2020 versus 1945
A Tale of Two Bunkers
by Professor John Kane
Trump is said to have cancelled a planned move to Mar-a-Lago in favour of staying in Washington to fight on. He has developed, one aide said, “a bunker mentality.” And indeed it is amusing, and perhaps instructive, to note the parallel unrealities afflicting the current White House and a certain bunker in Berlin in April 1945.
Hitler, after the December failure of his Ardennes Offensive (the Battle of the Bulge) and with much of Germany lying in ruins, broadcast in January that:
“However grave the crisis may be at this moment, it will, despite everything, be mastered by our unalterable will.”
But if it so happened that an unworthy German nation failed its great leader, he was determined to take it down with him via a scorched earth policy (fortunately ignored by armaments minister Albert Speer). Even as armies encroached from east and west, Hitler hoped against hope for something that would reverse his evident defeat, perhaps a falling out among the allies. Then as the Red Army entered the outskirts of Berlin, Hitler from within his Führerbunker ordered flanking attacks by non-existent army divisions.
It is all too appallingly easy to draw the parallel with Donald J. Trump hunkered down in the White House issuing frantic tweets denying his election loss and commanding armies of lawyers to assault the courts in an effort to reverse voting results. In each case there is damage done that timely surrender would prevent.
Hitler kept sending boy soldiers to sacrifice themselves against the allied armies to the bitter end; Trump continues to encourage his fanatical base to protest a ‘stolen’ election, thus jeopardising public confidence in democratic processes and undermining democratic legitimacy.
Witness also the mad adherence of subordinates and partisans to a failing leader’s will, with remarkably few defections by notable players. See also the leader’s identical rage against those who do defect (Trump has just tweet-fired a top Department of Homeland Security official who refuted claims that election systems were manipulated), and his anger toward those who do not seem to act with sufficient energy and enthusiasm to achieve his vain purpose.
Trump has not yet had his equivalent of Hitler’s definitive bunker moment, when military chiefs informed him that no German attacks had occurred and that the Soviets were in Berlin. This provoked a tirade against the treachery and incompetence of his commanders followed by a last despairing declaration that “everything is lost”. [Perhaps it is time for some humourist to add another episode to the cannon of send-ups of this scene from the film Downfall.] But surely the time must come when Trump can no more ignore the reality of a lost election than Hitler could deny that Russian soldiers were in the Reichstag.
Admission that “all is lost” will come if and when enough Republican loyalists screw up the courage to tell Trump the plain truth ― and, more importantly, to tell his gullible acolytes to stand down (not by). But Republican molly-coddling of Trump is based in part on fear of the damage his tweets can do to their reputation among followers who, given his vote tally, seem to have expanded alarmingly. Trump holds out in order to hold on to his following, for what future purpose is uncertain (a run in 2024 being a mere fantasy). Republicans are not sure that his hold does not remain dangerous to their own fortunes.
Whether Trump can long retain such power is unclear, but we may hope that the parallel with Hitler’s final days holds good here too. Historians say that news of Hitler’s suicide broke his “spell” over Germans, that the Nazi phenomenon without its leader simply burst like a bubble. People were too busy trying to survive or just get by to care about the deceased object of their recent adulation.
America in 2020 is not Germany in 1945, but the Republican Party under Trump certainly became a cult of rabid zealots focussed on a bloated leadership. Zealotry, as in Nazi Germany, was succoured by a steady diet of lies, vitriol and propaganda that valorised an allegedly persecuted (white) nation with a promise to restore it to its former greatness (MAGA anyone?).
Can leader-parties ever sustain the loss of their leader? It is a question that Trump is currently testing. Charismatic magic usually ceases to be magical when the leader loses, and certainly there is no term of disparagement that Trump deploys ― or fears ― more than that of ‘loser’. To be clear, Trump does not mind being a loser, for he has lost repeatedly in his business enterprises, but he cares deeply about appearing to be a loser. His whole career has been about creating an illusion of success sustained by an unrelenting barrage of lies, cheats, threatened lawsuits and non-disclosure agreements aimed at stemming an ever-threatening tide of reality.
Trump is often called a showman, and the essence of showmanship is to create an illusion of wonderfulness concealing a lack of real substance. In the social world, where we understand that we are not supposed to take the show seriously, that counts as harmless entertainment. In business, which is semi-serious, it works so long as we can get away with it. In politics, which is always at its core fundamentally serious, the showman’s fakery can arouse demons that, while flattering the showman’s ego, may threaten the body politic.
So now, in the final throes of his presidency, Trump cares not about the reality of his loss ― he has long been anticipating and preparing for that with his predictions of election rigging ― but only about preserving his image as a winner, even if one robbed of victory by Democratic fraud. Can he preserve that image and, with it, his continuing hold over his base and the Republican Party once Joe Biden assumes the presidency (as surely he will)? Or will he be exposed as the ultimate loser whose giant balloon, like Hitler’s, instantly deflates, with a population too distracted by COVID 19 and economic insecurity to care? (There is perhaps a telling sign in the fact that the person designated Q of QAnon, the conspiracy machine linked to Trump, has gone suddenly silent, throwing the movement into disarray.)
Hitler, unable to live with the humiliation of loss and prospect of retribution, put a bullet in his brain. It is most unlikely that Trump will deliver the metaphorical bullet by conceding defeat, congratulating his opponent, and offering his support for the greater good of the nation. To Trump there is no good greater than his own fragile but overweening ego.
And this is where the Hitlerian parallel breaks down. We may call both men monsters, but Hitler was a monster with political talent and long-held political goals which (however obscene) he was determined to fulfill (see Mein Kampf). Trump is merely a monster of vanity with some fixed political prejudices but no true ideological vision. Hitler’s grand obsessions and opportunities, once pursued, produced tragedy on a world scale. Trump’s relative triviality may lead us to think he cannot pose such a vast threat. Perhaps, yet he has exposed chinks and vulnerabilities in the constitutional fabric of the American polity that, if left unaddressed, may be ruthlessly and devastatingly exploited by some future demagogue more astute and more determined than Trump.
Trump’s empty bluster revealed the hollowness of the contemporary Republican Party and allowed him to absorb it into his craving soul. His bunker moment is thus also a bunker moment for the party ― which is, however, currently uncertain about the nature of the reality it is required to confront.
If the Trump spell is broken, the party will likely seek to return to its pre-Trump ‘normal’, if that is possible. But if it is not, Republicans will be tempted to settle on and expand the quasi-fascist foundation that Trump established.
This strange election may therefore prove, as both parties insisted, the most important of a generation. People of a broadly liberal goodwill should hope, in this case, that history repeats.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN KANE
John Kane is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations and Researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.
John attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and and teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and five times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with Haig Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
