Trumpolini

The more authoritarian Donald Trump gets, the more his detractors compare him to Adolf Hitler.

Alexander Stille argues that Trump is more like Benito Mussolini, Hitler’s junior partner in crimes against humanity.

“...What we are witnessing in the first three months of the second Trump administration is a populist demagogue morphing into a would-be autocrat,” he wrote in The New Republic in April. “In the process, Trump has taken on a decided resemblance to ... [an] Italian politician: Benito Mussolini.”

Stille, a journalism professor at Columbia University and an author of books about Italy, said Trump also invites comparison to Silvio Berlusconi, the vain, corrupt, womanizing, billionaire Italian politician who was convicted of tax fraud.

But “Trump’s narcissism is very different from Berlusconi’s,” Stille wrote. “Like Mussolini’s, it involves a desire for total dominance and an increasingly unhinged delusion of omnipotence: hence his repeated threats to take over Canada and invade Greenland; to turn Gaza into an American beach resort. Mussolini, like Trump, had a keen instinctive animal cunning that helped him intuit the public mood and vanquish his domestic political opponents. He was a brilliant demagogue who could electrify the crowd and who shrewdly understood and exploited his domestic opponents’ weaknesses.”

Stille makes a convincing case that the “Trumpolini” nickname fits the president.

Hitler had a crush on Mussolini at first. Il Duce established his dictatorship in the 1920s, when the future Fuehrer and his ragtag band of Nazi thugs tried to overthrow the government of Bavaria, failed miserably, and Hitler was briefly imprisoned.

In 1933, Hitler became Germany’s dictator. Six years later, he set out to conquer and subjugate Europe and nearly succeeded.

Hitler’s homicidal hatred of Jews led him to direct the mass murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children.

Mussolini, the original Fascist, succeeded in ruling Italy with an iron fist, but he was a bust as a would-be conqueror.

“When he began to move outside of Italy — creating an Italian empire and forcing Italy into World War II — his fundamental provincialism, his deep ignorance of the outside world, and his overestimation of his own instincts over objective facts did him in,” Stille wrote.

“After years in power, surrounded by toadies and yes-men, Mussolini began to believe his own rhetoric about Italy’s ‘eight million bayonets,’ preferring to ignore his generals’ warnings that Italy was nowhere near ready to fight a world war. Mussolini was convinced that ‘national character’ mattered more than industrial capacity, causing him to badly underestimate both Britain’s and America’s ability to wage war.”

Added Stille:

“Like Trump, Mussolini insisted on taking personal charge of most important negotiations. He insisted on meeting alone with Hitler, relying on his own somewhat shaky German to deal with the Nazi leader, who, not surprisingly, dominated their talks. This is reminiscent of Trump’s personalistic approach to handling Vladimir Putin, in highly secretive, one-on-one meetings that the Russian seems to always get the better of.”

It’s too early to tell how Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuke facilities will turn out. But after conquering weaker Ethiopia and Albania in the 1930s, Mussolini invaded France and Greece early in World War II and suffered humiliating defeats. In addition, the British crushed his forces in North Africa, forcing Hitler to send troops to rescue the Italians.

Just as Mussolini became Hitler’s vassal, Trump became Putin’s poodle and alienated our democratic allies.

American presidents were considered leaders of what used to be called the Free World (as opposed to the communist world). Trump has made himself a pariah even among our closest global friends and partners.

Despite Trump’s demonstrable incompetence, he scoffs at expert opinion, according to Stille: “This conviction of knowing better than the experts was a characteristic of Mussolini’s rule, as well. At different moments, along with being prime minister, Il Duce assumed the Cabinet positions of foreign minister, minister of war, minister of the interior, minister of the navy and the air force, as well as minister of Italian Africa. Trump in his second term has removed anyone who might check his worst instincts and has filled his Cabinet with people whose only real qualification is personal loyalty to the chief.”

While Hitler was the embodiment of unadulterated evil, Mussolini, who was also given to murdering, torturing and imprisoning the disfavored, was ever the pompous clown, always preening and strutting for crowds and cameras.

We were in Verona, Italy, the day before Trump’s military parade and took in a special exhibit in the Castelvecchio Museum on Mussolini’s 1938 visit to the northern Italian city.

The exhibit included propaganda film of Il Duce’s advent in Verona. We were struck at how Trump-like the carefully choreographed festivities were.

Soldiers awed crowds with weird synchronized dagger-wielding and bone-jarring goose step marching.

The film shows Mussolini entering the castle via the same drawbridge tourists tread today.

He delivers a stock rant/bloviation to a packed house in Verona’s ancient Roman arena. Today, the stadium is a popular venue for operas, concerts, and other entertainment.

Melinda and I – she also studied history at Murray State – have long wondered how such an absurd little man came to establish an absolute dictatorship over a modern European state.

After viewing the old black-and-white film, the answer is as elusive as ever to us.

Perhaps his rise to power says more about the Italian people than about Mussolini, and likewise for Germans and Hitler and Americans and Trump.

Anyway, there’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, about one of Mussolini’s aides telling Il Duce that he was often the butt of jokes and the subject of satire in America.

He supposedly replied that he only cared about Italians’ opinions.

Europeans commonly lampoon Trump in myriad ways. He is widely detested in the whole world. “No Kings” protests also took place globally on June 14.

Trump doesn’t care what Europeans or anybody else abroad thinks of him. Nor does his MAGA base. which is infected with his aggressive anti-intellectualism, his astonishing indifference to our allies’ opinions, and his fawning sycophancy to Putin, our greatest enemy.

Our English friends, and Europeans we have spoken with on trips to the Old World since Trump was first elected, share our bewilderment that the country put him in the White House, not once but twice.

Concluded Stille: “Mussolini careened from crisis to crisis – the invasion of Ethiopia, the civil war in Spain, the invasion of Albania and, finally, the entrance into World War II. If his career is any guide, we can expect four years of constant crisis. Autocrats require crisis to justify the extraordinary — and often illegal — measures they take, and to distract the public’s attention from the fact that they are not actually improving the lives of ordinary citizens.”

It took the armed might of the Allied forces in World War II to rid the world of the murderous authoritarianism of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese warlords. Thankfully, we Americans still have the ability to rid ourselves of Trumpolini via the ballot, not the bullet.

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