It is now conventional wisdom that “Donald Trump is like Adolf Hitler.” The Washington Examiner crystallized this in a report on December 28, 2016, under the headline “Seven times the media compared Trump to Hitler.”
But the Washington Post gave this meme über credibility when it published an editorial on February 29, 2016, under the headline “Voters shouldn’t reward Trump’s assault on democracy.” That editorial included the following to support its admonition:
You don’t have to go back to history’s most famous example, Adolf Hitler, to understand that authoritarian rulers can achieve power through the ballot box. …
It is not hateful to wonder whether terrorists might smuggle themselves into this country disguised as Syrian refugees. … But Mr. Trump is pandering to those fears, not offering solutions.
Of course, there’s no denying the comparison. After all, no less an authority than “the Adolf Hitler biographer” Ron Rosenbaum warns that the way Trump “bluffed” his way into power – by normalizing big lies – is eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s rise.
But I have posited that a comparison with Benito Mussolini is more fitting. Not least because Vladimir Putin is the big elephant on the world stage in this context. I shared my cognitive dissonance in “Prince Charles Draws Analogies Trumpism and Nazism,” February 8, 2017.
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It’s eminently newsworthy that this Prince of Wales is being hailed as a conscientious objector to Trumpism for saying this:
We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive to those who adhere to a minority faith. All of this has deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s. …
My parents’ generation fought and died in a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and inhuman attempts to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.
Mind you, some of us have been saying much the same for years. But I, for one, have always predicated commentaries in this regard on this far more compelling analogy: Putin is to Hitler as Trump is to Mussolini. After all, the aggression Vladimir Putin is executing over in Europe has far deeper “echoes of the dark days of the 1930s” than the nationalist populism Donald Trump is propagating here in America.
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This is why I derived some vindication from the following:
Fourteen heads of state have contacted Joe Biden in an attempt to better understand the actions of the Trump administration, the former vice-president said on Tuesday, with one even comparing the US president to Mussolini.
Speaking at an event on Tuesday alongside Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, Biden bemoaned Trump’s ‘bizarre conduct’ and claimed that one European prime minister went so far as to liken the president to ‘Il Duce’.
(London Guardian, October 17, 2017)
But perhaps Trump’s sexual proclivities are what make him more like the promiscuous Mussolini than the repressed Hitler. Therefore, let’s talk about sex.
The following gives some insight into how the three men compare on this primal score.
Hitler
During the majority of teenage years and in his twenties, Hitler was a homosexual and had a wide-ranging string of men whose company he regularly enjoyed. …
Hitler had also attempted to change his homosexual tendencies and become a heterosexual since he had grown tired and wary of blackmailers who knew about his dark secrets. However, he didn’t enjoy much success with in his relationships with women, and most of his heterosexual relationships weren’t even consummated.
(War History Online, April 26, 2016)
Mussolini
He told his jealous lover Clara – complaining bitterly about him returning to an old flame – that the idea of sleeping with only one woman was ‘inconceivable’. ‘There was a period in which I had 14 women and I’d take three or four every evening, one after the other … that gives you an idea of my sexuality.’
‘Mussolini’s butler revealed that he was screwing women all the time,’ [Nicholas Farrell, author of a biography of Il Duce] said yesterday, ‘even behind [most-favored mistress] Clara Petacci’s back.’
(London Independent, November 9, 2009)
Trump
Nearly a decade ago, when Trump was filming a segment for Access Hollywood with Billy Bush to promote his cameo on Days of Our Lives, the businessman and reality TV star was caught on a hot microphone talking about how he gets away with groping women.
‘You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them … it’s like a magnet, just kiss … I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything … grab them by the pussy … anything.’
(Washington Post, October 8, 2016)
I rest my case.
Related commentaries:
Trumpism and Nazism…
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