Life & Culture

Trump, Kim, and Wilhelm II

How close are we to nuclear war? Really? It’s September 2017, and we seem to be in the middle of a classic conflict spiral with North Korea that, without heroic intervention, will end up where conflict spirals usually end up: war. It’s disheartening to find myself hoping the other side will produce the hero—especially when the other side is a North Korea—but that’s where I am. President Trump shares Kim Jong-un’s appetite for power, but Trump also exhibits other war-prone tendencies that push the doomsday clock closer to zero. Most arise from that broken obsession with me, me, me that we call Trump’s character. Maybe Kim is the same, but I think of Trump more as our own Kaiser Wilhelm II, an unstable and ineffectual narcissist whose sense of his own greatness was all-consuming and fragile, ready to collapse without constant reinforcement. What Bismarck said of Wilhelm could also be said of Trump: he wanted every day to be his birthday. Wilhelm took meetings perched on a saddle-chair, like a child play-acting the part of a ruler. Trump demands twice-daily folders of news clippings praising him (even his aides call them propaganda documents) while rejecting anything critical of him as fake. These are not the kind of men you want leading countries with the power to destroy the world. Wilhelm led his into World War I. Where will Donald Trump lead ours?

Posted on September 25, 2017 at 6:47 pm under Life & Culture

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