At the end of WW II, when Nazi Germany was on the brink of defeat, there were mass suicides throughout the country. Not only Nazi party members and government officials, but also regular citizens. Entire families, children murdered by their parents before killing themselves, chose suicide rather than face defeat and justice at the hands of the Red Army or the Allied Forces.
The Germans that bought into the Nazi myth of invincibility, that victory was their destiny, could not bear the humiliation of their ultimate defeat. Of course, many didn't want to stay around and be held to account for the horrible atrocities committed by their brutal and inhuman countrymen.
That was then and this is now. Then it was a death cult sheathed in political garb, but its followers were held in total thrall to their charismatic insane leader.
What about now? We have a charismatic and severely personality disordered leader that has risen to the Presidency on the backs of the self-pitying racist and prone to violence disaffected groups in this country. Skin-heads, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members are in total thrall to the Trump cult of personality.
Less than a month into his Presidency, the Trump administration is in total chaos. Rank amateurs with no clue how to work the levers of power in Washington D.C., their racist and unconstitutional agenda is floundering.
There is a feeling that Trump won't last the entire term of his presidency. Talk of impeachment fills the air along with other constitutional maneuvers extant to provide for the removal of the President, should his closest aids find him unable to serve due to ailments physical or mental. With any luck, the Trump years may fade into just a laughingly ridiculous aberration.
When that happens, what will become of the true believers, the fellow travelers, the 60+ million people that believed in Trump, that he was somehow different, that he'd not only make America great again, that he'd make them great again too? The people that jammed his rallies at every campaign stop, that ridiculed the press covering them, that reveled in Trump's victory as if it were their own, what of them? The base that ignored every idiotic pronouncement, every lie about protecting the little guy, lies about bringing back jobs, what of them?
When the crisis happens, will these people don their Nike sneakers and slink into their homes and find that the humiliation of their having been duped by a conman too much to bear and emulate the Germans of 1945, even as Trump has tried to emulate the Germans of 1933?
History does seem to have a way of repeating itself, doesn't it?
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