Steven King’s Novels Aren’t the Scariest Books Around

by Kenneth Lee Warner in ROME Magazine

If you’re nervous about another Trump Presidency, reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is guaranteed to keep you up at night

Iwas a voracious reader when I was a teenager and read every history book I could lay my hands on.

I still am and I blame my mother. When I was growing up my bedtime was 8:00 p.m., but I could stay up till 8:30 if read a book. My first “real” book was The House At Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne and I haven’t stopped reading since.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I was undertaking much more challenging works like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

I can tell you from personal experience, it’s a long way from A.A. Milne to William Shirer.

Now in my so-called golden years, while following the daily news, the shenanigans of Donald Trump have stirred up dim memories of my high school studies. As I read about world and national events, I can't help asking myself, “Haven’t I heard this all before?”

Consequently, this has inspired me to re-read a few books, among them, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Frankly, it makes Steven King’s novels look very much like The House at Pooh Corner. Shirer’s eyewitness view as a reporter is an almost day-by-day account of the unparalleled ascension to world domination by Adolf Hitler, and his just as meteoric demise.

But, if you like horror stories, you’ll find it terrifying in its mirror image of what’s happening today in the good old U.S. of A.

I’m certainly not the first one to liken Trump’s actions to that of Adolf Hitler. There are books written about it by much smarter minds than mine. Even Trump himself often makes the comparison and bases many of his antics on the German Fuhrer’s blueprint.

For example, two of the former President’s recent remarks illustrate the point with chilling similarity.

Mr. Trump, in a video interview with right-wing leaning website The National Pulse, stated that immigrants are “…poisoning the blood of our country” which is right out of the Nazi leader’s playbook on hatred of Jews.

And then there’s the comment Trump made on his own social media network, Truth Social. He casually suggests that General Mark Milley, his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should have been executed for his remarks in the aftermath of the January 6th invasion of Congress. Referring to the General’s comments against the event, he calls them “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been death.”

Murdering generals who spoke out against him was a tactic Hitler frequently used throughout his rise and fall.

Ironically, in a book written by New York Times reporter Peter Backer along with Susan Glasser, Trump once complained to one of his generals, “Why can’t you be like the German generals of the Third Reich?”

He should be careful what he wishes for. Apparently, in his reading about Adolf Hitler, he skipped the chapters where Hitler’s generals attempted to assassinate him on several occasions.

The parallels between Hitler’s rise and the current condition of America are frightening at the very least … and gravely disturbing at best.

Anyone with half a brain realizes that Trump’s words led to incitement to riot on January 6th. But, so far the former president has escaped actual blame … much like Hitler did after the Reichstag fire, the burning of the German legislature building in 1933 that precipitated Hitler’s final take-over of the German government.

But above and beyond his rhetoric, it’s the more insidious events that compare to Hitler’s rise to power that are much more horrifying.

To point out just a few …

• Trump’s weakening of democratic institutions: The Weimer Republic guaranteed even more democracy than our U.S. Consitution. Yet, Hitler was able to subvert German democracy by manipulating election outcomes, much the same way as Trump tried to discredit American elections.

• Subversion of the press and spreading of misinformation: Hitler had Goebbels, Trump has Steve Bannon, and now it appears, Elon Musk.

• Diversion of the public’s attention from real issues: Our Congress is paralyzed by leadership fights, disagreements on border security, and charges of election fraud, while ignoring our broken healthcare system, failing to shore up our disintegrating education infrastructure, and ignoring the devastation wrought by climate change.

The list seems endless and includes fostering disrespect for law and order institutions like the FBI, making a mockery of our country’s Judicial system, and Trump’s support of book banning that harkens back to the Nazi state-sponsored book burnings that characterized Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s.

Sadly, there’s no question that the Austrian corporal was a genius. But what makes me even more troubled is that I have come to appreciate the genius of Donald Trump as well.

It’s textbook Nazi-ism. If you can’t take it over, tear it down.

Clearly, this is a nightmare worthy of a Steven King novel. But it’s one we have to wake up from before it is too late.