Hitler expert gives stunning warning about Trump's 'intellectual nitwit' image

Donald Trump shares a lot of similarities with Adolf Hitler, according to an expert on Nazi Germany.

The former president has reportedly praised Hitler for doing "some good things," and shared a video on social media dreaming of a "unified Reich" if he wins re-election. And Henk de Berg, a professor of German at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, told The Guardian that he saw many similarities in the rhetorical strategies and self-promotion of Trump and the notorious German leader.

“We tend to see Hitler as a genocidal mass murderer, which of course he was, but not so much as a populist," de Berg said. "I thought looking at it through the perspective of Trump can help us wrap our heads around the idea as to why so many people actually supported Hitler and vice versa.”

De Berg, who recently published Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying, described Trump and Hitler as political performance artists who speak only vaguely about policy. He said each used jokes, insults and extreme language to command attention.

“Their extremist statements are very deliberately meant to provoke a reaction and to get them into the press," de Berg said. "Hitler actually writes quite openly about this in Mein Kampf and this of course is the challenge: What do you then do as a journalist or as an opposing political party when the other person makes these extreme statements?"

Their extremist language appeals to voters who are frustrated by complex problems beyond their control, the professor said.

“Most of their electorate are dissatisfied with the status quo for a variety of reasons — globalization, automation — so they want to change the system and here you have an anti-establishment candidate who is not politically correct, who says that we will sort it, who doesn’t come up with all these ‘cowardly, rotten compromises,'" de Berg said.

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Hitler blamed Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I, while Trump has attacked Mexican and Central American immigrants.

"It decomplexifies the world," de Berg said. "Instead of abstract social structures and historical developments, you have one specific group of people that you can blame all your problems on.”

Trump's incoherent zig-zagging rhetorical style at his rallies allows his followers to recognize themselves in his words, which de Berg said Hitler's supporters also saw in their leader.

"In his rallies he outlined a whole range of very problematic things that he would do when he was going to be president, but that doesn’t mean all people literally believe that," de Berg said.

"I don’t think they literally believed that he was going to build this big concrete wall between Mexico and the United States. Many of them thought, unconsciously, what he’s really saying is he will protect America’s traditional identity, and that — to use a posh phrase — interpretative openness means that both the more extreme followers and the less extreme or ‘moderate’ followers can recognize themselves in the speaker’s words. That made Hitler and makes Trump so difficult.”

“Trump goes from the FBI to a judge to the Democrats to communists and so on," he added. "You can then say, well, clearly this guy is an intellectual nitwit, he can’t talk in a logical, argumentative way. He could, but he realizes that this vague way of tying all these people together actually gives different sections of the electorate different things they can identify with."

"Some might not like the FBI, others might not like immigrants and so on."