18 III 2019: Portrait of a Leader

I came upon the following in the Wikipedia site “Big lie.” The first is from an OSS Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler and the second from Henry A. Murray Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler: With Predictions of His Future Behaviour and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany’s Surrender:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Never admit a fault or wrong; never to accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time; blame the enemy for everything that goes wrong; take advantage of every opportunity to raise a political whirlwind.

Who could read these and not think at once of President Trump. Trump does not quite conform to the “concentrate on one enemy at a time” rule, but, of course, Hitler did not have Twitter. To avoid pathologizing Hitler, we can say that he was an “unconventional politician” which is the way Republicans describe our President.