The truly scary part of this article was how close the description of the Trump Rally was to the Mussolini Rallies of the mid-1920’s. The same kind of absolutely off the rails meaningless ranting that the audience ate up. Promises that were never kept, continual lies that got bigger and bolder as time went on about how great Italy was dong as its industry spiraled down. Which led to Italy joining a war on the side that was obviously against their interest due to their leader’s obsession with a man he wanted to be like…so if/when Puten starts a war are we going to join in on the Russian side against Europe?

I am deliberately avoiding the comparison to 1930’s Germany because I don’t actually think Trump rates that high. He reminds me much more of Mussolini and 1920’s Italy the prototypical Fascist that everyone forgets about in their rush to compare everyone to Hitler. In many ways Mussolini was more damaging to Italy because while Germany was destroyed by the end of the 1940’s it eventually recovered — Italy is still feeling the side effects of the damage that Mussolini did. They exited WWI as a borderline great power, nearly in line with France and Great Britain. The great depression then Mussolini and his retooling the consumer industries into war production followed by three wars that were complete disasters for Italy, they might have won Ethiopia and Spain but they were both pyrrhic victories costing far more than anything Italy gained. Their time in WWII on either side was a straight up loss for Italy, both on the Axes side where they were used as bullet sponges by Germany and later on the Ally side where the war tore up what was left of their country to try to get at Germany while killing a huge number of Italian military and civilians. So Italy exited WWII on the “winning” side, but arguably gained less than the losers so took longer to shake off the remnants of their experiment in authoritarian rule continuing to flirt with it all the way into the mid-1970s off and on. With the re-industrialization never reaching the share of world markets that Italy enjoyed prior to WWI.

In my oh crap radar went off with this description of his rally matching a Mussolini rally more than anything else. Can the US afford a Mussolini? We seem to have one.