Libertarian icon Ron Paul blasted Donald Trump in a CNBC interview this morning, and said he wouldn’t support the billionaire mogul if he wins the GOP nomination.
“Trump has been able to tap into the anger and fear of a large ‘minority’ of voters, Paul told CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box.’ He said the billionaire businessman acts like he has all the answers but ‘zero’ realistic solutions to the problems facing the nation.”
The former Texas congressman is no fan of the candidate shaking up the Democratic race, either.
“The race for the White House has become ‘Trump-ism versus Sander-ism,’ said Paul, referring to Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders. He said both approaches are ‘not a whole lot different’ in their wrongheadedness. Sanders wants to make the government bigger and Trump wants to be the government ….”
Read the story here, and then let’s focus on that last statement. I think Ron Paul has really capsulized, for the first time, what Trump is all about: He wants to be the government. Which means Trump doesn’t really understand our system of government, which divides power among executive, legislative, and judicial institutions, and governing requires assembling coalitions and securing the consent and cooperation of many players. Or maybe Trump does understand it, and thinks he can supersede it. Either way, Trumpism is unhealthy for our democracy, and probably not so good for us individually, either.
“Trump’s ex-wife Ivana told her lawyer that Trump kept Hitler’s book ‘My New Order’ on his bedside table and read it occasionally.”
I don’t believe in reincarnation, and even if there is such a thing, the odds are slim that Hitler would return in the body of Donald Trump when there are over 7 billion other human bodies to choose from. Much more likely is that Trump is an admirer of some of Hitler’s ideas, or at least curious about them. The latter is not a terrible thing in itself; lots of people try to understand what made Hitler tick, given the ticking time bomb he turned out to be.
However, I’m not the only person to notice some eerie parallels between Hitler’s and Trump’s political careers; both men were/are demagogues who capitalized on working-class discontent during unsettled times. But I don’t even slightly believe that Trump is another Hitler. At worst, the Trump phenomenon illustrates that modern demagoguery has gone downhill (if that’s possible) from Final Solution to Zero Solutions. Hitler was a great big destroyer; Trump is a great big blowhard.
The risk, of course, is that Trump might evolve into some kind of Fuhrer if America’s voters make the same mistake Germany’s voters made in the 1930s, i.e., choosing to follow a pied piper who promises to solve their problems by scapegoating and attacking other groups. The question is whether enough of us have learned from history not to buy into this dead-end mode of thinking.