Trumpism in four photos

My morning reading once again triggered memories of past fanaticisms colored by severe mental instability and fascistic impulses utterly unrestrained.

One such reading was Paul Krugman's latest post, a requiem for America's world standing — in short, we stand catastrophically alone. He quotes military historian Phillips O'Brien: "The key of the United States has been that it has maintained arguably the most successful alliance system in history since 1945." Adds Krugman: "And Trump is throwing all that away." Myself, I'd put that in the past tense.

Krugman's pictorial analogy of Trump as Kaiser Wilhelm II is accurate is this sense: Neither megalomaniacal thug molded a successful alliance system. Their dissimilarity is that while Germany's caesar had lousy allies — namely, moribund Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, "The Sick Man of Europe" — America's has none at all. Nonetheless, the two are, to frame it in Willie's vernacular, something of doppelgängers.  

In Margaret MacMillan's resplendent volume on the First World War's resolution (or lack of it), titled Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, she notes Kaiser Wilhelm's "erratic behavior and wild statements"; indeed, "he may have been clinically mad." Need I go further in comparing him to the unstable, feral swamp creature of Mar-a-Lago?

In an earlier post I mentioned what I see as Stephen Miller's eerie resemblance to Joseph Goebbels.  

Perhaps my pictorial analogy is a trifle oblique. But in my imagination's defense, whenever I see the visage of Trump's "malign homunculus," as Charlie Sykes brands Miller in his morning post, I hear the selfsame vulgar fatuity of Hitler's chief provocateur.  

I concede that likenesses, whether symbolic or physical, make not the man. Still, themes of human malevolence run throughout history, and in personifying them, the whole hideous bunch do tend to blend in one's mind. Am I wrong?

* This piece is cross-posted at in Substack; subscribe to be notified of new posts.