuing his own destructive impulses on a smaller scale.
Mary Trump has opined that President Trump now hates America because the majority rejected him at the polls, that his hatred would lead him to attack Republicans who refused to try to overturn the election, and that he would then “go after the rest of us.” It is sobering to imagine the misery Trump can inflict on America and the world in the few weeks that remain to his disastrous tenure. His petulant refusal to sign the omnibus bill for covid relief and funding the government proved that the cold-hearted would-be caudillo cares not at all for those he would make his subjects. Allowing the stimulus to lapse inflicted a cruel blow on millions of Americans, including those serving in the military, who now face weeks of privation for no reason other than Trump felt like hurting them. On the other hand, his ultimate approval of the legislation bolsters hopes that our worst fears will not be realized.
The originator of the famous adage that no one can fool all the people all the time is unknown, but it is most often attributed to a showman (P.T. Barnum) or a politician (Abraham Lincoln). Thankfully, a sufficient number of Americans resisted the non-stop propaganda machine supporting America’s showman-politician to prevent the surrender of our democracy to the will of one man — for now.
