PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

Washington Post writer Richard Cohen asks a good question in a recent column.

“…in any reading of the rise of Nazi Germany, you come to a dead stop: How did this happen? How did a nut like Hitler manage to take over one of the world’s most advanced and civilized nations? The question becomes particularly acute when you consider the jumble of criminals, incompetents and ideological zealots he had around him. One answer to the question is that others in Germany thought Hitler could prove useful.

Then Cohen goes on to draw this parallel.

“Much the same thing happened in the United States with Trump. Trump was always a poster boy of the selfish, egomaniacal, ignorant, bragging, cruel rich kid, whose mirror was the sleazy pages of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. Trump’s oxygen was the leaked item, without which he would die the suffocating death of being shown to a bad table.

“All this was known about Trump — that and his sly approach to women. But by the time Trump ran for president, he had also mounted the attack on Barack Obama that charged — against all evidence — that the African-American president was African only. This was a revolting and racist allegation to which Trump, to the knowledge of those who have recently asked him about it, still clings. The man’s true religion is a farrago of conspiracy theories. He believes, sincerely, in the unbelievable.”

For my part, I have drawn Trump parallels to Hitler before and rested uneasy then as now with the perception. And, then, I made what could be called a mistake last month by watching a program on the History Channel outlining the downfall of Hitler near the end of World War II.

It was an excellent program, but, for me, the mistake was that it was a reprise of the incredibly vicious regime of Hitler which remind me of a perspective I had more than a year ago: Comparisons between Hitler and Trump.

Unsettling? Yes!

Trump swept into office in a way similar to the process by which Hitler took over post World War I Germany.

Columnist Eugene Robinson has provided a list of comparisons between Hitler and Trump:

• Like Hitler, Trump has watched approvingly as his followers, during the election campaign, used violence to silence hecklers, dissenters and protesters.
• Like Hitler, Trump offers few real plans or strategies for confronting the nation’s challenges, giving voters instead the assurance that he, by force of personality alone, will conquer those challenges.
• Like Hitler, Trump presented the electorate a scapegoat for its fears and vulnerabilities. Hitler gave his people the Jews. Trump has given his the Muslims.
• Like Hitler, Trump proposes to register, surveil and restrict the scapegoat populace. Nor, like Hitler, is he overly concerned with the niceties of civil or human rights.

And, this from Robinson: “It all brings home something that has become glaringly obvious: While many of us have lamented Trump’s improbable rise to political prominence, the real problem is not him and never was. Rather, the problem is that thing deep down in some of us that responds to him, that small, primeval thing so filled with uncertainty, fear and fury that it will suspend both logic and compassion to worship a man whose very name has become a symbol of all that is hateful and violative of American ideals.”

No, Trump is not Hitler. Hitler was a singular figure who committed a singular crime. But Trump’s dominance of the Republican field during the campaign and his first year in office offer vivid evidence of the depth of alienation that he has both created and capitalized upon.

His use of the word “treason” to describe Democrats who did not applaud for him in his State of the Union speech is only the latest over-the-top utterance from this president.

The fact that Hitler’s fascism was able to steal the hearts and minds of Germans makes you ask yourself how a supposedly enlightened nation could have fallen for the lie.

That makes me wonder how we, as Americans, will reconcile ourselves to Trump’s conduct whether or not it smacks one of the most reviled figures in history, Hitler.