I am sure Donald Trump has much of the con man in him. Most great persuaders do.
F.M. Alexander, the developer of what is now known as the Alexander Technique, had many qualities of the con man but he really did have the golden brick.
I expect politicians and real estate developers to lie, deceive and double-deal.
Trump is pragmatic. Hitler had a messianic vision.
I can’t think of any parallel to Donald Trump. As for Hitler, he was like Caesar, Mohammed and Napoleon.
One was a psychopath who believed his raving rants. The other is a con man.
Before their recent meeting — and I suspect a few times after — Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto compared Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. He wasn’t the first to do so, even in his own country. Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, has also compared Trump to Hitler. Cher has compared Trump to Hitler. Abraham Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, has compared Trump to Hitler (although in fairness, that’s kind of his whole brand). Even Glenn Beck compared Trump to Hitler. We’ll no doubt hear it again many times before this election is over, and, to be honest, it’s a comparison that bothers me for two reasons.
I am a Jew — a New York Writer Liberal Jew, the scariest Jew of all — and from a very young age, I was taught about an unimaginable horror called the Holocaust and about an evil man named Adolf Hitler. The elderly man who sat beside me every Saturday morning in synagogue was a Holocaust survivor, and his elderly wife was a Holocaust survivor, as well. And so the first reason the comparison of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler bothers me is not because it belittles the deaths of millions of innocents, but because, frankly, it belittles Adolf Hitler.
Hitler believed Jews were the cause of every problem. He believed extermination was the solution. He believed that the “Spear of Destiny,” the spear the Romans used to poke Jesus on the cross, would give him magical powers. He had an elaborately developed, hideous, deplorable theory of how things worked, and he believed in it deeply.
Trump doesn’t.
Hitler was a psychopath. Trump is just a con man.
Hitler had some opinions, he had some plans. They were monstrous and evil, and reason enough for even an avowed atheist to consider the existence of Satan. But I don’t recall Hitler flip-flopping. I don’t see him saying one morning, “I’m going to invade Poland,” and then “softening” his stance that afternoon after meeting with Sean Hannity. He didn’t decide to kill the Jews, then change his mind when his new campaign manager arrived. “I said the kill the Jew — singular, one Jew, not all the Jews. Just the bad ones.” Hitler was a megalomaniacal psychopath who should burn in Hell for eternity… who actually believed in something.
There’s a difference. Trump is a two-bit con man. He’s playing the fools.
