Little Caesar

It’s tempting to call Donald Trump a Nazi. Lord knows, he’s given us reasons. There’s his racism and xenophobia, his coddling of white nationalism, his contempt for liberal democracy, his talent for the Big Lie and his tin-pot-dictator-obsession with military pageantry. But you shouldn’t call him a Nazi or compare him to Hitler. Some object to the comparison because it is a gross exaggeration that trivializes the Holocaust and profanes the millions of victims of Nazism. Others are skeptical of any rhetoric that tars political opponents as Hitler. Because even if there are legitimate points of comparison – the incremental steps to totalitarianism, for example - people get turned off, the memes become clichés, someone shrieks “Godwin’s Law!” and the whistle blows. The conversation ends.

        

But calling Trump a Nazi or comparing him to Hitler also misses a key distinction for understanding how authoritarians think and what they believe. Hitler was evil and monstrous beyond measure, but he believed in something. Trump lacks the capacity to believe in anything beyond himself and his own gratification. His authoritarian streak reveals him as a fascist, but it's a fascism void of  any vision for the nation (like Hitler) or commitment to ideology (like Mussolini). Trump's brand of fascism is incidental to the behavior of a sociopathic child. He’s a “fascist of convenience,” one insightful blogger observed. For Trump, “'fascism’ just means everybody pays attention to him all the time." Joe Klein put it somewhat differently: Trump is Caligula with a lizard brain. This theory wasn’t intended to be ad hominem.  It was a serious warning not to underestimate Trump’s feral nature - how he reacts to stimuli, sizes up prey and expertly strokes the brainstem of his followers. The triumph of the reptilian brain also helps explain why Trump and so many hardcore followers are impervious to reason, deaf to irony and void of anything resembling decency or a moral compass.

But if Hitler is the wrong analogy, there may be another historical figure, also from the land of Drumpf, who bears a closer resemblance: Kaiser Wilhelm II, the vain, bumbling, monarch who led Germany into World War I.  For all of the echos of the 1930s that resound today, there's something about Trump that hearkens back to an earlier time of out-of touch autocrats who were committed to an old order and a world of privilege. The First World War doesn’t have a hold on American consciousness the way the Second World War does and so the Kaiser is not a figure that readily springs to the public mind. We picture a black and white image, a cartoonish figure with a spiked helmet and handlebar moustache (a cross between Rollie Fingers and Yosemite Sam).  But the similarities behind Trump and the Kaiser are real enough:  Authoritarian, narcissistic, impatient, impulsive, theatrical, childish and deluded. 

One historian described the Kaiser as:

….superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success…

Sound familiar?

Historians have also noted the Kaiser's deep insecurity, poor judgment and, ultimately, a detachment from reality. 

Wilhelm’s personal instability was reflected in vacillations of policy. His actions, at home as well as abroad, lacked guidance, and therefore often bewildered or infuriated public opinion. He was not so much concerned with gaining specific objectives, as had been the case with Bismarck, as with asserting his will.

And the narcissism! Kaiser Wilhelm always needed to be the focus of all attention. Bismarck, the wily former Prime Minister said that the Kaiser wanted every day to be his birthday. According to one quip, "The Kaiser insists on being the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral." On the eve of the first World War, Germany had the best-trained and most professional military in the world. Yet, when the Kaiser addressed his admirals, he told them, "All of you know nothing; I alone know something; I alone decide." I alone.

Then there's Trump: "I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me." And, his dystopian speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention: "I alone can fix it." I alone.  

“Kaiser” is the German word for emperor and it derives from the Roman title, Caesar. Inherent in the title is the understanding that authority to rule comes from the divine. It is absolute. This is the kind of  authority that Trump understands and yearns for.  He has nothing but contempt for the give and take of a democratic republic, for the checks and balances, the rule of law or for due process.

Yesterday, Trump shared something of his perspective on political power. He praised the Chinese President, Xi JinPing who had consolidated power to become president for life. "I think it's great," said Trump. "Maybe we'll give that a shot someday." It was one of the most remarkable and Un-American statements ever uttered by a United States president.  Remarkable in its ignorance of U.S. history and its contempt for the legacy of George Washington and the very nature of our republic. The media barely blinked. The public is numb to this sort of thing by now, and Trump's handlers will say that he was joking. The Kaiser also liked jokes, especially if they were vulgar. He liked them almost as much as he liked military uniforms.

World War I shattered European optimism and left 15 million people dead. Unlike World War II, no single leader or aggressor can be blamed since the war's origins are complicated. But the Kaiser (and perhaps the Austrian Chief of Staff, von Hotzendorf), driven by arrogance, recklessness and personal slights, bears as much culpability as any one individual.

When Great Britain entered the conflict, and it became clear that this would be a new kind of war, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, supposedly remarked, "the lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." With each passing day, it seems as if lamps are going out in our republic. Time will tell if they can be lit again.