A very nice couple who live nearby are immigrants from Germany and are friends of mine. They arrived in the 1950s and have been successful in their lives and professions. They reside in a comfortable home and have achieved the American dream.
These friends are now in their 90s. They were young people in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. They were made members of Hitler youth groups. They remember some of Hitler’s speeches as teenagers. They also remember a Germany in ruins.
Their minds are still clear and sharp, and what worries them and saddens them, is to witness the incredible parallels between Hitler and Donald Trump, which few Americans seem to be really aware of. It’s as if Trump were following the Hitler playbook, although Trump may not be bright enough to know it.
The Hitler playbook involved outrageous lies of various magnitudes, of personal insults, of blaming ethnic minorities for a host of problems, and of stated grievances, some of them going back to the treaty of Versailles. There was paranoia too about the German people getting no respect, that everything was going to rack and ruin, and as Trump has said, “I, only I, can fix it.” The bigger the falsehood, the more it was believed.
Hitler created a following of gullible people. He promised to protect them from the dark forces of evil around them. The people’s role in this movement was to be blindly loyal and to excuse him from being immoral, stupid and dictatorial. Anything goes. Our leader can do no wrong. If Trump or Hitler says so, it must be true! Better believe it! (For example, “I won the election.”)
All of this adds up to a cult, not a normal political party. Some people today don’t even realize that they have been taken into the cult as fools and suckers by Donald Trump. People in cults sometimes do terrible and irrational things, even overriding their own core religious principles.
To conclude, my neighbors from Germany are very much alarmed about the future of the country that they came to with such high hopes in their 20s. They fear Donald Trump and his talk of a “blood bath” and retribution for those who oppose him. As Trump has said himself — and this is on the record in July — “We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote again.”
James King, Salt Lake City
