Why Trump will fail

Because of the lessons Trump is incapable of gleaning from history.

Toward the end of David Kahn’s comprehensive history, Hitler’s Spies, Kahn analyzes why, given “This gigantic, jerry-built apparatus” of Hitler’s intelligence agencies, Hitler lost the war.

Kahn specificies how excellent the Allies’ intelligence was, even given some big mistakes (“A Bridge Too Far,” for instance). Kahn continues:

The Germans, in contrast, were glaringly inferior.

Five basic factors bred this failure: (1) unjustified arrogance, which caused Germany to lose touch with reality; (2) aggression, which led to a neglect of intelligence; (3) a power struggle within the officer corps, which made many generals hostile to intelligence; (4) the authority structure of the Nazi state, which gravely impaired its intellience; (5) anti-Semitism, which deprived German intelligence of many brains.

  • Let’s take these factors one at a time, replacing Trump and his administration with Germany. “Unjustified arrogance.” We view and hear it every day. And along with the arrogance is the egregious and egregiously displayed stupidity. The combination causes them to lose touch with reality, if they ever had any touch with reality aside from an unreal TV show.
  • “Aggression.” Oh yeah.
  • “Power struggle within the” administration’s corps, making many officials hostile to intelligence. Kahn is using the term “intelligence” to describe Hitler’s “gigantic, jerry-built apparatus,” but it’s so easy to read it as intellectual capacity. Knowledge, factual knowledge. Today, as I write this, I’ve read a variety of claims about Trump’s bombing Iran, from hugely successful to “we’re not yet certain.”
  • Trump’s “authority structure” is both more bizarre and less cohesive than Hitler’s, partially because no one is afraid of being wiped out. Losing their jobs, yeah, but not being liquidated. As yet. And Trump’s “authority” shifts every day in his mad display of what he seems to think is power.

I left in Kahn’s point about anti-Semitism, although I’m not sure it applies to the Trumpists who are, in any case, hardly collected and competent enough to use anti-Semitism as a dynamic. They don’t have to. They have picked their vulnerable victims, people of color and foreign ancestry.

But as Kahn continues to deliberate upon Hitler’s anti-Semitism and how it weakened the Third Reich’s intelligence apparatus, he makes some striking points about how attacking and attempting to remove an entire population of certain people weaken a country.

So, as you read this, replace anti-Semitism with asylum seekers and undocumented workers who are employed everywhere in the country, doing work that Americans don’t want to do; and the many young people who have come to the United States on student visas to get an education and have hugely benefited our colleges, universities, hospitals and scientific research centers.

First, Kahn notes that anti-Semitism had a long life in Germany prior to Hitler.

The Prussian army…simply did not commission Jews as regular officers…The Nazis intensified this attitude and its effects. They “coordinated” scientific, technical, and academic organizations with the party philosophy, squeezing Jews out of them…

Is this sounding close to home?

The Nazis expelled the Jewish rector of the Göttengen Mathematical Institute…the foremost center of mathematics in Germany…Mathematicians, scientists, engineers streamed to Great Britain, Russia, above all the United States…

Kahn names only Einstein. I just asked Perplexity.com for a list of the European Jewish scientists who escaped the Nazis and worked on the Manhattan Project. There were nine, plus three who either didn’t work on the Project or had family Jewish connections.

Their departure fed [Germany’s] exhilarating sense of renewal and cleanliness and mission. But even the strongest motivation could not make good the replacement of superb intellects by mediocrities.

Read that one again and contemplate how many “superb intellects” have been tossed or pushed out of Trump’s government and our universities and replaced by mediocrities. Less than mediocrities. Wacky dimwits.

…German anti-Semitism both seriously depleted Hitler’s intelligence potential and vastly increased the allies’, thus doubly damaging the Reich’s intelligence.

Trump’s malicious and cruel anti-immigration onslaught depletes United States’s potential, thus doubly damaging our intelligence. Ergo, like Hitler, Trump will fail.

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‘Is There a Dignified Legal Way, Preferably in Latin, to Say “Holy Shit”?’

Paul Krugman asked this question as his response to the U.S. International Court of Trade decision soundly thumping Trump’s tariff mania.

Immediately, I grabbed my Latin-English dictionary.

“Holy” is easy. It sprung to mind without the dictionary. Sacer (sacred to the gods) or sanctus (inviolable), or putting the two together, sacrosanctus (what is held in veneration). Since Trump is neither god nor inviolable — as the Court just demonstrated — I think I’ll go with the double weight of sacrosanctus.

What to do with “shit”? I suspected, and was correct, there is no Latin word for it. I now must wander among euphemisms, although I’m not even going to try “poo,” “poopoo,” or “poop.” Nor “doodoo.” Nor anything to do with baby diapers.

