A Reflection of Trump’s America in Gdańsk, Poland

Everyone should spend time in the city’s

Museum of World War II

Republicans didn’t get the red wave they wanted earlier this week and after Tuesday’s elections, Trump is under fire from many of his staunchest supporters.

It’s amazing what some people think when they see elections in the rearview mirror.

One New York Times story this week reported the startling news that as election returns came in Tuesday night a prominent Republican advisor is quoted as saying, “Republicans have followed Donald Trump off the side of a cliff”. Some allies, including those on Fox News, are even questioning whether his toxic brand of politics is the reason they’re on a losing streak.

Trump has even decided to postpone his announcement that he will be a candidate in 2024 on the advice of some of his minions.

Really? I can’t help but wonder why it took t so long for these brainiacs to come to this realization.

I’m spending a few weeks here in Europe trying to get my head around what I should be doing after I hit my 70th birthday next year. But the aftermath of Tuesday’s election has my head spinning, especially after my visit to Gdańsk, Poland’s Museum of World War II.

The first thing met upon entering the first of 18 exhibits covering world history from the conclusion of World War I through the end of the Cold War that had half of Europe behind the Iron Curtain, is a bust of Adolf Hitler.

The bust of Adolf Hitler greets visitors at the World War II Museum in Gdańsk, Poland. (Photo by the Author)

After that everything goes downhill. The fact is, I was so moved by the emotional drain of the exhibits that I raced through the section on terror and cried as I went through the holocaust section. It was all I could do to finish the tour. Even now the museum’s exhibits haunt me.

These days, everyone seems to toss around descriptions of people being like Hitler and the Nazis as if they were casual adjectives. But you have to see it to believe it and the museum brings home the horror in photographs, interactive screens, videos, and artifacts.

It’s incredibly sad and scary. It’s made worse by the realization that Trump and his cronies are following Hitler’s lessons as blindly as scholarship-winning students in the “I’m-a-Nazi Too” University. The lies, hatred, and propaganda ubiquitous in the 1930s in Germany (and in Italy and Spain) are exactly what is happening here in America today. The difference is simply the medium — movie clips, newspapers, and pamphlets then. Facebook, Twitter, and the dark web today.

There’s a lesson in all of this. If Republicans … and the rest of America … are worried about following Trump, they should be. The cliff we are about to fall off is a chasm of endless depth.