A Chilling and Heretofore Unknown Link between Hitler and Trump

Three Essays on a)Links between Hitler and Trump, b) Political changes compelled by the digital economy, and c) What Great Books are Made of, Courtesy of V Hugo and D Halberstam.

By

David Gottfried

Another Eerie and Unsettling Link between Hitler and Trump:

It suddenly dawned on me:

World War Two and Trump’s 2024 campaign were prompted by the same psychopathology.

Hitler, and to an extent Germany itself, were humiliated by Germany’s loss in World War One, believed that traitors and backstabbers prevented Germany from winning, and started World War Two to avenge Germany’s loss in World War One. (Indeed, some historians see these two world wars as really one world war with 20 years of an intervening, insincere, precarious peace.)

To a large extent, Trump’s campaign in 2024 was only prompted by one enormous grudge: His loss in 2020. Indeed, most of Trump’s speeches, up until the latter part of 2024, had very little to do with what he intended to do if he were to seize the white house in 2024. Most of the time, he bitched about his delusional belief that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, and when he wasn’t spreading his splenetic poison about the deep state’s treachery in stealing the election, he spoke about 2016 -- his bold and glorious win and the throngs of adoring admirers ready to kiss the hem of his garments.

Of course, most candidates, I suppose, enjoy thinking about their prior electoral successes, but most candidates know that voters aren’t going to love them because they love the way they gloat about a prior election. Most candidates know that voters want to know what a candidate will do for a voter, not how much a candidate loves to reminisce about prior victories. For example, I defy anyone to cite any instances in which Richard Nixon in 1972, or Ronald Reagan in 1984, or Bill Clinton in 1996 or Barack Obama in 2012 gave speeches in which they told voters to vote for them because winning the prior presidential election was so much fun. None of those prior presidents were dumb enough not to realize that people care more about the nation than a candidate’s self-esteem.

However, for Donald Trump, self esteem is everything. He, like Adolph Hitler, knows that, outside of murderous maliciousness, mediocrity is his most salient trait. Because he feels so shabby, he requires incessant, blinding stardom.

Hitler started a second world war to rehabilitate his wounded soul, a wounded soul which he imagined that all of Germany also possessed, and Trump is starting a new administration not because there is anything he wants to do for the nation – he still has not been able to tell us what he wants to replace Obamacare with. (Face it: He couldn’t care less what health care most Americans have) -- but because he has scores to settle with Americans who voted against him. As he said, “I am your retribution.”

Of course, Trump harbors other Hitlerian attributes. Consider:

A) Hitler at the outset, and Trump at the inception of his 2016 campaign, were considered jokes with minimal chances of attaining power;

B) Hitler and Trump both exploited novel forms of media. Marshall Mc Luhan said that Hitler capitalized on radio, which Mc Luhan said was a hot or more emotional medium. Because radio doesn’t give you a picture, the listener’s mind can create his own pictures which will be more extreme and starker as the speaker’s rhetoric becomes more flammable and fierce.

Trump is capitalizing on social media which, like radio, is conducive to bringing emotions to a fever pitch.

C) Trump’s relationship with conservative, Republican elites in this country mirror’s Hitler’s relationship with right-wing elites in Germany. In Germany, the right wing supported Hitler even though much of his politics were anathema to elite elements of the far Right. The Traditional Right-wing thought they could use Hitler to annihilate communists and leftists and then be done with him; instead, Hitler ate both the far left and the right-wing traditionalists for lunch. In this country, the right backed Trump because he seemed unstoppable. I am sure they never realized that Trump would redefine the Republican Party by a) discarding our longstanding commitment to defend Western and Central Europe from Russia, b) scrapping our commitment to free trade, and c) launching a “cultural revolution” against East Coast refinement, Academic excellence and professional achievement – actually item C preceded Trump and had its roots in Richard Nixon who, in an effort to get votes in the once solidly Democratic South, tried to adopt a “grits and country” image – recall Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s First attorney general, decrying Julia Child’s preparation of exquisite French food and admonition to cook Southern Fried Chicken.

D) Trump and Hitler both believe that a liar will thrive by telling the most outrageous lies with the greatest frequency.

E) According to his first wife, Trump kept a copy of “Mein Kampf” on his nightstand.

F) Of course, the biggest and most revolting link between the two ogres is their fiendish sadism and yen for slaughter. But this was so obvious it didn’t seem necessary to write it down.

Advanced Technologies compel radical political changes and prove the enduring relevance of Karl Marx.

Many of you, upon reading the immediately preceding assertion that Marx is still relevant, will heave with disgust and deem me a dated radical fixated on the Marxism of the first half of the 20 th century or the flower power conceptions of the New Left which captured the imagination of the 60’s.