How about “excrement”? Ah, of course. Lest we forget, English is derived from Latin, so excrementum. But far more precise is stercus, which means “dung, muck, manure,” and as a term of reproach, stercus curiae, which I guess could be translated as “shit of the court.”

Nah. Let’s hand curiae back to the International Court of Trade and go with stercus sacrosanctus. Holy shit!

Post scriptum. I have fairly fond memories of translating brilliant Cicero with my father, who’d been a Classics scholar. I trust my herein display of Latin would make him proud.

Post post scriptum. I had a good time doing this. I hope you enjoyed it.

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I’m reading about Hitler’s intelligence agencies. Can’t imagine why

Re-reading, actually, the exhaustive history of Hitler’s intelligence operations, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence In World War II, by David Kahn.

Exhaustive it may be, but Kahn was such a terrific storyteller the book reads like the complex thriller it is.

Since my copy is hard cover, I’m assuming I bought it and first read it in 1978 when it was published. What caused me to take it down (and dust it off, literally — I’m a lousy and lazy housekeeper) from my WWII shelves is what’s going on here, now, in 2025.

While a lot of highly informed and intelligent people were warning us as early as 2017 about the advent of a Hitler-type of fascism, I was sticking to my guns. So to speak. And my guns were saying, no, Trump is not Hitler and his sort of tyranny can’t happen here because we have a history of rejecting tyranny in many forms. (And Trump is stupid.) We were founded in rebellion and I think we’ve never entirely lost that part of the national character, even if it’s declined somewhat into a multifarious kvetch about whatever’s going on.

The criticism of our elected and selected higher-ups from some constituency or another never lets up. We keep our eyes fixed on each and every imperfection and complain about them, loudly. (And Trump is stupid.)

Despite the results of the previous election, I’ve not relinquished my view that we will not drop off the cliff into fascism, and whenever someone I’m talking to says, “This country is stupid,” or “crazy,” I say, “Well, some of the country but not even half of it.” (And Trump is stupid.)

But the speed and irrationality of the acts of destruction continue to be both shocking and bad horror-movie-quality. I’m not going to enumerate the awful things Trump and Elon’s berserkers have done, except to re-emphasize they make no sense in any form of reality. What does make sense is the slew of lawsuits defending our Constitution, and the judges who decide them. The Terrible-Two Trump may make it feel slow, but in reality it’s remarkably fast.

Trump (who is stupid) exists within the chaos of his intimate White House. It’s relentlessly anti-reality and tragi-comically chaotic. To me, it seems psychotic, a bunch of weird people of outstanding mediocrity — and that’s being kind. Plus, it’s relatively small, and shrinking as responsible and law-abiding career civil servants depart.

So if it isn’t Hitlerian fascism, what is it? Pocket-pretend Hitlerian fascism, without the despotic rigor (and instantaneous death penalty) that could make it effective. If any entity drops off the cliff, it’ll be Trump’s lunatics, not this country.

Ergo, I’m re-reading Hitler history to be reminded of how fascism actually worked, and didn’t.

In an early chapter, “The Institutions of Control,” Kahn provides a meticulous description of how Hitler’s showy (the uniforms!), personalized paramilitary forces were invented and who came to power within them. There is a two-page chart entitled “Principal Agencies of German Foreign Intelligence at End of 1943,” squeezed into small print to accomodate the mind-boggling number of branches, and directors of these branches, each of which grew arms and legs. (The branches; the directors presumably already had arms and legs.)

Some of the directors wound up commanding a bunch of offices (like Marco Rubio, maybe?). But at the top, in large bold letters, it reads “ADOLF HITLER, Führer of the Nazi Party and Commander in Chief, Armed Forces.” Just so you don’t wander through the hundreds of power bases and think you’ve gotten to the gist of anything.

Here’s how Kahn summarizes it:

This gigantic, jerry-built apparatus, Germany’s intelligence system, consisting of numerous uncoordinated and often competing mechanisms, sucked up torrents of information–some of it duplicated–through its remote and multiform termini. Each unit refined its information, passing it either through special evaluating agencies, as with the military or through the general bureaucracy, as with the Foreign Office. Then the jealous ministers, the arrogant party officials, the proud warlords of the high commands all scrambled to bring their tidbits to the Führer.

Hitler wanted it that way. The disunity and the rivalries remitted control of the intelligence apparatus to him. And, as the only person with access to all intelligence, he could judge it as he alone saw fit. He would not readily abdicate these powers to anyone else, and he never did. But this afflicted German intelligence with two fatal flaws: inefficiency, and subjugation to a madman.

This does sounds familiar: Inefficiency and subjugation to a madman. (But a stupid and incompetent madman.)

 

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