German leader Trump most resembles isn't who you think

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

By Max Hastings / Bloomberg Opinion

An admiral writes of a world leader who is familiar to us: “He is vanity itself, sacrificing everything to his own moods and childish amusements, and nobody checks him in doing so. I ask myself how people with blood rather than water in their veins can bear to be around him.”

I cheated by putting my first sentence above in the present tense. These words were, in fact, written in July 1914 by Germany’s Albert Hopman, about Kaiser Wilhelm II. A fellow historian who, like me, has written a book about the outbreak of World War I, messaged this week, asking if I share her view of the character matches between Wilhelm and today’s U.S. president.

I do indeed. And find myself scared by them. Donald Trump’s extraordinary performance in Davos, littered with falsehoods, insults and explosions of grandiloquence, closely resembled one of the Kaiser’s public performances as he rattled his saber in the years before playing a major role in precipitating World War I.

Trump’s ruderies about how fast the Nazis overran Denmark in 1940, and about how NATO allies allegedly avoided the front line in Afghanistan — where Britain lost 457 dead — compare with the Kaiser’s jibes at other nations. He constantly abused “Slavdom”: the Russians. He despised the French as “a feminine race; not manly like the Anglo-Saxons or Teutons.”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-german-leader-trump-most-resembles-isnt-who-you-think/

[tanyev]

1. One difference:

The Kaiser was only 56 years old when that description was written and presumably in good health since he lived to age 82. Plenty of time and energy to cause a lot of trouble.