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The Enemy Within: you have to be this tall to ride the psychotic rollercoaster [1]
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Date: 2025-02-10
“Look what they could do with elections. Look what they do. They’re smart, and we have to be very careful. I talk about the enemy from within. They’re the enemy from within."
During unsettled times, strongman candidates also boost their popularity by invoking nostalgia for a vanished past, while depicting the present in dark, dystopian terms as an era in need of a savior. In a 2016 biography, the scholar Volker Ullrich noted that Hitler began his rise to power by promising “to lead Germany to a new era of national greatness,” and his supporters believed that their country, which was still reeling from the fallout of World War I, needed “a man of iron” who could shake things up.
As for Donald Trump—who frequently praises dictators like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Rodrigo Duterte—he asserts that he’s “the only thing standing between the American Dream and total anarchy, madness and chaos.”
This, of course, is yet another case of Trump projecting his own liabilities onto others. After all, it’s Trump himself, who is the chaos candidate, as former Republican opponents like Nikki Haley and Jeb Bush have pointed out. Chaos trails after Trump like a permanent shadow—the direct result of his contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law; his zeal to undermine government institutions meant to protect civil liberties; and his eagerness to overturn the post-World War II order by assailing NATO and longtime allies, even as he cozies up to Putin’s Russia.
Trump is a chaos monster because of his impulsivity and willful ignorance of policy and history, but, at the same time, he uses chaos as a potent tool of disruption. Like many dictators and would be autocrats before him, Trump consciously or unconsciously recognizes that confusion and mayhem create a fertile petri dish in which fear and anger thrive—the perfect environment in which a demagogue, practiced in the art of propaganda, can rise to power and persuade followers to support policies that defy common decency and common sense, not to mention their own self interest.
time.com/...
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