Best historical analogy for Trump = Kaiser Wilhelm II
I’m reading Christopher Clark’s excellent pre-WWI history ‘The Sleepwalkers’ and am repeatedly struck by the thought that he seems to be subtweeting Trump – but the book was published in 2012. Examples in thread.
I’m reading Christopher Clark’s excellent pre-WWI history ‘The Sleepwalkers’ and am repeatedly struck by the thought that he seems to be subtweeting Trump – but the book was published in 2012. Examples in thread.
“Wilhelm frequently… bypassed his responsible ministers by consulting with ‘favorites’, encouraged factional strife in order to undermine the unity of government, and expounded views that ... were at odds with the prevailing policy.” (178)
“There can be no doubt about the bizarre tone and content of many of the Kaiser’s personal communications in telegrams, letters, marginal comments, conversations, interviews and speeches on foreign and domestic political themes.” (179)
“The extreme inconsistency of the Kaiser’s utterances makes an assessment of their impact difficult... his intentions were always equivocal and the focus of his attention was always shifting.” (179)
“The Kaiser picked up ideas, enthused over them, grew bored or discouraged, and dropped them again. He was angry with the Russian Tsar one week, but infatuated with him the next.” (180)
“He was particularly upset when foreign policy officials insisted on vetting his personal correspondence with foreign heads of state… It was not the political content of the letter that worried diplomats, but rather the effusiveness and immaturity of its tone.” (182)
“he was completely unable to calibrate his behavior to the contexts in which his high office obliged him to operate. Too often he spoke not like a monarch, but like an over-excited teenager giving free reign to his current preoccupations.” (182)
“[his] fantasies about future world wars… the blue-sky scenarios of an inveterate geopolitical fantasist, not policies as such. And whenever a real conflict seemed imminent, Wilhelm pulled in his horns and quickly found reasons why Germany could not possibly go to war.” (183)
His advisers managed him “mainly by not taking him too seriously… ‘It seems that His Majesty is recommending another new program’, Hohenlohe wrote, ‘but I don’t take it too tragically; I’ve seen too many programs come and go’.” (198)
