You do not - under any circumstances - have to hand it to Adolf Hitler.
The latest documentation of Trump's moral and intellectual vacuity will be hitting the shelves soon. Trump's profound ignorance of the most basic information regarding US and world history should surprise exactly no one who isn't a Kool Aid swilling minion of Cult 45.
The West Wing has been derided by the Internet Kewl Kids as being facile, NPR propaganda, and there is some truth to that criticism. But there are a few killer lines, including one where Nobel Laureate Economist Jed Bartlett was running against an idiot Florida governor. One of the characters said something along the lines of, I don't need the president to be PhD, but I want to know he has a full toolbox.
Trump's toolbox was empty. I would've loved for a debate moderator to ask him to name the capitol of South Dakota. Odds are he couldn't do it. Expecting him to understand Hitler beyond the "he made the trains run on time" or "he built the autobahns" so he wasn't ALL bad is expecting him to move beyond the sort of understanding of history that plagues so many of the rightists in this country.
Having observed young boys, you can notice that a lot of them love Darth Vader or the Hulk. Frankly, those are not great role models. The reason boys love Vader - the villain of one franchise - and the Hulk - the brute force of another - is because both a "strong." That strength is divorced from accountability or empathy, but it doesn't matter. The world is scary to a 6 year old and being strong like Vader or the Hulk means not being scared.
That's basically the worldview of people like Trump. They never get out of worshipping the "strong" man. Trump's idolatry of people like Putin or Xi and his inability to see the moral rot of someone like Hitler is because he shares the fascination with "strength" that so many of his cultists have. They loved Trump because he was "strong." Not real strength - intellectual, moral, cultural - but this preening faux strength that typifies people like Trump and - yes - Hitler.
The number of suburban dads who read incessantly about Hitler or the Civil War without really understanding them is frighteningly large. Placing slavery as the root cause of the Civil War is not "revisionist" history or a mythical version of "Critical Race Theory" that is used to scare people and get them primed to accept a "strong" man. The defense of slavery and white supremacy was the absolute cause of that conflict. We have the receipts! Hitler's rise was partly "economic anxiety" but the hyper inflation of the early Weimar Republic had disappeared by the time Hitler seized power. Hitler's rise was about the "humiliation" of the German people at Versailles and his ability to case responsibility for that "humiliation" on ethnic minorities and socialists. Sound familiar?
This is the reason for all the GOP efforts to create warped "memory laws" to prevent the accurate teaching of history in schools. If you understand America's and the world's past, you will understand that the world was always flawed and that those flaws must be addressed or they will erupt in really terrible ways. Reforms succeed and revolts fail. However, the reforms this country currently needs are ones that might imperil GOP control of various parts of the country. So it is best to prevent people from understanding that. If that leads to an American dictator...well, you can't make a Hitler Omelet without breaking some eggs/heads/norms.
I remain hopeful that America will reject the GOP's increasingly obvious turn towards authoritarianism. However, it's important that we all understand that this is what is going on.
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