Well, in style and what they look to draw out of people, Trump is remindful.
But one can begin and end with Hitler committed genocide and comparing Trump is absurd, and surely always will be. When suggestions comparing the two first appeared, at least in his political career, that was the predominant reaction, and still is for most.
Then there are the style comparisons, as this Daily Show X post went for:
View: https://x.com/TheDailyShow/status/1851438234552742324
I’ve always thought Trump just “naturally” possessed the skill set of a demagogue. He had an instinct for the mood of the disaffected, politically alienated, knew how to play on anger. On hate. On creating “the other”. Others have suggested otherwise: that he was more familiar with Hitler’s writings than many were aware of, and actually used Hitler’s propoganda lessons from a book by Hitler: My New Order. More on that in a second. I was reminded of that belief by a recent piece by Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic(no paywall):
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-authoritarian-rhetoric-hitler-mussolini/680296/?gift=jya-z5lTntURuSFdyDPB2XC-9P7L2Qu-W7Ns7WWcy1o&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
“These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence,
to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.
But neither has this rhetoric been
tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not”.
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The fact that Trump kept a book by Hitler by his bedside may have first been revealed in a 1990 Vanity Fair story describing the divorce from Ivana:
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner
“Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches,
My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of
My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of
Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was
My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not
Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “
If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda. The
Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories”.
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The author of this 2015 Alternet piece played with the idea of Trump learning from My New Order:
https://www.alternet.org/2015/12/do...itler-how-gop-leader-following-fuhrers-recipe
“Nobody can know what Trump reads or does not read—or if he even reads. But it appears that one way or another, much of the content in
My New Order about how Hitler says propaganda works, and how he structures his speaking style, and how Hitler targets the lowest-common denominator as his intended audience, has seeped into Trump: the way he speaks, argues, rages and responds in public. This goes beyond what has been reported in the
New York Times, which analyzed 95,000 words from five months of speeches and concluded that Trump shares a style with the 20th century's biggest demagogues.
Looks like Trump agrees with Hitler’s tenets. Trump’s “I love the uneducated” comes to mind:
- “The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.”
- “All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.”
- “The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.”
- "Once understood how necessary it is for propaganda to be adjusted to the broad mass, the following rule results: It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance.”
- “In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”
- “The function of propaganda is, for example, not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth… its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.”
Also of interest in comparing the style of Hitler and Trump is chapter 2, described here, from the 2019 book, “When at Times the Mob is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending the Republic”:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/...ways-trump-copying-hitlers-early-rhetoric-and
“A new book by one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America's constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler's extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s--when the Nazis took power in Germany.
In
When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America's constitutional foundation in 2019--an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority--is not positioned to withstand Trump's extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, "Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?," extensively details Trump's mimicry of Hitler's pre-war rhetoric and strategies”.
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It needs to be said none of the above constitutes proof Trump consciously studied the speeches and propoganda of Hitler. That he read the entirety of My New Order. He’s not known as a reader.
That he actually thought “worked for Adolph, I can pull this off”.
But, I tend to agree with Anne Applebaum in that first link, and in general, I at least can appreciate the nature of the comparisons, once you get past the usual knee jerk reaction “NO”, stemming from the Holocaust. Of course there’s no comparing that. But there is a strong resemblance to how one seizes power, how one controls people. He talks his reality into existence, and sticks to the lies through everything. He knows his propaganda, be it a natural “gift” or learned.
“In using this language,
Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read
Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he
told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”
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