Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler’s Writings
I was going to make a joke about how, in view of Mein Kampf being republished in Germany, Donald Trump will now be able to get his lines from the original, rather than just a translation. But it turns out it is maybe not actually a joke at all. From Vanity Fair:
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.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Here’s from The Psychiatric Quarterly, 1942, Volume 16, Issue 1, pp 187-190; an excerpt from the critical review of the Hitler book of speeches that Trump seems to have admired. I’ve highlighted some of the common characteristics of Hitler’s and Trump’s “Make the Reich Great Again / Make America Great Again” rhetoric and the personality behind it:
Yes, this is worrying. The Daily Show has also pointed out how often Trump’s rhetoric sounds like the rhetoric of Third-World dictators.