{"id":43874,"date":"2015-07-24T18:37:38","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T18:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/?p=43874"},"modified":"2018-05-07T14:52:07","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T14:52:07","slug":"trump-is-hitler-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/trump-is-hitler-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump is Hitler (Part II)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"trump_is_hitler_part_II\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I had not watched Donald Trump\u2019s July 8 interview<\/a> with NBC News\u2019 Katy Tur when I posted my (clickbait-titled) Trump is Hitler<\/a> post on Tuesday. (I admit that I have actively avoided viewing Trump footage, in general, over the years\u2014I am, for example, unfamiliar with his TV show about firing people.) But now that I\u2019ve been through all 29 minutes of this particular sparring match, I\u2019m compelled to double down on my contention that he really is reproducing the German dictator\u2019s early tactics (say, 1922-1930) move for move.<\/p>\n

It should go without saying that Trump is not doing this deliberately<\/i>\u2014he is not a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist\u2014nor is he aware of the correlation, or even possessed of the wherewithal to understand the base mechanics of fascism (or even of government). But then, Hitler started out with the best of intentions, too: he simply wanted to save his beloved country from what he perceived as fatal internal weaknesses\u2014of elected officials and, more urgently, people of a certain ethnicity, just like Trump\u2014and, also like Trump, he was anxious to reinvigorate the armed forces for these and other purposes (“I’m more into the military than anybody,\u201d Trump avowed in the NBCTV interview). Except in fiction, nobody sets out to be<\/i> an instrument of bloodshed, poverty, social destruction or institutionalized injustice; nobody desires<\/i> the role of destroyer (at least not consciously; Freud might say otherwise).<\/p>\n

As I have already learned firsthand in the wake of my previous post on the topic, the comparison seems, to many, outlandish at best\u2014Donald Trump, surely, is a figure of fun and his wild rhetoric and climbing poll numbers cannot be taken seriously. But make no mistake: this is not a joke, and should not be dismissed. “The idea that Trump’s appeal isn’t genuine,” Eric Boehlert of Media Matters<\/i> cautioned<\/a> two days ago, “or that the press has lured Republicans into supporting him is likely more comforting than acknowledging the truth: Trump, an ignorant, nativist birther, is appealing to an often-ugly streak within the conservative movement.” Disputing the dismissive language with which Trump’s ascendency has been reported, Boehlert stresses how “Fueled by hateful rhetoric and right-wing media programming, Republicans and conservatives have veered towards extremism in recent years. If the press had honestly documented that trend, today’s Trump phenomenon wouldn’t come as such a shock.”<\/p>\n

Watching Trump interviewed at length (which, I freely admit, I should have done earlier) is extremely illuminating. Reading his quotations in the context of campaign-related news accounts does not do him justice\u2014you need to see him<\/i> to get the full effect. Clearly, it\u2019s an effect that is as pleasing and rewarding and fulfilling to many thousands of Americans as it is viscerally repugnant and appalling to you and me (when it\u2019s not uproariously and inadvertently funny, which is how Jon Stewart and others outside Stewart\u2019s comedy wheelhouse are\u2014somewhat nervously\u2014choosing to regard it). You need to see Trump because the real force of his rhetoric doesn\u2019t come across without the sound and the visuals: the coarse, accented voice; the ugly diction; the boardroom posturing; the glowering facial expressions; the spray-tan; the awful neckties and suits; the sneering condescension; the hair (which Trump knows is ridiculed, and affably defends: \u201cMy hair is just fine,\u201d he insists<\/a>). You can\u2019t understand what\u2019s happening until you look closely at this caricature of grotesque hubris and understand that precisely the elements from which you recoil are the ingredients of his stunning popularity.<\/p>\n