So forgot all the culture baggage of Marx. Forget all the things Marxism became associated with in the 20 th century.

Become a little bit of a fundamentalist. Look at Marx’s text.

Marx, among other things, stressed that new economic forms, and new systems and ways of creating wealth, will command the creation of new social forms and new systems of government.

I don’t think anyone would dare dispute the contention that economic life has changed dramatically because of the computer. Our economy is a stark and dramatic change from the industrial economy that had endured for two hundred years.

Just as Marx said that the industrial revolution made the seemingly copacetic farmer democracy of Jefferson a quaint relic, Marx’s ideas tell us that the digital age and its depredations and dislocations compel us to create new social and political forms.

Moving From the Abstract to the Concrete Real Fast:

As we have often heard, this new economy is in large measure knowledge based. We make ideas instead of things. (Actually, I think that most of what is considered new is really a petty derivation from something else and that most knowledge workers are not constructing new ideas; rather, they are puttering around the periphery of pre-existing work and half of what they devise are half-witted hagiographic odes to other thinkers, e.g., most feminists say nothing new; rather, they write stuff which either restates what Gloria Steinum once said or they try to find fault with her formulations. For example, an old joke about Academia in the 1950’s went like this: A man, upon introducing himself at a party, would say, “I am the man who wrote the review about the review about the review of David Reisman.” (Reisman was a brilliant social and political theorist of the 1950’s)

In a knowledge-based society, people are less apt to work on assembly lines. Very often, they work from their homes.

Because of this, more and more people are considered independent contractors and not employees.

Because they are now considered independent contractors, they will probably be a whole lot poorer, sicker and have less job security:

Employees obtain the following benefits that independent contractors do not get:

A) The right to form a union;

B) The right to strike for higher wages;

C) The right to unemployment insurance;

D) The right to disability insurance;

E) Possibly pension benefits, usually medical benefits.

Of course, you never heard anything about this in the last presidential campaign.

What Makes for Successful and Brilliant Books in the Eyes of Victor Hugo and David Halberstam.

A couple of days ago, I read that Victor Hugo, referring to “Les Misérables,” said:

"Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Misérables knocks at the door and says: 'open up, I am here for you.' "¹

National Public Radio, March 20, 2017, Nina Martyris

From Hugo’s description of Les Misérables, we can infer that he really believed in what the book was trying to say. He had an intense, over-riding need to express his ideas about the suffering of the poor, so emphatically conveyed in Les Misérables.

Les Misérables was exceptionally successful. People far, far away from France and its socioeconomic discontent read the book. For example, it was widely read by both Union and Confederate soldiers during our Civil War, and the confederate soldiers wholeheartedly identified with the badgered and beleaguered Parisian poor, calling themselves, “General Lee’s Misérables.”

(Something really gets on my nerves: People today are such inane, snot-nosed assholes, and they are so very certain that they are the most sophisticated, stellar people who have every trod upon the earth – after all, they wear designer footwear. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know too many people who discuss French novels. But our Civil War soldiers, while shooting and getting shot at, read French novels. Don’t forget: They had no television, no movies, no radio, no computer. They were infinitely more literate than today’s humans, insufferably boring, stupid animals whose signature activity seems to be shuffling through shopping malls.)

Upon reading the aforementioned words of Hugo, I immediately remembered what David Halberstam had to say about writing books that are great and that also sell. He said that someone had advised him – I don’t recall who – that a book will sell, and often has merit, when the writer strongly believes in what he has to say and wants to shout it from the mountain top.

And that’s when Halberstam decided to write a scholarly yet popular account of the Vietnam War, his truly superb work, “The Best and the Brightest.” He had been told that scholarly stuff doesn’t sell (And we all already knew that). But Halberstam, whose life had been consumed by Vietnam for years (President Kennedy complained to the publisher of the New York Times that Halberstam’s reports about Vietnam were too critical – later, the President’s brother, Robert Kennedy, agreed with Halberstam), had so much about Vietnam that he wanted to get off his chest. He wrote the book, and it was one of the few scholarly best sellers in history.

What Hugo said jived with what Halberstam said: Halberstam said that the best books and best sellers are resounding stirrings from one’s heart that the author must express, and Hugo’s words make it plain that he believed in Les Misérables so much that his book really was his “Baby.”

This reminds me that Camille Paglia condemned what she has seen as academia’s distaste for the heartfelt, emphatic stance and preference for material that is ironic, aloof, keeps its composure and reads the way ladies were once taught to behave, which is to never give oneself away. I agree with Paglia, and from what Hugo and Halberstam have to say, it is refreshing to think that literature that dares to sound a resounding note can rise like la creme de la crème.

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/20/520459332/let-them-eat-bread-the-theft-that-helped-inspire-les-miserables