OPINION: President Donald Trump travels Hitler’s trail

No, President Donald Trump isn’t Hitler. Trump himself coined that phrase and blamed it on then-Vice President Kamala Harris during the late stages of the 2024 presidential campaign. It was but one snowflake in a blizzard of lies.

But Trump is sprinting down the trail that Adolf Hitler followed to become a dictator. The similarities are astounding.

Hitler’s father beat him physically, and Trump’s father beat him emotionally, and the sons were never able to gain their father’s respect. In both cases, sons who were denied a father’s affection and support developed mental disorders of grandiose delusion.

Adolf and Donald were both draft dodgers, although Adolf later volunteered and served in World War I.

Utterly lacking traits of military leadership, Hitler never rose above the rank of lance corporal and was assigned duty as a messenger carrier.

In 1918, Hitler entered a psychiatric hospital. Trump apparently was never officially diagnosed with mental illness, but he has displayed characteristics of personality disorders, including malignant narcissism, which involves:

• Extreme arrogance.
• Extreme need for power.
• Acts of revenge against critics.
• Lack of conscience, regret or remorse.
• Cruelty and taking pleasure in the pain of others.
• High levels of aggression.
• Paranoia.

Both Hitler and Trump were masterful public speakers and propagandists, although their styles were very different.

They both also employed an arsenal of lies in pursuit of their goals.

Hitler first rose to fame on a concocted story in which he claimed to have singlehandedly captured an enemy officer during World War I.

Throughout his political career, lies were a major weapon against the German populous. Similarly, Trump has effectively employed pathological lies throughout his business and political careers.

Both men were convicted criminals.

Hitler was convicted of high treason for his leadership of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, which was an attempt to overturn the Weimar Republic. He was sentenced to five years in prison, but served only nine months.

Trump attempted to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, in which he lost a bid for a second term and survived an impeachment. But, during the years of his interregnum, he was convicted on charges of 34 felonies.

Now back in the Oval Office, an embittered president is pursuing a bloodless pogrom against his political enemies and even government employees involved in investigation of his crimes.

He is assaulting entire government departments with intent to destroy them without constitutional authority to do so.

Total, personal loyalty was demanded by Hitler, and now by Trump.

Both Hitler and Trump have deployed a strategy of dehumanization of peoples in attempts to justify actions against them.

Hitler used the rhetoric to enable the truly mass-murder of 6 million Jews.

Trump employs dehumanizing language as cover for his inhumane, illegal and unconstitutional actions against immigrants.

During last fall’s election, Trump said other nations are sending us “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists, the worst they have.”

After referring to a man accused of killing a 22-year-old nursing student, Trump said: “Democrats said please don’t call them ‘animals.’ I said, no, they’re not humans, they’re animals.”

Trump claimed that Biden “weaponized” the criminal justice system against him, which is a bald-faced lie, and now Trump is literally weaponizing the justice department to get revenge for his criminal convictions.

He plans to fire all FBI employees who investigated him. They were only doing their assigned jobs and they are protected from just such actions by our civil service laws.

Trump has said that he won’t accept Supreme Court decisions that don’t support him, and it is clear that he won’t.

Then only the Republic Party can save our democracy. In 1974, the GOP girded up its loins and told President Richard Nixon to resign, and if he didn’t, the GOP would support his impeachment.

Nixon resigned.

So far, today’s GOP is backing up dictatorial actions of a demented president!

Terence L. Day and wife, Ruth, have lived in Pullman since 1972. In 2004, he retired after 32 years as a science communicator on the Washington State University faculty. His interests and reading are catholic (small c) and peripatetic. He enjoys email at terence@moscow.com. Give him a piece of your mind.