Of course, I\u2019m talking about class<\/i>\u2014not erudition or intelligence or political posturing or decorum, or wealth, but pure social class, the great American taboo subject. “Although most Americans sense that they live within an extremely complicated system of social classes and suspect that much of what is thought and done here is prompted by considerations of status, the subject has remained murky, and always touchy,” the late literary historian Paul Fussell wrote in his landmark study Class<\/i> (1983): “Since I have been writing this book I have experienced the truth of R. H. Tawney’s perception, in his book Equality<\/i> (1931): ‘The word “class” is fraught with unpleasing associations, so that to linger upon it is apt to be interpreted as the symptom of a perverted mind and a jaundiced spirit.'” Fussell elaborates, “At the bottom, people tend to believe that class is defined by the amount of money you have [\u2026] Nearer the top, people perceive that taste, values, ideas, style and behavior are indispensible criteria of class, regardless of money or occupation or education.” Elaborating on details of lower-class dress and grooming that he feels are actually intended<\/i> to offend finer sensibilites (such as garish baseball caps or “legible” sweatshirts), Fussell concludes, “[dressing this way] says to those whose expensive educations have persuaded them that the ideal of dignity is the Piazza San Marco or the Parthenon or that the ideal of the male head derives from Michaelangelo’s David<\/i> or the Adam of the Sistine Chapel: ‘I’m as good as you are.'” Fussell, I’m sure, would have instantly understood the basic meaning of Donald Trump’s candidacy: Trump\u2019s enemy\u2014his supporters\u2019 enemy\u2014isn\u2019t Mexico or illegal aliens or ISIS or Muslims. It\u2019s the American upper classes; the elite.<\/p>\n

The overarching forces of American Conservatism\u2014banks, corporations, business lobbies, energy consortia, the \u201cmilitary-industrial complex,\u201d and the entrenched dynasties entwined with these interests\u2014have done a masterful job over the decades of disguising themselves so as to ingratiate with the weakest and most ordinary amongst us: the simple, unassuming (white) workers and strivers; the downtrodden and oppressed (white) rural Christians; the bolo-tie wearers; the (white) truck drivers; the poor, struggling, honest, ordinary (white) people who didn\u2019t go to fancy colleges and don\u2019t live in big cities and advance fancy-sounding \u201cEuropean\u201d (\u201csocialist\u201d) theories about how hard-earned dollars must be given to \u201curban\u201d (black and hispanic) \u201cmoochers.\u201d Through precise manipulation of (mainly Church-related) cultural imagery, and a crafted mythology of pioneering “small-businesses owners” who can succeed through honest toil, a legitimately elite contingency has managed to bond with its inverse demographic\u2014to compel trailer-park residents and welfare recipients to look at, for example, George W. Bush (as pure a representative of extreme patrician wealth and its interests as has ever crossed the national stage) and say, \u201cHe\u2019s like me; he\u2019s on my side.\u201d<\/p>\n

On these terms, the failure of the Republican candidates in the last two national elections makes perfect sense. McCain was supposed to be a \u201csalt of the earth\u201d war hero, an independent Gary Cooper type (despite his nepotistic military career), but it turned out that he was mainly popular with the Washington D.C. press corps; nobody else liked him. The desperate gamble to re-up McCain\u2019s cultural-underclass credentials by adding Sarah Palin to the ticket not only failed: the tactic<\/i> revealed the panic involved; the awareness of the slipping mask that needed to be more strongly affixed. And Mitt Romney was a similar compromise-candidate whose “competence” (meaning, personally generated wealth) and reassuring Midwestern squareness were trusted to inspire confidence despite his peculiar mundanity\u2014unlike Bush, he could not quite make himself come across as a regular joe, but he was nevertheless expected to appeal to voters by embodying that most hallowed of Randian archetypes: the successful, attractive “self-made” business titan (as if he were Henry Ford, if Ford had made foreclosures and layoffs rather than cars). Romney was genuinely predicted (by vast crowds of white Americans) to win handily, but, unfortunately, the outsourcing and the liquidation and the overseas factories were more visible and more toxic than Republicans apparently realized, and\u2014most famously\u2014the jig was up when a waiter\u2019s phone camera told the real story of the contempt behind the curtain.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s where Trump comes in. The voters who liked George W. Bush because he \u201cowned\u201d a \u201cranch\u201d in Crawford Texas* and mispronounced \u201cnuclear\u201d and behaved like a drawling Texas good old boy (even though he was born in New Haven, Connecticut, attended Phillips Exeter Academy, was a cheerleader at Yale and graduated Harvard Business School) are now being presented with the real thing\u2014a genuine vulgarian. The basic scam of Conservative American politics\u2014the faux populism\u2014is finally being exposed, because those carefully-groomed constituents trained to dislike \u201cthe elite,\u201d taught to sneer at Obama\u2019s putting Dijon mustard on hamburgers and John Kerry\u2019s windsurfing and the Clinton\u2019s million-dollar book deals and speaking engagements (one of the most incredible selective-example scams in the history of mass communications), are suddenly realizing that there\u2019s no real difference (at least as far as class indicators go) between the top-tier representatives of the Left and the Right. (We on the Left, it almost need not be elaborated upon, do not have this problem because our ideology is built on respecting<\/i> hierarchies of achievement and erudition; we don\u2019t have to tie ourselves in rhetorical knots insisting that an Editor of the Harvard Law Review turned University of Chicago Law School professor is less competent or intelligent than a Hollywood B-movie actor from Eureka college who became a radio spokesman for General Electric or a Wasilla beauty pageant contestant who never read a book.)<\/p>\n

