'the big lie' and 'the good germans'

[rae121452]

.Trump’s 2024 playbook is straight out of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’: Yale historian Timothy Snyder.

NPR on Thursday aired an alarming report on "the clear and present danger of Trump's enduring 'Big Lie.'"

"When a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the goal was to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and install Donald Trump in a second term. Call it an insurrection or a coup attempt. It was fueled by what's known as the "Big Lie": the verifiably false assertion that Trump won. Joe Biden won 306 votes in the Electoral College, while Trump received 232. In the popular vote, Biden won by more than seven million votes," Melissa Block reported.

Law school professor and election law expert Rick Hasen offered NPR a dire warning.

"I've never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now, because of the metastasizing of the 'Big Lie,'" Hasen said. "This is not the kind of thing I expected to ever worry about in the United States. I kind of feel like a climate scientist from five years ago, or [an] expert on viruses a couple of years ago, sounding the alarm and just hoping that we're not too late already."

Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder noted Adolph Hitler used a similar strategy.

"Part of the character of the 'big lie' is that it turns the powerful person into the victim. And then that allows the powerful person to actually exact revenge, like it's a promise for the future," he explained. "The lie is so big that it reorders the world. And so part of telling the big lie is that you immediately say it's the other side that tells the big lie. Sadly, but it's just a matter of record, all of that is in Mein Kampf."

 

[butters]

wasn't that the book t had on his bedside cabinet?
(yeah, i know this throws shade on the 'he can't read' thing)

no, it wasn't, though apparently t had a problem remembering the title–as well as his friend's religious persuasion"

That said, Trump was quoted in 1990 as saying he had been given a copy of Mein Kampf by a friend — though it turned out he was mistaken about which of Hitler’s books had been given to him.

In their September 1990 issue, Vanity Fair ran a lengthy, unflattering profile of Trump written by Marie Brenner. The subject of Hitler came up in a decidedly strange passage about his alleged ownership of a book containing the Nazi dictator’s speeches called My New Order:

Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.

Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.

“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.

Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)

it comes as no huge surprise, though, that he likely isn't too familiar with the speeches. His ex claims he read from them occasionally, but who knows?

 

[pecksniff]

Somehow, I don't think Trump got the idea from Hitler. As with any other apparent resemblance to Hitler, he is only being himself.