If you are one of the fortunate few in this country to have received more than a cursory education about the Holocaust, you have no doubt heard Adolf Hitler described variously as a gifted orator, a shrewd politician, a master manipulator, and an evil genius. The implication is that this man was so cunning, so persuasive, so irresistibly charismatic, that the throngs of people who gathered to listen to him couldn’t help but fall under his spell.
This characterization of Hitler as a preternaturally brilliant demagogue is routinely invoked to explain how such a monstrous man could have commanded the unquestioning loyalty of ordinary German citizens even as he waged a campaign of persecution, destruction, and extermination against Europe’s most vulnerable populations for more than a decade. The same myth of rhetorical genius has more recently been used to rationalize the appeal of some of the most hateful, vulgar authoritarians of the last decade, including Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald Trump.
It is also, to put it politely, complete bullshit. Well before they came to power, each of these demagogues revealed themselves to the public as pompous, pretentious blowhards whose politics consisted entirely of recycled bigotry and transparent fearmongering. Hitler didn’t hide who he was, nor did Modi, Bolsonaro, or Trump. So how did they manage to attain the highest elected office in their respective countries? A common claim is that the world “underestimated” these men precisely because they were so mediocre, and there is certainly a great deal of truth to this. However, it falls short of the mark in a small but crucial way: what people really underestimated was the willingness of ordinary citizens to help an objectively unimpressive bully terrorize their own country, in exchange for nothing more than an illusion of power and superiority.
When we perpetuate the narrative that men like Donald Trump succeed by cleverly fooling the public into following them, we engage in a dangerous fallacy. By mythologizing a reprehensible, buffoonish charlatan as a master of three-dimensional chess, we implicitly let his millions of followers off the hook for committing the easily avoidable error of electing him in the first place.
This is why, when the history of the Trump administration is written, I desperately hope we can avoid the temptation to paint Trump as a brilliant con man or a practitioner of political jiu-jitsu. Already a sizable portion of the country has grown comfortable repeating the fiction that Trump’s election in 2016 was a reflection of economic anxiety or legitimate concerns about national security, even though the man is famous for destabilizing everything he comes into contact with. Others contend that Trump rose to the top ranks of the Republican Party by convincing enough people he would be a staunch defender of traditional values and a champion of the “regular guy,” despite a seven-decade history of not giving a damn about either.
These excuses we make for Trump’s supporters aren’t just facile whitewashing; they are lies so obvious we should be embarrassed even to entertain them. If voters had really wanted to elect a conservative leader in 2016, they would have chosen someone with conservative ideas and leadership qualities. Instead they threw their weight behind a man utterly lacking in qualifications, government experience, knowledge, intellectual curiosity, scientific literacy, cultural competency, grace, charm, humility, remorse, compassion, conscience, convictions, moral courage, impulse control, decency, honesty, diplomatic skills, public speaking skills, or skills of any other kind. Even his vaunted business acumen was a sham, and a well-documented one at that. The most damning part? All of this was common knowledge before Trump even secured the Republican nomination. And any one of these deficiencies should have disqualified him from even getting close to a position of power in our government.
In the four years since his election, Trump gave the American people one reason after another to repudiate his compulsively destructive approach to “leading” the country, starting with a string of flagrant human rights violations against Latin American immigrants and culminating in his disastrous handling of a pandemic that has killed almost half a million Americans to date. That last failure of leadership—Trump not only declined to act on information that could have saved lives but actively made the pandemic worse by misrepresenting the nature and severity of the virus—should have been the final straw for even the staunchest devotee of MAGA ideology. Instead, more people voted for Trump in the 2020 election than in 2016, proving beyond a doubt that his appeal could not, and can never, be explained by any kind of ability or talent on his part. Every one of his supporters has to be aware by now that he is the quintessential naked emperor, and yet that doesn’t seem to faze them. Which, I’m afraid, means either (a) they don’t care about the bottomless cruelty of his administration, or (b) they get off on it.
That might sound harsh, but bear in mind that Americans have had four years to wake up and realize their support of Donald Trump’s administration has cost us lives, jobs, and possibly even the right to call ourselves a civilized society. If they don’t see that by now, it’s because they don’t want to. This level of selfish arrogance, the consequences of which continue to play out in the form of ICE abuses and hate crimes and attempted coups, cannot be credited to (or blamed on) the evil brilliance of a single man. Donald Trump didn’t trick half the people in this country into abdicating their responsibility to their fellow human beings. All he did was to give them permission to indulge their basest, most sadistic impulses without ever having to worry about being held accountable. And they took him up on it.
It doesn’t take any special talent or intelligence to appeal to the worst side of human nature, and it’s time we stop pretending we’re powerless against it. Otherwise, we’re just going to keep making the same mistakes, committing the same atrocities, and telling ourselves the same lies about why we can’t do better.
The Shellshocked Cassowary Rises 