The Rise and Fall of the Great Republic

Whenever it was that I first read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, it was long before 2016 for my copy was completely unannotated with any margin notes, "Trump." I have only re-read it intermittently in the last month and have not covered even 200 pages but my God, just thumbing through the 191 pages I have read so far, there are a dozen or more handwritten references to Trump and pages dog-eared that never were previously. It is shocking. I will detail these at a later time and it is not as if I was unaware of the parallels, I have written of them repeatedly, but I did not remember (because I had not read the book by 2016) the innumerable details of the parallel. They have left me literally open-mouthed. William Shirer and Winston Churchill both wrote of their amazement that Hitler stole upon the world so stealthily because, as Churchill wrote, "There it all was," in Mein Kampf, Hitler's programme for world conquest, in detail. Similarly, I gape at the insouciance of both the American intelligentsia and the middle classes as they gaze at and gauge Trump, for there it all is, in The Rise and Fall, Trump's template.