First a bit of background. My daughter, though an American citizen by birth, has only been to the US twice, the last time when she was about three and a half (we live in East Asia). So while she’s been exposed to plenty of American culture through books, music, movies, and various television programs, from Sesame Street and the Electric Company to Adventure Time and the Simpsons, the exposure isn’t constant, and in particular she hasn’t been inundated with political news. Nevertheless, she’s still become familiar with a few of the more prominent political figures (it helps that I sometimes watch clips from programs like the Daily Show, Colbert, Last Week Tonight and so forth with her and my wife). She was probably about four when she suddenly told me that she thought Barack Obama was “cool”; sometime around the time she turned six she bought a Who Is Barack Obama book and learned even more about him, plus a bit about racial issues in the US.
So over the past year, she’s gotten at least a vague idea of the process by which US presidents are elected, and she knows the main candidates (or former candidates, in a few cases). After Ted Cruz dropped out, the next couple of times he was mentioned, she’d rather gleefully comment “Ted Cruz is out!” She has been slightly confused by the absurdly drawn out campaign – watching clips from the Democratic convention, she asked if Hillary Clinton had won the election, and I had to explain that she’d just officially won the Democratic nomination. But one personality she’s all too familiar with is the orange-haired con man who won the Republican nomination.
A few months ago, my daughter was playing with one of her stuffed animal toys, a dog. She had it tell me that it hated cats because cats had killed its father. I told the stuffed dog that if it hated all cats because of something just a few of them had done, it would be acting like a guy who was running for US president. She immediately had the dog protest, “I’m not like Donald Trump!” Later, I told her about how a Florida Republican had dubbed Trump “Cheeto Jesus”, which she found quite amusing. I also told her that some had altered that to “Cheeto Mussolini”, reminding her that Mussolini was an ally of Hitler (she’d recently read a book about WWII, and last year we went to Auschwitz during a trip to Eastern Europe). She considered this, then said “We could call him Pumpkin Hitler, because he looks kind of like a pumpkin, and he’s a little like Hitler.” While she may have heard others compare Trump to Hitler, I think the pumpkin comparison was one she came up with independently (though I’ve seen a few people use it since), and the combination “Pumpkin Hitler” was as far as I can tell entirely her own invention.
A month or so later, Pumpkin Hitler came up again, and she made a curious comment about him. She said that he was “stupid like a baby.” Before I could ask why she was insulting babies, she continued, “Babies are stupid because their brains haven’t finished growing yet.” She explained that Trump acted as if his brain hadn’t finished growing yet either. In a later conversation, she added a further bit of analysis, stating that Trump was half like a baby and half like Hitler.
While I don’t know exactly how my daughter reached her conclusions about Pumpkin Hitler, I think she is pretty close to the mark. While the parallels with fascists like Hitler and Mussolini are obvious, I think Trump’s evil (for lack of a better term) is not the scheming, malevolent evil of someone like Hitler, or for that matter someone like Dick Cheney or Ted Cruz. I don’t think he has any sort of secret master plans to set up a fascist dictatorship or to immediately start rounding up undesirables. Simply put, I don’t think he’s intelligent or disciplined enough for anything like that. After all, this is the guy whose ghostwriter on “The Art of the Deal” said has the attention span of a preschooler. He can’t hold an idea in his head long enough to execute any long range plans like setting up a “thousand-year Reich”. In this respect, he is indeed rather like a baby, or rather a toddler, albeit one without the many redeeming features toddlers have, or the excuse of being in an early stage of development.
This doesn’t mean he isn’t incredibly dangerous. His narcissism makes him incapable of seeing any sides of an issue but his own, and his insistence on getting his own way could lead him to do almost anything once he is in power. He certainly hasn’t shown any regard for any rules or standards of behavior that might get in his way. His shallow grasp on reality means he tends to follow the lead of whoever has his ear on a particular topic, no matter how unhinged and fantastic that person’s ideas are. Considering the type of people he has been taking his cues from during this campaign, that is a truly scary thought. Just as bad, his absurd belief in his own greatness means that he is entirely unable to even realize, much less admit, how completely unqualified he is to perform the duties required of a US president. These qualities alone mean he would be a complete disaster as president.
What’s more, his racism, misogyny, and bigotry are real, even if I don’t think he actively hates any particular group of people in quite the way Hitler hated the Jews and other “undesirables”. His bigotry is, I think, largely unconscious, more of a reflexive, ingrained thing than something he actively dwells on, but it could still be deadly if he were to be elected. For instance, it’s easy to imagine him simply ordering that all undocumented people be removed from the country, without bothering to specify how or by whom. If ICE agents, local law officers of Joe Arpaio’s ilk, or even civilian vigilantes then used violent means to enforce this order, I doubt he would do anything to rein them in. Likewise, he might well suddenly order all mosques closed “temporarily”, with similar consequences. In issuing orders like these, he might not actually intend for people to be hurt or killed, as he really seems to think that he can make a complex problem – or a group of people who he considers to be the source of problems – simply disappear just by saying he wants it to be so. In his imagination, he might seriously think that he could just order something extreme and it would just happen without fuss. But whether he intends violence or not, the end result is likely to be the same. And in some cases, it wouldn’t surprise me to see him deliberately order violent action, e.g., against people who have insulted him personally (a long list at this point). Like a lot of bullies, he may just want to “teach them a lesson”, but if things go farther than he originally intended, he’d probably just shrug his shoulders. Of course all this assumes that his orders are actually carried out. In the case of blatantly unconstitutional ones, one would hope that most people in the government at whatever level would refuse to obey. It’s difficult to imagine Secret Service officers beating up people on his word, for instance. But unfortunately, he could probably find someone who would do what he wanted, and of course his more rabid followers might well take matters into their own hands. So while he might lack the disciplined malevolence of a Hitler or Stalin, he could still be deadly to any individual or any group of people who he arbitrarily decides are a problem. This could include foreign individuals, groups, or even countries, with all the attendant consequences if he acts out.
Of course the reasons why Pumpkin Hitler would be a terrible choice for president are endless (for instance, having a climate change denier in the White House for four years may result in irreparable harm to not just the US but the whole world). Frankly, I haven’t be able to stand the guy since long before he involved himself seriously in politics with his birther blather and his initial round of flirting with the idea of running for the Republican nomination. The birther thing alone should be enough to disqualify him, as anyone who can believe utter nonsense in the face of clear evidence to the contrary obviously should not lead a country. But this, and his tendency to accept whatever white nationalist nonsense he reads on the internet as fact, is yet more evidence that he is indeed mentally immature and incapable of critical thinking. He strikes me as something like a spoiled twelve year old who combines being a bully with being the worst kind of class clown, the kind who gets attention the attention he craves by mocking others, especially those who are in some way different. Even his insults are childish, and yet if he had real power it would be like putting that bullying class clown in charge of not merely the class but the whole school. I’d say my daughter’s characterization of him as half an immature child and half Hitler is just about right. One can only hope that enough adult voters can see what he is as clearly as she does.