By Hal Brown, MSW
I have Google News searches which turn up all or most of the articles referencing Trump’s mental illness and why and how it makes him dangerous especially in the final days of his presidency when desperation and delusional thinking where he is a textbook example of someone who is an extreme narcissistic personality who has suffered a devastating narcissistic injury and is reacting with narcissistic rage. All these are psychiatric terms now so familiar to most of those you who have read so much about Trump’s psychopathology you could pass the final exam for an abnormal psychology course.
I’m not going to bother providing links to the literally hundreds of articles that come up with a web search of Trump and various names of mental health professionals who have expounded on his psychological issues or the keywords like malignant narcissism, mentally ill, delusional, and others. I just did this the other day in a story about what you find doing a search of Trump and delusional.
True enough, as psychologist Alan Blotchy notes in “This could all have been prevented: How mental health experts were silenced” (Salon and Rawstory). Now we have to understand why it happened and make sure it never happens again. It could have been prevented. It wasn’t.
Of course the term “never again” in various forms is frequently applied to Hitler and the Holocaust. These two words should be in the forefront of the mind of every Democracy loving person not just in the United States but around the world. (Click to enlarge image)
I came across this documentary yesterday. Taking the time to watch it could be the most important 50 minutes Americans spend at this juncture in our history: How Hitler Built The Nazi Party's Brand | Hitler's Propaganda Machine.
I discussed this with my friend who was a young child when the NAZI occupation of her small town in The Netherlands occurred. She lived with NAZI soldiers in the street in front of her house and next door to her.
She also watched the documentary and we had a long talk about the similarities ad differences between Hitler.
Here are some of the things we came up with.
What is striking and what most Americans don’t know is that Hitler began his quest for power in 1918 after Germany’s loss in World War. The loss was a national humiliation. The German people were ready for Germany to become an international power which is part of why Hitler’s promise for the Third Reich, the Tausendjähriges Reich or the thousand-Year Reich, resonated so strongly with the Germans.
Hitler fought in the war and his vocal cords were injured in a gas attack which is why he sounded the way he did. He used his vocal stylings with a Bavarian accent to his benefit. He sounded like an ordinary German.Hitler was jailed "political crimes" following his failed Putsch in Munich in November 1923. This is where he began to write Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Once freed he became even better known. Mein Kampf was released in 1925 and by 1933 had become a huge best seller.
Hitler was a brilliant political strategist and made many of the decisions which enhanced his image totally on his own. For example, he searched though various existing symbols and chose the swastika which was a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indian religions and used it in his carefully designed the NAZI flag for maximum impact.
He studied the popular western movies of the time and used their techniques in the propaganda movies he commissioned. He had finally approval over all the NAZI posters and the articles in the NAZI newspaper.
Hitler was a cultured man who enjoyed classical music, especially composers like Wagner. Through the also brilliant propagandist Joseph Goebbels he controlled music and made it accessible to the public by opening numerous concert halls where music meant to promote Aryan superiority was all that was allowed.
Hitler practiced every gesture which he planned to use in his speeches. He had his photographer take pictures of all of them so he could study which had the most impact. His speeches were well crafted using short sentences and repeating his main points starting low key and building to a crescendo which had his massive crowds screaming in approval.
He was well aware that a believable lie repeated often enough would persuade the vast majority of people to think it was true.
The fears he stirred up about the Jews all could be related to by the common German as anti-Semitism was rampant and the Jews were active in business and banking. He could easily demonize them in speeches and posters (below, click to enlarge) without saying they ran pedophile rings and ate children. Unlike Trump he didn’t promulgate ludicrous and delusional conspiracy theories like those coming from QAon.
Everything he said and did was carefully planned. from his rallies to his publicized airplane trips where he had his plane fly over towns across Germany.
Hitler became the NAZI party's leader in 1921 and was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg on Jan 30, 1933.
In an amazingly short time Trump pulled off what Hitler did with calculated genius he did with instinct, a flair for showmanship, trial, and error. He started by announcing his candidacy with this infamous elevator ride on June 15, 2015. Then rather than devising a calculated plan he stumbled into a primary victory with vicious attacks against his opponents and casting himself as a populist outsider and business genius who significantly would assure that he would protect white Americans from non-existent hoards of brown-skinned rapists and criminals. His dog whistles to racists of any ilk might have been air raid sirens because his message of Make America Great Again was meant to convey that the last time it was great was when minority groups “knew their place” and discrimination was ensconced in laws going back to slavery.
It is impossible not to to see how Trump and Hitler were similar in some ways and very different in others. Both wanted to be dictators but Hitler wanted to do this to lead Germany to world domination and Trump wanted to do this out of his narcissism. Trump stumbled into power more though being the right person at the right time rather than by virtue of any level of systematic planning and actual intelligence.
What we must be the most wary about is that the people both Hitler and Trump appealed to in order to gain power still exist ready to embrace their messages and ally themselves with an autocratic leader who will use hate against groups they fear, be they Jews or blacks and Latinos, to win elections and failing at that, to incite supporters to violence.
This danger just doesn’t exist in the United States. Nationalist and xenophobic movements are active in Europe and even in the United Kingdom with Brexit.
If there was ever a time to study Adolph Hitler it is now. These words say it all: