Trump is no Hitler

Mr. Trump is no Hitler, for many reasons. But there's one uncanny parallel I can see in the two men: they were/are both ciphers. Neither were/are known to ever have had "friends" in the normal sense of the word. Far more than being personalities with their own peculiarities, both were/are more like vessels for pouring in certain essential qualities of their respective countries/times. For Hitler, those qualities were ultranationalism, militarism, racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, etc. For Trump, while some of those qualities are apparent in him, too, the far more essential quality that is really characteristic of Trump is infantility.

The "Trump baby blimp" that activists plan to fly in London alludes to this. But to pretend that this is some kind of coincidence not revealing of the country he presides over is grotesque. The infantilism of USA culture has been increasingly apparent, since well before Marshall McCluhan's observations about the early days of television. The problem is really not even a question of a "left/right" divide (that there exists today no electoral political left in the USA, properly so-called, is a whole other can of worms, that I don't want to get into now).

Any even cursory inspection of some of the criticisms against Trump -- for, say, meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un -- reveals a kind of "bipartisan" cranky infantility. Never mind that by doing so, he was helping to defuse a dangerous confrontation of his own creation. No, the danger that he might get any credit for stepping back from the brink of a nuclear war was too much for his staunchest Democratic critics. "Trump hobnobs with a murderous dictator!" screamed Democrats! Senator Tammy Duckworth (D, IL) even introduced a proposed law banning the Pentagon from withdrawing forces from Korea!

The entire "Russia conspiracy" fairy tale, and the credulity with which zealous anti-Trump members of the public have swallowed it, point to the same infantilism. I mean, ok, I can well believe that intelligence agencies engage all the time in numerous efforts at influencing the media. But the idea that any foreign intelligence agencies might be capable of becoming a crucial determinant of the results of elections in a country with such a balkanized, baroque voting system as the one prevailing in the USA is preposterous. (And not only preposterous, but truly dangerous, to the extent that it distracts from the very real, methodical and insidious GOP projects at intimidating and suppressing voters in dozens of states, which we know have had crucial effects.)

The ultimate infantilization of USA political and public life becomes most apparent in the very 24/7 reality-TV show now embodied by Trump. The Presidency as a political institution was already an absurd monstrosity all by itself, effectively hardly more than a quadrennial monarchy. To have it occupied now by a man of Trump's ilk, though, guarantees the ultimate degeneracy of the "mainstream" mass media -- even while they profit lavishly from the mesmerizing quality of it all. These qualities of Trump's surely made it no accident that he was chosen by author Bret Easton Ellis, all the way back in 1991, as his protagonist's personal hero in that author's controversial novel, "American Psycho." Trump already embodied a certain kind of Lord-of-the-Flies mixture of amoral hyperindividualism, vanity, cruelty, and decadent neoliberal opulence that spoke to something deep in the heart of the culture Ellis observed.

Befitting the "bipartisanship" in evidence here, the main character of that novel even leads a kind of double-life: by day, he criticizes his colleagues in his Manhattan highrise offices for making racist and sexist jokes. But by night, he plays a serial killer, who viciously stabs a black, homeless man to death, shouting as he does so, "do you even realize how pathetic you are?!" It hardly takes much imagination to read a prophetic fable/metaphor for our times now, currently manifesting itself via a daily reality TV show, into Ellis's novel.

Trump also reminds one of a figure from another, much earlier, quintessential "great American novel," Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby," of course. The uppercrust society playboy Tom's racist eugenicist rants come to mind, and of course the unforgettable epitaph summing up his character:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

As such, Trump is really more like a kind of archetypal caricature of childish sefishness of a very vicious, schoolyard bully sort, one devoid of the normal sorts of adult qualities, even of allegiances or a sense of responsibility to institutions or other people that he tries so often to claim that others owe him. He is almost closer to an unalloyed Platonic ideal of the "Ugly American" than a real human being.

I am reminded of the interviewer who challenged him over whether his rhetoric against Moslems wasn't stoking more anger and violence in the world. His response was, "what difference can it make, the world is already an angry, angry place!" It was as if a cop had caught a polluter red-handed pouring poison into a lake, and the culprit pointed to the dead fish on the shore and said, "So what?! They're already all dead anyways!"

I hesitate even to talk about the elephant in the room, for that very reason, since talk about Trump is hardly in short supply, and can only confer on him more importance and legitimacy than he really has. And yet, Trump does indeed offer other bullies and culprits more license to pour out their poisons and then point at the dead fish on the shore. But in the end, reveling in hating Trump probably does no more than pour more poison into that lake. So something else is called for.