The Stink in the Atmosphere.

The very air we breathe these days seems to be suffused with the name, the face, and the blathering of Donald Trump. He’s become a bad smell – incipient, intrusive, and insufferable. I for one am becoming sick to the back teeth of his omnipresence on the news pages and YouTube recommendations.

I note one historian on YouTube drawing parallels between the political situation in 1930s Germany and the USA under Trump. That might well be true, but I see relatively little similarity between Trump and Hitler.

Hitler was a leader and a bully; Trump is no leader, just a bully. Hitler had charisma (dark though it might have been) where Trump has none, except to those addle-headed Americans who count their worth in the number of guns they own, and many of whom are probably descended from good white men who once used live black babies for alligator bait. Hitler was hard-edged, where Trump is blubbery. And Hitler had excellent speech writers who could rouse the masses of whatever political persuasion. All we get from Trump is lies, threats, overinflated ego, and juvenile rhetoric dribbling from his mouth like so much regurgitated stomach bile. The only parallel I perceive between Hitler and Trump is that they’ve both been said to smell bad. I categorise Trump more in the Mussolini mould, and maybe he will come to the same end one day (although that’s unlikely unless there’s a major war which nobody with any sense wants.)

So what do I do every day when my major worldwide input comes from the BBC news and YouTube? Skip over it quickly, I suppose, picking up the basic facts, and hope there will be an end to it one day. As I said in an earlier post, I don’t have a great deal of faith that such will happen. The feeling is growing stronger that we are slipping into a darker, more dystopian place. Let’s hope I’m wrong, or in my case that I have relinquished this mortal coil before it gets too bad.