by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I continue to read a book about the rise of Hitler and Nazis and I have to admit that there are a lot of eerie parallels between Trump and Hitler. And, yet it’s the difference between them that I think are most telling.
While both men were underestimated by their opponents, the thing that is clear to me is that Trump is not the Great Man that Hitler was. Trump is nothing more than an avatar, a vassal for the rage of white Christians who are afraid of the browning of America. Trump is just himself. He doesn’t manage or direct the flow of history, he just rides it towards an unknown destination.
As such, it’s not Hitler I would compare Trump to, but rather a kind of negative Boris Yeltsin. Both men seek to destroy and they both cause a lot of chaos. Yeltsin brought about the peaceful destruction of the Soviet Union. So, too, could Trump ultimately do the same thing with the United States.
Trump, like Yeltsin, is paving the way for a successor who will ultimately be the real Man of History. So, if we manage not to buckle into civil war, it will be President Pompeo, or Cotton, or Cruz, or Flynn, or, Hawley or, or, or, or, or whoever ultimately becomes a very powerful, very long-lasting American autocrat. Whomever the autocrat ends up being, they will become fabulously wealthy and powerful.
The thing that has me on edge is I still can not game out which of the three possible outcomes the United States is going to take. Will we have a civil war, or turn into an autocracy or have some sort of military junta? I just don’t know. Logically, at the moment, we’re going to slip peacefully into autocracy because we’re already an autocracy without an autocrat.
And, in the end, when we do become an autocracy, at first things really won’t change. It will only be gradually that the autocrat will begin to abuse their now free reign to do whatever the fuck they want. And that’s when people like me will feel the direct effects of no longer living in a Western democracy, of living in an illiberal democracy.
I know this sounds like my usual “doom shit.” But something’s gotta give. There really are too many similarities between the Weimar Republic and modern America for us not to sit up and take notice. To realize how fucked we are. And we are really, really fucked.
Our political isn’t just collapsing — it’s collapsed. We’ve reached the point where two people who disagree politically can’t discuss matters of the day without screaming at each other. That’s just one step away from the two sides taking up arms and settling those issues on the field of blood.
So, while Trump definitely shares a lot of historical traits with Hitler, for the time being I don’t think he is our Hitler because I don’t think that’s the proper historical analogy. The proper comparison is the fall of the Soviet Union and the transition from Yeltsin to Putin. Someone is going to be an American Putin and THAT person is going to be the person that strangles American freedom and liberty once and for all.
Besides the whole autocracy or civil war question, the other question is — who will Trump pick to be his 2024 veep? He’s so dumb and always goes for the worst possible decision that I think it’s possible he’ll pick Mike Flynn. But I also think fucking cocksucker and fat fuck Mike Pompeo would definitely be someone that Trump would look hard at. Pompeo would quickly make life for loudmouth drunk cranks like me hell, especially when I won’t shut up about what a fat fuck he is.
But only time will tell, I guess.
