Stopping the Orange Monster

As the trial opens, Ron Rosenbaum on why the evil of Hitler and Trump cannot be explained by ‘malignant narcissism.’

Ron Rosenbaum

When I moved to New York in the early 1980s, Ron Rosenbaum quickly became one of my favorite non-fiction writers. He wrote brilliant, hilarious pieces for a variety of publications on a wide range of topics. Here’s one that still makes me laugh about why so much weird shit was happening on Long Island. 

In 1987, Ron interviewed celebrity real estate developer Donald Trump about his plan for world peace. Even then, Trump recklessly argued for allying with the Soviet Union (against France and Pakistan). Nearly 30 years later, when Trump was first a candidate for president, Ron reprinted the piece and reflected on how much more he now disliked Trump. Eight years after that, his contempt has become fear that Trump is another Hitler. And Ron should know. His 1998 book, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil is the best book I’ve ever read on the Fuhrer. His latest book is In Defense of Love: An Argument.

JONATHAN ALTER:

At what point did you realize Trump wasn’t just a malignant narcissist and major-league asshole but had become a truly evil force?

RON ROSENBAUM:

I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, published February 5, 2017, two weeks into TFG's regime, after seeing the neo-Nazis, racists, and anti-Semites creeping out of the woodwork, enabled by Trump's victory. This [upsurge in hate] struck me as more than right-wing BS.  

Most on the Right still lick Trump's boots. But for the first time, I'd get unashamed terror threat messages like, "I gas Jews." The LA Review of Books piece was about something I learned about when researching Explaining Hitler. It was the story of one brave newspaper and the indefatigable willingness of its journalists to risk their lives to stand up to Nazi terror and murder tactics. The newspaper was the socialist Munich Post. Reporters there had actually discovered as early as September 1931 — 16 months before Hitler came to power — a Nazi Party document that spelled out everything they planned to do. You could call it their "Project 2025”. The authors of the document called for the Final Solution, endlosung, to the Jewish problem.

Recalling their story reminded me of the rise of Hitler in Weimar Munich and the fact of an evil beyond anything normal. The piece I wrote was called "Against Normalization" and argued against the treatment of Trump as just another politician. 

JON:

You were way ahead. But before we get to that, what happened to the Munich Post?

RON ROSENBAUM:

I was fortunate to discover an almost complete set of their issues in the damp basement of the Bavarian State Library. The excellent Munich Institute of Contemporary History had the final issues on microfilm, showing them not cease from fighting. Here are their headlines in the weeks after Hitler took power:

“Germany Under the Hitler Regime: Political Murder and Terror”

“Blood Guilt of the Nazi Party”

“Germany Today: No Day Without Death”

“Brutal Terror in the Streets of Munich”

“Outlaws and Murderers in Power”

“People Allow Themselves to Be Intimidated”

They kept going until Hitler’s Enabling Act shut them down, and their last issues — when they knew the end was coming — are heroically tragic. The journos were scattered, some locked up in the brand new prison outside Munich—Dachau.

JON:

The U.S. media blew it, especially at first?

RON ROSENBAUM:

The media had a responsibility as this evil grew more and more evident. But bothsiderism, in fact, did normalize Trump until it was too late.

And by the way, I totally reject explaining Hitler or Trump through the puny, nearsighted DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] formulation of "malignant narcissism." It is an exculpatory cliche: "Oh, Hitler couldn't help the 50 million deaths of soldiers and civilians he was responsible for — the poor guy had a personality problem, but we've got a code for it.”

JON:

What separates merely bad from evil?

RON ROSENBAUM:

Semantics, maybe. I would have preferred “sinister" to evil, but that has too much of a tinge of theology, and I'm an agnostic.

I don't think there's a bright line between bad and evil, though I think if you have to lie about it, as the House Republicans seem unable to cease doing, that's a clue. For instance, when they deny there was an insurrection or that they took part in it. 

If we had a living Attorney General, you'd at least see GYM [Rep. Jim Jordan], GOMER [Rep. Louis Gohmert], Marge [Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene] and Bobo [Rep. Lauren Boebert] be perp walked.

Standing by and allowing evil to proceed without opposition or accountability, as we've seen from the Justice Department on down, is evil, too. I except Jack Smith, who was only brought in when the J6 Committee shamed A.G. Garland, who, as the Washington Post reported, didn't even open a case against Trump until 16 months after he (Garland) came to office. 

JON:

What is it about half of the American people that has allowed this?

RON ROSENBAUM:

Well, I'm not sure it's half. Don't polls show hardcore hate — rally MAGA at about a third?  But that's no excuse for the rest. You know all the stories about those who may not execute the Jews but see that the trains to the death camps run on time. That's where Hannah Arendt was wrong about the so-called “banality of evil” in Adolf Eichmann's case. If you look at the frenzied way he sought to ensure the extermination of every last Hungarian Jew even after the war was lost and heard Eichmann saying he'd go to his death "with a smile on [his] face” because he had arranged the slaughter of five million: Not banal.

