How stupid is Trump?

vastly different levels of competence.

It’s likely the strong language from Mr Parkinson, which has been echoed by PM Keir Starmer and home secretary Yvette Cooper, has put off many would-be rioters. And now that we’re seeing the kind of sentences people can expect to receive for joining in with the violence, the deterrent has grown even stronger.
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Years after I’d let Godwin’s Law run free, I learned that an actual political philosopher, Leo Strauss, had made a somewhat similar remark a few years before I was born about debates trending toward Hitler. Strauss (whom I confess I still haven’t read) chose to classify Hitler comparisons as a special instance of a particular logical fallacy: reductio ad Hitlerum. He was right about that, but he also missed how funny such an inappropriate comparison might be. The sitcom writers of “Seinfeld” didn’t miss the goofiness — consider their “Soup Nazi.” Similarly, I loved Mel Brooks’s subversion of Hitler in “The Producers” when I discovered it as a kid in the 1960s.

But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.

And that’s why Godwin’s Law isn’t violated — or confirmed — by the Biden reelection campaign’s criticism of Trump’s increasingly unsubtle messaging. We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.

Trump has the backing of political actors who are laboring to give the would-be 47th president the kind of command-and-control government he wants. Their proposals for maximizing and consolidating the powers of the federal government under a single individual at the top — provided that the individual is appropriately “conservative” — don’t sound like an American democracy. Sorry, sticklers, they don’t even sound like an American republic, either. What they sound and look like is a framework to enable fascism. And we have to thank Trump for being admirably forthcoming that he plans to be a dictator — although, he says, only on “Day One.”

What’s arguably worse than Trump’s frank authoritarianism is his embrace of dehumanizing tropes that seem to echo Hitler’s rhetoric deliberately. For many weeks now, Trump has been road-testing his use of the word “vermin” to describe those who oppose him and to characterize undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Even for an amateur historian like me, the parallels to Hitler’s rhetoric seem inescapable.

Unsurprisingly, though, there are plenty of people who push back whenever anyone or anything gets compared to Hitler or the Nazis — or to related subjects like the Holocaust or the confinement of Jews to ghettos or the systematic killing of civilian populations. Masha Gessen relearned that lesson recently after writing an article for the New Yorker that raised — in an exemplary, thoughtful, nuanced way — the question of whether modern Germany’s promotion of a particular way of thinking about the Holocaust might forbid public questioning of the morality of Israel’s choices in retaliating for Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Gessen was set to receive the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought, but the New Yorker article troubled two sponsors of the event enough to pull out of the award ceremony that had been set to take place in Bremen, Germany. Although Gessen ultimately received the award, the controversy raises two peculiar Godwin’s Law-related issues.

First, has the sheer absurdity of so many hyperbolic Nazi comparisons in popular culture made us less vigilant about the possible reemergence of actual fascism in the world? I think it shouldn’t — comparisons to Hitler or to Nazis need to take place when people are beginning to act like Hitler or like Nazis.

Second, is Germany’s specific culture of remembrance — which privileges the idea that the Holocaust is unique — working, as some have said Godwin’s Law has also functioned, to quash appropriate comparisons of today’s horrors to the 1930s and 1940s? I continue to insist that Godwin’s Law should never be read as a conversation-ender or as a prohibition on Hitler comparisons. Instead, I still hope it serves to steer conversations into more thoughtful, historically informed places.

The steady increase in Hitler comparisons during the Trump era is not a sign that my law has been repealed. Quite the opposite. Godwin’s Law is more like a law of thermodynamics than an act of Congress — so, not really repealable. And Trump’s express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.

Will Trump succeed in being crowned “dictator for a day”? I hope not. But I choose to take Trump’s increasingly heedless transgressiveness — and, yes, I really do think he knows what he’s doing — as a positive development in one sense: More and more of us can see in his cynical rhetoric precisely the kind of dictator he aims to be.

Donald Trump, Prince of Self-Pity

There is no end to his hallucinatory disadvantages.

The size of the crowd at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Atlanta last month rivaled the turnout for Donald Trump days later only “because she had entertainers,” Trump told the audience at his event, referring to the rappers Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion. “I don’t need entertainers.”

Translation: Harris cheated. Even so, she didn’t get the better of him.

She isn’t really Black but “happened to turn Black” over the course of her political career. That’s what Trump said at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, insinuating that Harris had performed a melanin metamorphosis and was falsely improvising identities to contrive some perk unavailable to him.

Poor Trump. Always forced to compete on an uneven playing field.

Of all his feats of projection, which is psychology’s term for seeing your own methods and motivations in someone else, none fascinates me more than his incessant insistence that every one of his adversaries — that everyone, period — is the beneficiary of some scheme or scam that puts him at a disadvantage. If he triumphs nonetheless? It’s a testament to his peerless might. If he doesn’t? It was never a fair fight.

He’s the prince of self-pity, the bard of bellyaching, reportedly worked up over the imagined injustice or trickery of Harris’s late replacement of President Biden on the Democratic ticket. According to an article in The Washington Post this week, he told an ally: “It’s unfair that I beat him and now I have to beat her, too.”

