In her recent letter, Peggy Lambert compared Trump to Hitler. Such comparisons are grossly unfair.
Trump is no Hitler. Hitler could think and write in compound and complex sentences. He could express verbally what Trump can only feel instinctively.
For example, Hitler did not just employ The Big Lie, he possessed the reflective capacity for understanding the psychological bases for successful Big Lying.
“[In] The Big Lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”( Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X)
Can you imagine Trump reading the above from a teleprompter? Could Trump stay on point and restrain himself from lapsing into word salad and detouring into nonsequiturs?
How would Trump perform on a reading comprehension test based on the above passage? Would he simply write: “I am a stable genius — person, woman, man, camera, TV.”
Note too that Hitler openly disdains “the broad masses” whereas Trump expresses such disdain solely in private.
Andrew Bjelland, Salt Lake City
