Book author Christopher Browning (“The Origins of the Final Solution”, 2007)
offers a lengthy piece in the New York Review of Books in Oct. 2018, “The Suffocation of Democracy”.
The author points out some similarities of Trump’s history
to that of Hitler. In the early 1930s,
the extreme right in Germany made a “deal” and installed Hitler. There are many more institutional checks and
our situation today was a lot more stable than Germany in the 1930s, but not as
immune to group resentment as we had thought. Trump has no Army of “brownshirts”
in comparison. But he did have conspirators,
ranging from the Bannon crowd (apparently ultimate connected to ideas of
returning white supremacy disguised as “Christianity” or something) to Vladimir
Putin himself. It is rather shocking to
us that Trump fell for them, as he didn’t seem extreme in running “The
Apprentice”, just badass.
Browning also notes at the end the legacy Trump could leave,
over the slow motion catastrophe of climate change.
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