Dorothy Thompson leaves the White House after a visit with Roosevelt, May 1940. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Today’s substack from Heather Cox Richardson contains a sharp warning about what Trump will do to those who oppose him, if he ever gets power again:
“On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be ‘bloody.’ He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is ‘a fascist to the core … the most dangerous person to this country.’
“On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those ‘radical left lunatics’ on Election Day.”
Our mediocre media soft-pedals Trump’s overt fascism. Most Americans are strangely unconcerned about what Trump intends to do if he ever gets power again, because journalists are afraid that to tell them would sound shrill and unobjective. We even have a new term for how the media normalize Trump’s depravity to avoid sounding shrill — “sanewashing.”
But scholars like Heather Cox Richardson don’t have to care what Republicans or centrists think about what she writes. She writes for a smaller set of people. She has, I believe, 1.3 million subscribers on Substack, as well as 2 million followers on Facebook. That’s a lot of people, but it’s only 1.3 percent of the American population.
Richardson writes today about Dorothy Thompson, a journalist who was expelled from Germany in 1934. Thompson was a rare journalist who risked sounding shrill when what she was writing about was gruesomely ugly. She had written in 1931 that Hitler was a man of “startling insignificance.”
In Harper’s Magazine in 1934, she wrote:
“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”
It seems that Dorothy Thompson analyzed everyone she met in the same way she analyzed Hitler. She wrote a fascinating piece for Harper’s Magazine in 1941, Who Goes Nazi? She asks us to imagine a parlor game at a large gathering of people. She describes twelve people in the room, whom she labels A through L, and asks whether they would “go Nazi.” She wants us to see how It Could Happen Here. People today are just the same as people were in 1941. For persons A through L, which types seem familiar? Whom do you like, and dislike, the most? Which one is Elon Musk? Is there a Liz Cheney in the room? For those of us who would never go Nazi, why?
It’s an odd paradox, and only the best of journalists and historians can get at it — how it can be that some of history’s greatest monsters also are pathetic little creeps.
Here’s another paradox. Given any major issue, the higher the stakes and the greater the controversy, the harder it is to find out what is really going on. Sources that depend on large audiences have to water things down so as not be accused of taking sides. But, somewhere in the fog of propaganda, there will be a few who are doing their best to get at the truth. Dorothy Thompson did it then. Heather Cox Richardson is doing it now.
Update: The New York Times seems to have had a fit of conscience:
