Weird and scary parallels between Trump and Kaiser Wilhelm

[mainer]

He called his rivals stupid nicknames. He thought he was a dealmaker. He surrounded himself with generals.

He helped usher in WWI and the destruction of Germany.

During Wilhelm’s reign, the upper echelons of the German government began to unravel into a free-for-all, with officials wrangling against one another. “The most contradictory opinions are now urged at high and all-highest level,” a German diplomat lamented. To add to the confusion, Wilhelm changed his position every five minutes. He was deeply suggestible and would defer to the last person he’d spoken to or cutting he’d read—at least until he’d spoken to the next person. “It is unendurable,” a foreign minister wrote, in 1894. “Today one thing and tomorrow the next and after a few days something completely different.” Wilhelm’s staff and ministers resorted to manipulation, distraction, and flattery to manage him. “In order to get him to accept an idea you must act as if the idea were his,” the Kaiser’s closest friend, Philipp zu Eulenburg, advised his colleagues, adding, “Don’t forget the sugar.” (In “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff writes that to get Trump to take an action his White House staff has to persuade him that “he had thought of it himself.”)

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-happens-when-a-bad-tempered-distractible-doofus-runs-an-empire?intcid=inline_amp

[thbobby]

1. Kaiser Wilhelm had crippled arm

Right, I believe. From a breech birth. He always felt inferior. trump was born with the horrible affliction of bone spurs. Alike in many ways.

[uponit7771]

2. K&R, Wilhelm was an obvious idiot it's one of the reasons Europe was so hard on Germany

[thucythucy]

3. And Mike Pence reminds me of Tsar Nicholas II.

Ultra religious and self righteous, believes God has chosen him to lead, contemptuous of other opinions, shallow intellect, little if any compassion for anyone outside of his immediate circle.

What a pair.

[chowder66]

4. And they had to endure 30 years of that. OMG. nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. I suggested some similarities last year

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=9097829

now it looks far closer than I realised.