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.