∼ ∼ ∼
This article is part of a series — At 250, Who Will America Be? — reporting on threats to American democracy as we approach the nation’s Semiquincentennial, on July 4, 2026.
∼ ∼ ∼
Just in time for an off-year election — do you know who your city councilperson is? — we are arriving at the 100-year anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s November 8, 1923, Beer Hall Putsch, in which the 34-year-old leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party attempted to overthrow the Bavarian government.
The Nazis hoped that gaining control of this large German state would lead to their eventual takeover of the entire nation and an expansion of their “Blood and Soil” goals — those twin dogmas holding that the German population had to be cleansed of “inferior stock” and that farmers and country peasants were the true, honorable backbone of Germany.
The coup fizzled when state police and government officials opposed the insurgents, resulting in a brief gun battle that left four officers and 16 Nazis dead.
Hitler suffered a dislocated shoulder and hid out with a friend, but was shortly arrested. In early 1924, his trial for high treason began, with the prosecution describing the Nazi leader as “the soul of the whole undertaking.” That didn’t stop a sympathetic, right-leaning judge from allowing the prisoner to give extended speeches: “I alone bear the responsibility. I alone, when all is said and done, wanted to carry out the deed…. But one thing I must say: I am not a crook, and I do not feel like a criminal.”
Almost exactly half a century after Hitler’s violent power grab, another politician had to defend his honor: “I am not a crook,” President Richard Nixon told a group of Associated Press editors, on November 17, 1973. But half a year later the White House announced that Nixon would pay $432,787.13 in back taxes and interest, because the IRS and a congressional committee had found that he had made some improvements to his personal properties under the rubric of “security” and then improperly deducted such safeguards as an icemaker, a swimming-pool heater, club chairs, sofas, and pillows.
Unlike Hitler and Nixon, Trump didn’t write his own book.
Maybe it’s something in the Earth’s journey through the cosmos that lands world leaders in heated pools of controversy every 50 years, but now, in November 2023, former president Donald Trump finds himself mired in multiple criminal cases, two that include charges of interfering with the 2020 election — which, in an echo of the violence of Hitler’s insurgence a century ago, led to the January 6 attack on the Capitol — and a pair of cases involving business fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice that might have come right out of Nixon’s nefarious bag of tricks.
Hitler was sentenced to five years, the minimum for treason, out of which he served only nine months of very soft time — some 30 to 40 guests were allowed in to fete him on his birthday. And his jail stint gave him the opportunity to dictate Mein Kampf to a loyal flunkie. As Hitler rose to absolute power in Germany, My Struggle became a bestseller, with the 700-plus-page tome becoming a de rigueur wedding gift across the country, presumably so newlyweds could intimately imbibe its attacks on Jews, Slavs, Communists, and democracies as well Hitler’s demands for more “living space” — i.e., territories outside Germany to be conquered — along with the author’s various visions of genocide: “the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.”
But, his inflammatory prose aside, Hitler believed books were for the weak-hearted, with one passage relating “let it be said to all our present-day fops and knights of the pen: the greatest revolutions in this world have never been directed by a goose-quill,” but instead arise from “the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone.”
Nixon, on the other hand, believed fervently in the written word, cranking out numerous books over his lifetime. Unlike Hitler, however, he never did jail time, having resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974, before he could be impeached after revelations of his secret expansion of the savage war in Vietnam and his obstruction of justice at home. A month after he resigned, Nixon’s appointed vice president, Gerald Ford, pardoned his former boss for any crimes he might have committed during his presidency. A short time later, no doubt with a sigh of relief, the ex-commander-in-chief began work on an often petulant rebuttal to his many critics, the 1,000-plus-page RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon.
Released in May 1978, the book was priced at $19.95, twice the usual freight for a hardback in those days. But some citizens were not having it, and started a “Committee to Boycott Nixon’s Memoirs,” a callback to the “Committee to Reelect the President” — unofficially known as CREEP — a White House fundraising operation started in 1971. The boycotters were appalled that the disgraced president was cashing in on the national trauma he’d caused four years earlier, and came up with the slogan “Don’t Buy Books by Crooks.” For a buck apiece, they offered buttons and bumper stickers reading “The Book Stops Here” and “Erase the Memoirs,” the latter a reference to the notorious 18½-minute gap in one of the Watergate tapes, which Nixon fobbed off as an “accidental” erasure committed by his loyal secretary, Rosemary Woods.
“I put lipstick on a pig.”
And now that half-century clock has ticked over once again, and Donald Trump is facing multiple court cases and, if convicted, serious jail sentences. Will he, if incarcerated, finally have time to reflect, and to write his own magnum opus? One that excoriates those rapists from Mexico and demands that Muslims be banned from entering America and that white nationalists “Stand back and stand by!” and that authoritarian leaders from Hungary to Russia to North Korea to China be bromanced and that insurrectionists be released and that Trump wins forever. He might also muse, perhaps in a chapter titled “Who Needs Gerry Ford?”, on whether a president has the power to pardon himself.
Trump, it should be noted, already has a bestseller under his belt: 1987’s The Art of the Deal. Like Mein Kampf, it gave a regional megalomaniac a much bigger stage to strut upon. But unlike Hitler and Nixon, Trump didn’t write his own book. That was left to his credited ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, who received a substantial advance and half of the royalties for a combination pseudo-autobiography and How to Succeed in Business manual. Schwartz had spent 18 months closely shadowing the real estate mogul and portrayed him in the book as a brash charmer who would use exaggeration to generate excitement and enthusiasm to facilitate deal closing. The gig was a good paycheck for Schwartz, but he had to struggle to figure out a way to present this man he had come to know as a brazen liar, one who had almost zero attention span. He confided to his journal, “the book will be far more successful if Trump is a sympathetic character — even weirdly sympathetic — than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.”
In 2016, as Trump’s improbable rise to power continued, Schwartz disavowed the book due to remorse about his role in making the future president a national figure. “I put lipstick on a pig,” he told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, adding that he’d never seen Trump with a book, or even seen one lying around his subject’s apartment or offices. Trump’s first wife, Ivana, had claimed that her husband kept a copy of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, at his bedside. If Trump actually read it, Schwartz would have been surprised, telling Mayer, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” However, back in the ’80s the Queens native did at least send back the manuscript of The Art of the Deal with a few red Magic Marker corrections, mostly crossing out criticisms of some powerful people he apparently had second thoughts about offending. So Trump did, it seems, read his own book — or at least he double-checked everything between the quotation marks.
Trump has been known to contradict himself in depositions, and when being grilled by the New York Attorney General’s office on business fraud charges earlier this year, he took the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times. So what will happen if, in the coming months, he is convicted in either a state or federal court? Maybe, if he ends up in the slammer and has time on his tiny hands, this master prevaricator might “write” another book — this time about his years as president and his role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. If so, considering his aversion to the truth — the Washington Post’s Fact Checker team documented 39,573 falsehoods that he spouted over the span of his presidency — Trump could end up in the same position as another famous memoirist. Asked about major discrepancies in her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, which was credited to her and the writer/activist William Dufty, Billie Holliday replied, “Shit, man, I ain’t never read that book.” ❖
The post Party Like It’s 1923: Will Donald Trump Write His Own ‘Mein Kampf’ in Jail? appeared first on The Village Voice.
0 Commentaires