The more assertively Trump presses a complaint, the more you know it’s bunk. He operates on the theory that if you’re selling falsehoods, peddle like the wind; your audience might well assume that you’d never speak that extravagantly and be that audacious if there weren’t some legitimacy to your claim.

So it is with his underdog yap — his pantomime of Cinderella when he’s really her wickedest stepsister.

He was born to a rich family. His father’s money and connections greased the start of his career. Legions of lawyers helped him skate away from bankruptcies and bad behavior. The moral cratering of the Republican Party gave him license to do and coup as he pleased. Friendly judges — including on the Supreme Court — afforded him impunity.

And, of course, he’s the schemer. I direct you to the “perfect phone call” that prompted his first impeachment. To the Big Lie that prompted his second. To lesser shadiness galore. Cutting corners is his cardio.

But woe is Trump! The Justice Department targets him as it does no one else. (That would be news to Hunter Biden.) The media simply blows kisses at Democrats. (News to Joe Biden, now cheering Harris from the sidelines.)

According to Trump’s public statements or emails sent by his campaign, top Republicans in Georgia are conniving to ensure his defeat there, Democrats from coast to coast are rigging the vote, plutocrats are showering Harris with such a deluge of campaign contributions that she’s basically buying the election, and on and on.

The forces arrayed against him are infinite and omnipotent. And Harris, as a Black woman, has a first-class ticket to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She can bask in tokenism and entertainment-industry love while he struggles for a mere sliver of the spotlight.

When children exhibit persecution complexes this severe, they’re sent to their rooms or to a therapist. Trump may be sent to the White House — for a second time. Woe is us.

Former President Donald J. Trump told a jaw-dropping story on Thursday about nearly dying in a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, the former California politician and ex-boyfriend of his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

There was only one problem with the story. Or maybe two. Or maybe three.

It wasn’t the famous former San Francisco mayor on the helicopter flight at all. It was Gov. Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, who bears little resemblance to Willie Brown.

There was also no emergency landing, and the helicopter’s passengers were never in any danger at all, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was also on the flight.

Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019, said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”

“I call complete B.S.,” Mr. Newsom said, laughing out loud.

Mr. Trump’s errant account, delivered during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, came in response to a reporter who asked a leading question about Ms. Harris’s past relationship with Willie Brown, and whether Mr. Trump thought it might have had something to do with her career trajectory.

The two dated in 1994 and 1995, while she was a prosecutor in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, and he was the speaker of the California State Assembly, and he appointed her to two state boards. He was — and still is — married to Blanche Brown, but they have long lived separate lives.

“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Mr. Trump responded. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him.”

He went on to tell a cinematic tale of a close call with death — and of politically advantageous gossip on death’s door:

“We thought maybe this was the end,” Mr. Trump said. “We were in a helicopter, going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing.

“And Willie was — he was a little concerned,” Mr. Trump continued. “So I know him, but I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her. But this is what you’re telling me, anyway, I guess. But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. But he — he, I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his tune. But he — he was not a fan of hers very much, at that point.”

Reached on his cellphone just after Mr. Trump’s news conference — at his regular lunch spot at Sam’s Grill in downtown San Francisco — Mr. Brown, 90, said the whole story was false. He had never ridden in a helicopter with Mr. Trump, he said. He had never nearly perished in any helicopter ride. And he remained an avid supporter of Ms. Harris’s.

Mr. Brown, who loves regaling anybody who will listen with stories and who penned a weekly column in The San Francisco Chronicle until 2021, added, laughing: “You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!”

Ms. Harris ended their relationship nearly three decades ago, but Mr. Brown said he had always been a big fan and supporter of hers. “No hard feelings,” he said.

The helicopter ride that Mr. Trump took in 2018 with Gov. Jerry Brown, 86, and with Mr. Newsom, then the governor-elect of California, was to survey damage wrought by the deadly Camp Fire in the town of Paradise, in the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Sacramento.

Mr. Newsom’s recollection of the occasion was vivid.

“I was on a helicopter with Jerry Brown and Trump, and it didn’t go down,” Mr. Newsom, 56, said in an interview. He said that Mr. Trump had, however, repeatedly brought up the possibility of crashing.

The subject of Ms. Harris, with whom Mr. Newsom had enjoyed a friendly rivalry, did not come up on the helicopter, he added. “We talked about everyone else, but not Kamala,” he said with a laugh.

Mr. Newsom called Mr. Trump’s news conference “an act of desperation” prompted by what he called Ms. Harris’s momentum.

Mr. Trump’s visit to the burned forest with then-Governor Brown and Mr. Newsom did generate headlines, but not because of anything that occurred on their helicopter ride. Rather, it was because, during a news conference after landing at the scene, Mr. Trump, 78, attributed the wildfire to too many fallen, dead tree branches and said the answer to solving California’s wildfire crisis was to rake the forest floors.

“It was back when we were making raking the forest great again,” Mr. Newsom said.

Just look at this f-ing weirdo!