The Republican Party has a problem—no one doubts that. “Trump isn’t the cause of the problem,” said John Kass in the Sunday Tribune. “He’s merely a symptom.” Some of us might think Kass was selling Donald Trump short. Germany had all sorts of problems after World War I that Hitler wasn’t the cause of. But history doesn’t remember Hitler as a symptom. As Donald Trump hopes to, he came to power as the solution.
If too many Republicans do, what will America wind up with? Not a Hitler, certainly. But maybe a lower-caliber tough guy like Putin, whom Trump has spoken well of, or Mussolini, whom he’s quoted. Or maybe he’ll simply turn out to be as incompetent as Bordaberry. Knowing nothing about governing, Bordaberry ceded Uruguay to the army, and it couldn’t call itself a democracy again until the mid-1980s.
In 1940, World War II begun, Shirer prepares to take his leave of Berlin. He muses about Hitler. “The men around him are all loyal, all afraid, and none of them are his friends. He has no friends . . . ” Does Trump? Does Trump even have loyalists? He’s winging it by his lonesome with next to no organization, which is one reason some people in and out of the Republican Party think that if he’s elected they can co-opt him, or at least sidle into positions of serious influence.
Just like everyone now hopes.
