Donald Trump’s Sincerity

                               former U.S. president, Donald Trump (via Wikipedia) 

Donald Trump’s Sincerity

 

Today’s post is a stretch, I admit, but it presents a modest, but real, claim.

I wanted to point out today something about events in 1945 and then relate those events to events in present times.

I will start by summing up some things about Adolph Hitler’s final days and hours. Hitler started his whole campaign to become dictator of Germany, and then to expand Germany’s “living space” (“lebensraum”, in German), by basing his plans on his vision of how history works. He believed he had discovered that history only moves forward by warfare. Struggle between nations. He claimed, for example, that “mankind has grown strong through eternal struggles, and it will only perish through eternal peace.” And he sincerely believed that his model of how history worked was as correct and exactly accurate as was Darwin’s Theory of Evolution about Biology. “Races” (his term) must struggle and fight or they do not survive. In fact, any tribe that is reluctant to fight wars, or that loses a war, deserves to die out. 

As I have said before in this space, Hitler’s theories about “races” of humankind are nonsensical to real students of Genetics. Humans are all members of one species. The amount we humans differ genetically from so-called “race” to “race” is less than 1/10 of 1% of our total genetic code. There is no “Aryan” race. In fact, in the real science of Genetics, there are no “races” at all. Not from Europe to Africa to the Far East to the Americas before Europeans came to the New World. Some people in all those places may have talked as if the term “race” made sense, but it simply doesn’t. The term, for modern science, is empty.

Why does this matter? Because in his final days and hours in a concrete-hardened bunker in Berlin, Hitler kept raving about a rescue army that was going to save Berlin, himself, and the Reich from the Russian troops that were closing in. There was no such army. Then, at the very last, he raved that the Germans should go down in a sea of blood and fire because that was what they deserved. They had lost this colossal struggle to another “race”, which, in his eyes, was the Russians – who, by the way, really were mainly responsible for the breaking of the power of the German war machine. (Look up the casualty stats.) In the laboratory of history, Hitler believed, the Germans had proved weaker than the Russians, and, thus, the Germans deserved to die out. He even wanted Albert Speer, his most essential minister of War, the economy, etc. to order German troops still fighting in parts of Germany to destroy infra-structure like bridges, electricity grids, water purification plants, and so on. Go down in a sea of blood. Like the heroes in his favorite operas by Wagner. At least the Germans would go out in a blaze of glory. This, by the way, Speer did not do. Much of Germany’s infrastructure was destroyed, by the invading Allies and by some German units, but at least some was saved. The important thing to see is that Speer could imagine a world in which a defeated Germany was prostrate before its enemies and somehow survived. Hitler couldn’t.

I have to grudgingly respect Hitler’s sincerity. At least on the surface, he stuck by his original vision of history and how it works. He found out that Speer had not issued the orders that he had told Speer to issue, and he did not punish Speer. He just shut up about the matter in his final hours. He apparently chose to let Speer off for disobeying direct orders. But he never took back his words – maintained in public and in private for nearly two decades by this point – about his model of history and what the German people deserved. In short, he had a kind of grotesque sincerity.

Why this matters today is that I don’t think a lot of people in the world, and especially in the US right now, get that in his warped way, Donald Trump is sincere. I think he really believes that somehow, by some trick those dirty Democrats pulled – a trick that has proved too subtle for his people to detect – the election really was stolen from him. There must – must – must be a fraud in there somewhere. He could not possibly lose that election to the man that he, for a long time called, “Slow Joe”. Trump, in his own eyes, is so much handsomer and so much more charismatic and savvy about the “art of the deal” that there must be a trick in there somewhere. Or so he believes. He couldn’t really l – l – l - lose. How he loathes that word! So much so that in his universe it can’t ever really be applied to him. So much so that, in his view, losing that election is an impossibility under the laws by which -- he believes -- the world functions.

He’s wrong, of course. The results were checked and checked, again and again. Tested in several different courts. In addition, it is worth pointing out that a conspiracy of multiple traitors who could manage to gather/create the so-called “fraudulent” results would be impossible to sustain. Any such conspiracy would have to involve thousands and thousands of conspirators – so many in on the scam – election officials in multiple states, judges, etc., many of whom he appointed. In a conspiracy that large and complicated, someone would blab, probably within a few hours, or at most a few days. No documents support his election fraud theory either. No witnesses in any position to make such a call have ever said the words he so desperately longs to hear. No documents support his version of events, and they have been painstakingly searched for.

Like Hitler in his final days, Trump was, and is, delusional. A solid majority of the American people don’t want him for their president anymore.

Still, in the face of overwhelming evidence and testimony, he will not admit that he lost. He admits that Biden is now president, but secretly, Trump believes, the election is a fraud. He will not put the word “loser” anywhere near to his name in speech or print. Why such obstinacy? He holds onto this view, not in a superficial pretense, but because he really believes it.

His losing as clearly as he did also tells us something very hopeful. Maybe, just maybe, with a free and responsible press and an engaged electorate, decency and sense really can win in a democracy. Maybe, like Hitler, Trump lost because he is just wrong. His way of seeing reality doesn’t match the way reality is. Maybe, democracy’s endless wrangling, in the end, is right. It does sort the con artists out from the sincere candidates, the neurotic out from the stable. In short, maybe DT lost the election because the majority saw him for what he is.  

I believe that history does move under an extremely subtle set of laws, but that set of laws, over the long term, favors freedom and pluralism. Democracy. It really is stronger, in the end, than bigoted totalitarianism and belligerent tribalism. It just takes a while for the laws of history to prove themselves.  

What Trump will try in the coming months remains to be seen; some of the possibilities are scary, I admit. Hitler took several elections to come to power in Germany. And it was only after a failed coup attempt that he decided to go the democratic route to power, for the time being, until he really could, as duly elected chancellor, get full control over the armed forces, the courts, the police, the writing of the country’s laws, and so on. Then he began to move forward with his terrible agenda. But I don't see that level of ambition or cynicism in Trump yet. During his time in office, he didn't try to take over the military or the economy. 

And in the end, Hitler did lose. My prediction, my hope, is that Trump has lost a lot of his power base, and with many of his former underlings now running for cover after his desperate attempt to use his supporters to overthrow the constitution of the US, his popularity is going to continue to shrink. If those things do come to pass, this will be evidence showing that decency and sense really can win out -- on the big scale of nations and the long haul of generations -- over cynicism and egotism.

There is still hope for our species.

In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, have a hopeful day.

                     

                                      U.S. president, Joe Biden (credit: Wikipedia)