Donald Trump has recently revived long-standing comparisons to Adolf Hitler, but a columnist hit him Friday for being more like a "crybaby conqueror" — though his fanatical supporters seem happy to embrace either.
Trumpists tend to call themselves conservative, which has traditionally signaled a belief in limited government and low taxes, but Chicago Sun-Times columnist Gene Lyons noted with horror that MAGA followers had essentially become fundamentalist fanatics.
"This explains what some see as the central paradox of the MAGA movement: that a congenital braggart who embodies what Christianity has traditionally called the seven deadly sins — greed, lust, envy, sloth, gluttony, pride and wrath — has come to seem the totem of faith for millions of Republican evangelicals," Lyons wrote.
Lyons turned to noted anti-fascist George Orwell, whom he said "captured the essence of the whiny strongman" in his 1940 review of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" — a manifesto Trump insists he has never read.
"Orwell understood fascism’s appeal to an aggrieved population," Lyons wrote. "While European and North American democracies, he wrote, told people in effect that, 'I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them, ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.
"Orwell also understood the personal psychology of the crybaby conqueror: 'The initial, personal cause of [Hitler’s] grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon,'" Lyons added.
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Lyons said he's inclined to believe Trump never read "Mein Kampf," but instead had affected an over-the-top persona based on low-brow entertainers from his own youth.
"Trump never learned anything from a book," Lyons wrote. "He stole his whole act from 1950s professional wrestlers at Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, specifically from Dr. Jerry Graham, who swaggered around boasting that 'I have the body men fear and women adore.'"
"The hairstyle, too — a bleached blond pompadour that taught a generation of wrestling fans how a 'heel' behaved — that is, basically like a cartoon Nazi," he added. "Graham was a masterful showman who aroused thousands to frenzy with balsa wood chairs and fake blood capsules. He was as fat as Trump, too, although there was muscle under the lard."
