Donald Trump, America’s modern Mussolini
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post
In an internal Republican Party memo, officials tried to come to grips with the possibility of Donald Trump as their nominee by comparing Trump to Wendell Willkie, the businessman who won the 1940 Republican nomination.
“Willkie and Trump have a lot in common,” Ward Baker, executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote at the beginning of the memo, obtained last week by my Post colleagues Robert Costa and Philip Rucker. “Both were seen as fresh-faced outsiders. . . . Willkie would go on to lose to wartime President Franklin Roosevelt, but this time it’s harder to predict an outcome.”
Thus placing Trump squarely within the party’s traditions, Baker suggested that Republican candidates should embrace some of Trump’s “character traits” and “limit the Trump criticisms.”
Um, no.
It’s hard to imagine a less apt analogue for Trump than Willkie. If the current front-runner for the Republican nomination is to be compared to a 1940 political figure, he comes closer to Il Duce.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com