HOW could 74.5 million Republican voters in the US have got it right, and the rest of the world got it wrong?
Nothing in recent history can match Donald Trump’s dramatic re-entry into the White House. Adolf Hitler’s success in the federal German elections of 1933 offers a pale parallel. Hitler’s impact though was local, European, until it exploded across the globe. Trump’s effect is ab initio international, with domestic undertones such as immigration and jobs.
Hitler never disguised his intentions. They were apparent in his incendiary manifesto Mein Kampf, published in 1925-26. (It sold 5.2m copies.) Hitler had written: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning.” He declared that it was “the sacred mission of the German people … to assemble and preserve the most valuable racial elements … and raise them to the dominant position.”
Trump, too, has made no secret of his abrasive nationalism. America First. America uber alles. Trump claims that he has never read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. His first wife Ivana reportedly told her attorney that “Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a bedside cabinet.”
Our relationship with the US has........