JON:

Given your book Explaining Hitler, how would you briefly explain Trump, whom you profiled in 1987?

RON ROSENBAUM:

Well, I didn't take him very seriously when he boasted of his nuclear weapons and strategic nuclear expertise, but back then, he was just one of the New Rich despoiling the city with his gaudy gold-plated facades and his idiot tabloid affairs. A Republican. A shameless know-it-all whose first entry into politics was the full-page ad he took in the Times accusing these five innocent kids of a horrific rape. Ironic who's the convicted rapist now.

 [His] transition seemed to come with his public racism in 2012, with the so-called "birther" garbage where he lied about all his "sources." It brought the hate-Obama racists to his side. Those very fine people" whose Nazi torchlight parade in Charlottesville gave away the game.

 There’s a mystery of a similar sort to Hitler's metamorphosis from broken down corporal in a military sanitarium in 1918 to fiery street orator in '22, and then the 10-year rise to Fuhrer. I have some theories about his "treatment" at Pasewalk Sanitarium and the origin of a political career founded on the "Stab in the Back" conspiracy theory, one of the most murderously successful propaganda slogans in world history.

JON:

In a 2012 interview with the late Martin Amis about his novel The Zone of Interest (the basis for the 2023 film), he quoted the writer WG Sebald, saying: “We have a sacred duty not to understand the Holocaust.”  What does that mean, and how scared are you by the idea that the Holocaust is receding from living memory?

RON ROSENBAUM:

One meaning I draw from Sebald is that now at least it's still something beyond our comprehension, beyond reducing it to Hitler's DMS-5. To say you can "understand" it means you think you can explain it away or exculpate Hitlers ’s crimes, thus diminishing them.  

JON:

If I remember right, spending all that time with Adolf in your head was not good for your mental health. For those of us experiencing Trump Derangement Syndrome, how would you explain the symptoms?

RON ROSENBAUM:

Well, that time will never leave me, but I plunged into writing a 600-page book on Shakespearean scholarly controversies after it, which immersed me in continuous contact with the peak of human possibility.

As for TDS, it's a pathetic right-wing attempt to construe those appalled by Trump as suffering from some BS diagnosis — as if they had an education. Calling yourself guilty of "TDS" does you a disservice. The real TDS, of course, is "Trump Devotion Syndrome" of the kind you see at the hate rallies, which allows MAGAs to feel good about putting a convicted rapist in the White House.

JON:

Agreed. But I still like staying abreast of people like you and the British writer Nate White who plumb new depths of his loathsomeness. On another matter: Remind me of exactly what our bet was and who is likely to collect. 

RON ROSENBAUM:

I was one of the first to castigate that preening little man [Garland], trembling at the thought he might be criticized for being partisan and thus cheating the American people of the justice we all deserved for putting up with the rapist crook who nearly missed demolishing the Constitution last time. Playing his delay games — not allowing Smith to petition to recuse partisan hack Judge Cannon with her determined to see there would be no trial.

Some of the many Twitter self-proclaimed "legal experts" implied I had something personal against Garland in their defense.

No, I just find it sad that after all his experience, he seemingly doesn't get the difference between enforcing the law against lawbreakers of an opposing party and being “partisan." He was worrying obsessively about "optics" and potential criticism. If you follow that logic, you could only prosecute offenders in your own party. The Republicans would be able to go on a crime spree without consequences, accountability, or punishment. Come to think of it, they have.

As soon as this man started preening about being oh-so-non-political, I went after him. I hate preening.

The bet: you thought I was being too harsh on Garland, and I bet Trump's delays and possible election where he promised he'd fire the DOJ and anyone who crossed him ("Dictator, Day 1") meant the rapist would not have to face a jury. You took the bet and asked for odds.

JON:

I think I’m still gonna win because he will face a jury, and the jury will convict. 

RON ROSENBAUM:

We’ll let the refs sort it out.

JON:

What are the three or four most important things Biden and the Democrats can do to win the election?

RON ROSENBAUM:

Make sure every citizen has Trump's crimes tattooed on their cortex. I can see a spot set in the White House at night, subtitled "Rapist in the White House.” The camera tracks up and down stairs until it finds Trump in the Oval Office with McDonald's bags and half-eaten fries, sloppy crumbs all over, and a camera close-up of a hungry cockroach eying tasty crumbs.

And the final black screen dramatic question:

DO WE WANT A RAPIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE AGAIN? 

JON:

Maybe this will help raise the money for that ad. Thanks, Ron.