Watching the NBCTV interview<\/a> through this lens, it becomes increasingly clear that it is not the man’s ideas as much as the persona itself<\/i> that appeals to his supporters\u2014that precisely the traits that propel Trump off of any reasonable person’s radar are the ones that make him the Republican front-runner. It’s not the rhetoric, it’s the person<\/i> they like, as evidenced by comments on the interview’s YouTube page:<\/p>\n

We need someone who is good with money and stands up for himself like DT<\/p>\n

He will turn America great again.<\/p>\n

[He is winning polls] Probably because he’s upfront and honest about his opinions. Most politicians simply put up lies to garner votes.<\/p>\n

Please spread the word around your communities. I genuinely think this man can help your people and ALL of us as well. He is right we are getting screwed. We ALL should be able to prosper in this once great nation that in my opinion will always be great. Even in our darkest hour we are better then the rest.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And when you then look at what Trump is saying (for example, about how he would conduct Middle East foreign policy) the juxtaposition is suddenly not funny at all:<\/p>\n

TRUMP<\/b>: With ISIS, you kill them at the head\u2014you take the oil. That\u2019s where they\u2019re getting their money. If you bomb the hell out of it, you bomb the hell out of it. You\u2019ve got to stop their wealth; they\u2019ve got tremendous wealth.
\nTUR<\/b>: What about civilians?
\nTRUMP<\/b>: I\u2019m talking about oil. I\u2019m talking about oil areas. I\u2019m not talking about civilian areas.
\nTUR<\/b>: Civilians are near oil areas.
\n[pause<\/i>]
\nTRUMP<\/b>: Oh, give me a break, Katy. Go ahead, next question.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of this\u2014the establishment disdain (which is entirely mutual); the underestimated populist fervor; the black-and-white rhetoric\u2014is, as I’m saying, very familiar. As Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw wrote, “Many contemporaries made a mistake in treating Mein Kampf<\/i> with ridicule and not taking the ideas Hitler expressed there very seriously”\u2014 through which, as Kershaw explains, “Everything could be couched in terms of black and white, victory or total destruction. There were no alternatives. And, like all ideologues and ‘conviction politicians.’ the self-reinforcing components of his ‘world view’ meant that he was always in a position to deride or dismiss out of hand any ‘rational’ arguments of opponents.” And Hitler, a “trooper with gypsy blood” (who appalled American supporter and Harvard graduate Ernst Hanfstaengl by “sugaring a vintage wine” during a visit) transcended and even exploited his Bavarian-peasant trappings: “He could have peppered [the wine],” Hanfstaengl wrote, “for each na\u00efve act increased my belief in his homespun sincerity.”<\/p>\n

Again, to be clear, I don’t believe that Donald Trump will be nominated or elected and I don’t believe he will rise in power to become a genocidal, warmongering dictator (despite his clearly-stated racist\/interventionist views)\u2014mostly because (as I wrote last time<\/a>) the United States is a far more robust democracy than was the fragile Weimar Republic. But have no illusions: this is genuine demagoguery, which is working to expose a legitimate mass movement. Trump may prove harmless, but the dark and violent forces he is stirring\u2014the fervent call to “make our country great again”\u2014are very familiar and very real.<\/p>\n

\n

*It was not a functioning ranch and had been bought and donated by a church group shortly before his inauguration; once out of office, Bush sold it and moved to Preston Hollow, an affluent gated community outlying Dallas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had not watched Donald Trump\u2019s July 8 interview with NBC News\u2019 Katy Tur when I posted my (clickbait-titled) Trump is Hitler post on Tuesday. (I admit that I have actively avoided viewing Trump footage, in general, over the years\u2014I am, for example, unfamiliar with his TV show about firing people.) But now that I\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43903,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43874"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43874"}],"version-history":[{"count":84,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44522,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43874\/revisions\/44522"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}