Unflattering comparison
Re: "Potus again presses Congress on voter bill", (World, March 10).
Donald Trump invites comparison to authoritarian strongmen not because history repeats itself perfectly, but because the pattern is familiar.
Like authoritarians such as Hitler, he builds politics around grievance and personal loyalty, demanding devotion not to institutions or the law, but to himself.
Enemies -- immigrants, political opponents, journalists -- are cast as threats to the nation, while the leader alone claims the power to restore greatness. Truth becomes elastic, reality negotiable and power a spectacle performed for crowds.
Around such a figure, the cabinet ceases to resemble a council of independent officials and begins to look more like a court.
Marco Rubio plays the role of the polished emissary, the man who dresses raw nationalism in diplomatic language and calls confrontation "strength".
Joseph Goebbels, the architect of public narratives that masked coercion with polish, played a similar role under Hitler.
Pete Hegseth, a self-described religious zealot, supplies the militarised fervour, translating political anger into talk of discipline, internal enemies and national rebirth through force.
Mr Hegseth's view of himself as a holy crusader arguably makes him an even more effective and dangerous instrument of authoritarian consolidation than Werner von Blomberg, Hitler's Minister of War.
Taken together, this dynamic shows how a central figure can bend a cabinet around a single will. Each actor embodies a specific function -- propagandist, enforcer, diplomat and commander -- designed to sustain the illusion of legitimacy before the nation. The point of the comparison is not that the United States has become Nazi Germany. It hasn't.
The point is that disguised authoritarian systems rarely announce themselves all at once. They grow through habits: loyalty tests, contempt for democratic norms, the normalisation of cruelty toward outsiders -- even those within the nation's own borders -- and the steady elevation of one man above the law.
Ultimately, war is the logical conclusion of authoritarian consolidation. War gives total control to the incumbent leader as everything becomes a "national emergency".
This authoritarian sideshow has now progressed to the chapter of war. Emboldened by a gradual erosion of institutional checks and the ability to suppress public outcry, Mr Trump has ordered the military to wage an illegal war on Iran without consent from either Congress or the American people.
What he did not count on, however, was the tenacity of the Iranians.
