by W.D. Ehrhart
“His primary rules are: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
Does this sound at all familiar? Might it remind you of a certain someone currently in the process of dismantling two hundred and fifty years of our constitutional republic?
But that opening paragraph actually dates from 1943, and is taken from A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler written by Walter C. Langer for the Office of Strategic Services, and later published as The Mind of Adolf Hitler: A Secret Wartime Report.
I’ve written previously that historical analogies never hold up under careful scrutiny. Circumstances are never the same from one event to another, one era to another, one person to another. But the parallels between Nazi Germany and what is happening in the United States today are horrifyingly unavoidable.
Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf that “the broad masses of a nation… in the primitive simplicity of their minds… more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
But as I’ve also written previously, Donald Trump has gone Hitler one better. Rather than creating one Big Lie, he has turned all of reality into a Big Lie. During his first four years, fact-checkers at the Washington Post actually tried to keep track of the number of lies he told, which added up to 30,573, or an average of 21 per day, day in and day out for four years.
I have been aware of no such efforts to keep tabs this time around. But then, with Trump suing or indicting anyone he deems an enemy—which is anyone who crosses him or who tries to hold him accountable for his lies, falsehoods, and outright crimes—there seems to be little enthusiasm for the truth these days.
Thus, American cities become war zones inhabited by domestic terrorists that have to be occupied by armed soldiers who are told to hone their war fighting skills on their own citizens, and heavily militarized, masked and hoodied, immigration and customs enforcement agents.
Nevermind that every city he has invaded—one can call it nothing else—is controlled by Democrats whose mayors—and often state governors—oppose this deployment of the national guard, which is in fact illegal because there simply is no national emergency and thus no need to nationalize these guard units.
Nevermind that the 11,488 murderers Trump claims President Biden allowed into this country actually reflect figures over a forty-year span including Trump’s first term.
Nevermind that Trump offers no evidence at all, let alone proof, that the boats his military has been extrajudicially destroying in international waters are crewed by terrorists at war with the U.S. rather than simply drug dealers out to make a buck off the lucrative markets in this country. Or indeed, that these boats are even being crewed by Venezuelan drug dealers.
Nevermind that Trump wildly overstates the number of Americans who have died of drug overdoses, the number of immigrants who entered this country illegally under Joe Biden, the number of criminal immigrants at large in the U.S., the success of his punitive tariff policies, his own popularity numbers. And the list of “neverminds” goes on and on and on.
Certainly the MAGAFaithful “nevermind” all these things and much more. I read a story recently about a man who had been screwed out of a program of voluntary resignation under Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency because he missed the deadline to sign up for it while on a compassionate leave of absence caring for his terminally ill wife, who subsequently died, leaving him out of a job, broke, and with several children. But at the end of the article, he said that he still supports Donald Trump.
What was it that Hitler said about “the broad masses” and “the primitive simplicity of their minds”? Clearly, neither facts nor truth nor reason will ever penetrate this man’s belief in his Liar-in-Chief. And there are millions and millions of Americans just like him. God only knows how they came to be so deluded that they fervently support a man who clearly holds them in contempt, enriching himself, his family, and his wealthy cronies while screwing guys like the poor schmoo in the paragraph above.
Meanwhile, many other millions of my fellow citizens—not everyone has been fooled—will be out in the streets all over the country this weekend at another round of No Kings demonstrations.
But I find myself wondering if Donald Trump will use the occasion to declare a state of emergency, claiming insurrection and rebellion, federalize the entire national guard, institute martial law, call out the regular military, suspend the Constitution he already ignores, and make war on those of us who are still willing to take a stand against tyranny.
We shall find out soon enough. Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking of John Keats’s immortal words: “Beauty is truth; truth beauty.” I wish I could offer a more hopeful conclusion, but the truth is that we are now living in a world that is all-but-bereft of beauty. For without truth, there can be no beauty. And truth, these days, is in short supply.
–=≈=–
W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.