The shadows began to lengthen in my long life just as the Trump incubus was starting to gnaw at the soul of the once proud GOP, a party that could rightly boast of such figures as Honest Abe, Teddy Roosevelt, Ike, Earl Warren, Sandra Day O’Connor, Barbara Bush, Liz Cheney, and the noble John McCain. That party has long been obliterated by the embrace of madness epitomized by Trump and made possible by his supporters, enablers, and appeasers. Trump makes the heinous Nixon look like Mother Theresa.
The confluence of my becoming aged and the incessant attacks on our democracy has caused me to relive the most important moments of my coming of age at Georgia Military Academy (now known as Woodward Academy), where our teachers, that noblest of words after mother and father, helped me across the ever-swaying bridge to adulthood.
We had just finished a long segment on the Second World War in our eighth-grade history class. I could grasp the historical accounts of critical moments in that terrible struggle but could not grasp how a country that could produce Anne Frank, Goethe, Bach, and Einstein could also produce Hitler. As a gangly cadet of 13, I had recurring nightmares about trains eagerly and ever so efficiently disgorging box cars full of emaciated Jews to the yawning ovens while the supposedly invincible Wehrmacht was being simultaneously crushed by Allied forces on two fronts.
One Saturday morning, woefully beset by my nightmares, I went to see our revered history master, Colonel John Moore, during the tutorial period. The colonel was one of our heroes, having been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge but somehow being blessed with the patience of Job. I falteringly tried to explain that I could not comprehend how a country could willingly fall victim to madness on such a scale. Colonel Moore, Pall Mall cigarette always lit, suggested that I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I did as he suggested but was still plagued by not being able to understand how the embrace of utter madness could so totally triumph over honor, decency, and truth to empower such evil as that unleashed by Hitler and his ilk.
Back to the colonel I went, still wracked by my nightmares. He told me to try to read, despite my age, Dr. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Finally, I had some incomplete comprehension of how the human psyche could possibly ever be tempted to embrace such madness.
When I was studying for my doctorate at Columbia, I would often see Dr. Arendt, her ubiquitous cigarette hanging out of her mouth, hurrying to her office in Low Library. One of my greatest regrets is that, then sorely intimidated by her intellect, I never thanked her for having helped a very troubled 13-year-old boy try to grapple with such an incomprehensible horror as the German embrace of Hitler.
Until the advent of the Trump incubus, I never once thought that such an embrace of madness could ever occur in our cherished country. My boyhood nightmares began recurring at my aged stage of life soon after Trump stalked into American history with his cleaver proudly held high. If I had the requisite funds, I would send every Republican in the United States a copy of Rachel Maddow’s recent Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism and a copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism before it is literally too late.
History will, of course, eviscerate Trump as it has Hitler. I hope, however, to live long enough to see how his myriad supporters, enablers, and appeasers excuse their own personal, cowardly contributions to the infamous threat he now poses to our imperiled democracy.
James F. Jones, Jr., an American academic and educator, is president emeritus of Trinity College and Kalamazoo College and the former president of Sweet Briar College.
