I’m seeing a bunch of posts on BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social) lately, from people who are astonished that so many voters, let along politically aware newspapermen, columnists, pudits, just don’t see what’s coming down the road with a second Donald Trump presidency. How can they not see it, people ask, when he’s been making it clear as a bell what he intends to do with power once he gets his hands back on it. It’s reminding baby boomer me, ominously, of how clueless people were said to be in the aftermath of the second world war. 

So many excuses for what happened. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. No one could have seen all that coming. We heard the rumors but we didn’t believe them. Nobody could have predicted that he would actually do everything he said he was going to do in Mein Kampf… 

I remember the documentaries I saw in school. A common thread was that Hitler’s speech had “strange powers” to sway the masses, almost hypnotic, as though that was supposed to excuse the belly flop into the human gutter. No. Just no. Watch the few speeches with english subtitles. He’s a moron. I have read Mein Kampf…granted an english translation and German isn’t easy to map directly to english…but you read it and what you see is a common bar stool bigot who can’t shut up once he gets going. This is no mystical hypnotic orator. What he was, is a street thug, a brawler, an outsider who walked into German culture with its emphasis on formality and process and order and set about trashing everything about polite orderly middle class German society he could. The magic was he had no rules. Just hate. Lots and lots of hate. In the wreckage of post World War One Germany, his act found its audience. And one day Germans awakened to discover there were more thugs among them wanting to trash it all then they’d supposed.

I’m seeing it now. It’s pretty hard to fit Donald Trump into the image of a master orator, but some try. They talk about how Trump is going to take down the cultural elite. That was Hitler’s promise to his thuggish base too. They talk about Trump’s spiritual connection to the common man. Here’s your common man.

The scene is in Mary Renault’s novel “The Charioteer”. The main character, Laurie Odell, a wounded survivor of Dunkirk, has just crossed paths with his schoolboy crush Ralph Lanyon. But time has passed, Laurie is crushing on a hospital orderly, a young Quaker named Andrew, and Lanyon has a boyfriend now…who becomes instantly very jealous of Laurie. We learn later he’d been breaking the lock and reading Lanyon’s diaries. At a small gathering of friends, Lanyon’s boyfriend (oddly nicknamed “Bunny”) spikes Lanyon’s drinks, getting him too drunk to drive Laurie back to the base before curfew. This allows Bunny to get Laurie alone in the car with him, at which point Bunny starts putting the moves on Laurie.

Laurie is furious. As they drive back to the base in silence, this is what’s going through Laurie’s thoughts…

With a cold barren weariness that quenced the dry glow of anger, he thought, What can you do about these people? The terrible thing is, there are such a lot of them. There are so many, they expect to meet each other wherever they go.

Not wicked, he thought, that’s not the word, that’s sentimentality. They are just runts. souls with congenitally short necks and receding brows. They don’t sin in the light of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on the Exmoor, and go on holiday leave the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’s gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouths open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and one and on…

Then he stops himself, thinking of the young Quaker he’s fallen in love with…

No, Andrew wouldn’t like that.

I’m seeing it now. The excuse making for not seeing a common thug for what he is, and all his devoted followers for what they are. All the looking the other way by everyone who should and can know better. All of them taking for granted that he doesn’t mean to do what he has always said he would do.