May 29, 2021 4 min read

The elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in 2020 and 2024, and the presidential election of 2024, will be pivotal in deciding the future of our republic. Will we remain a free society or will we begin the route to dictatorship?

Personality cult is defined by Merriam-Webster as a situation in which a public figure (such as a political leader) is deliberately presented to the people of a country as a great person who should be admired and loved.

Donald Trump has now become a personality cult with parallels to the Nazi personality cult of Adolph Hitler. He has even had his own version of the Reichstag Fire, used by Hitler to suspend civil liberties and create what became the Nazi Dictatorship. The Jan. 6 insurrection is being belittled by many Republicans in an attempt to dissociate Trump from any responsibly for it, and to also redirect blame from the Trump supporters and right-wing terrorists who carried it out to other named and unnamed groups and individuals.

The Reichstag was the German parliament building at the time it was set ablaze on Feb. 27, 1933, four weeks after Hitler was appointed chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg. Although appointed by a president, in Germany, the chancellor holds the executive power similar to that of a U.S. president. Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch Communist, was arrested and convicted for setting the fire. Many historians who studied this incident later determined that it was a false flag operation engineered by the Nazis to provide the pretext for the dictatorship that followed.

Hitler and Trump share at least two personality traits: narcissism and a delusion that they are more capable in conducting military operations than the generals who served them. Hitler often interfered with his generals’ decisions, frequently at great cost to his armies. Trump on several occasions made remarks indicating his belief that he had superior ability in war management to his generals.

Rank-and-file Republicans often speak of Trump in an almost messianic manner, and while many in state and federal legislatures, talk about him in a similar fashion, most of them are too intelligent to believe what they are themselves saying. Those who don’t believe in their own pronouncements have two reasons for their lies: they are frightened by being out “primaried” by a candidate more Trumpian than themselves, and look forward to positions of power in the dictatorship they are helping and hoping to create.

During Hitler’s early days in power some Germans openly disagreed with him. But after they became the first residents of Nazi concentration camps there was little open dissent. Most Germans then became true believers in the Thousand Year Reich until they found their cities being made rubble by allied bombers.

For those who say it can’t happen here I ask you to look closely at the lies being perpetrated in an effort to make Jan. 6 become something other than what it was. A member of the U.S. Congress, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, said that calling the Jan. 6 attack an insurrection is a “bold faced lie,” and likened the terrorists rampaging through the Capitol building to a “normal tourist visit.” Anyone who views the videos of Jan. 6, through something other than a cult-jaundiced eye, will know it was an insurrection and not harmless tourists visiting the capitol. Yet other members of Congress refuse to censure this member and others actually support his view of the event.

Almost 50% of the electorate voted for Trump in the 2020 election. Various surveys and interviews of some reveal that their nativist and bigoted views have only hardened. The cult of Trump is alive and well across the nation and among supporters of the former president. With several of the swing states enacting laws to make voting more difficult in what amounts to an attempt to restore Jim Crow it is a good bet that Trump or a Trumpian will gain the presidency and that Republicans will regain control of both houses of Congress. If that happens our nation is much closer to becoming a dictatorship.

LeRoy W. Bloom lives in Lawrence.