Globe and Mail丨Trump and Hitler

Trump and Hitler

伊恩·布鲁玛（Ian Buruma）

Donald Trump is the first former president in U.S. history to run for office while facing criminal charges . Despite this dubious honor, Trump is not the first political candidate in American history to be prosecuted, convicted or even imprisoned.

In 1920, Eugene Debs ran for president from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He violated the 1918 Act by delivering a speech opposing U.S. involvement in World War I. Sedition Act, where he is serving a ten-year sentence. As the candidate of the Socialist Party, he did not win the presidential election, but he received nearly one million votes, the most votes a socialist had ever received in a U.S. presidential election.

Some convicted candidates even managed to win elections. In 1994, Marion S. Barry, Jr. won a fourth term as mayor of Washington, even though four years earlier he had served six months in prison for drug possession.

In democracies, it is rare, but not unheard of, for candidates who have previously been prosecuted or imprisoned to secure government positions, sometimes accompanying democratization processes. In 1994, Nelson Mandela won South Africa's first free election, twenty-seven years after being imprisoned by South Africa's apartheid regime. A more recent example is that Brazilian President Lula won the election in 2022 after he was sentenced to 12 years in prison on corruption charges, but his guilty verdict was overturned in less than two years.

Others benefited politically from prison life, Adolf Hitler being the most notorious example. Before the failed coup in Munich in 1923, Hitler was a relatively unknown beer hall troublemaker with a criminal record. He was jailed for five years for staging a coup in a beer hall, but it didn't take long for his story to become a national news story after a sympathetic judge allowed him to state his political views .

Hitler ultimately served only nine months in Landsberg prison, during which time he wrote the anti-Semitic manifesto Mein Kampf. By the time he was released, he was already famous. Less than a decade later, the former demagogue became Germany's Führer.

Nobusuke Kishi, the grandfather of the late former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, is another example. Kishi Nobusuke was only in his thirties when he was entrusted with the important task of taking charge of the economy of "Manchukuo" (Japan's puppet state in Manchuria). In Manchuria, he ruled an industrial empire built on Chinese slave labor. During the Pacific War, Nobusuke Kishi served as deputy minister of the Ministry of Munitions. But even though he was arrested for war crimes in 1945 and imprisoned for three and a half years, he was never formally tried and convicted.

While incarcerated, Kishi plotted his political comeback with other prisoners, including a notorious gangster and a prominent Japanese fascist. The Americans judged that opposing communism in China and the Soviet Union was more important than prosecuting Japanese war criminals, and decided that Kishi was just the kind of person they needed. Soon after his release, Kishi ran for top public office. From 1957 to 1960, Kishi served as Prime Minister of Japan, during which time he repaid the United States' trust by consolidating Japan's status as a staunch anti-communist ally of the United States.

Mr. Trump is neither a dictator nor a war criminal. He was malicious and self-promoting, seeking to exploit his legal troubles for political and financial gain. He calls himself an outsider but has turned his prosecution into a political asset, portraying himself as a martyr persecuted by an entrenched corrupt elite.

So far, at least, his strategy appears to be working. Each new indictment boosts Mr Trump's popularity among Republican voters and spurs more donations to his presidential campaign. When Mr. Trump steps into the courtroom, he will undoubtedly relish the chance to run for president in the dock, especially in Fulton County, Georgia, where his trial for election interference will be televised and streamed live.

None of this means Mr. Trump will succeed. His violent rhetoric and threats directed at opponents are worrying, not least because many of his supporters are armed. But without armed forces and Wall Street support, it's hard to see how he could muscle his way into power. In an antiquated electoral system that favors rural areas over cities, it is certainly possible that he could win enough votes to become president, even if he campaigned from prison.

If Trump wins, the situation will never be like Hitler's coup in 1933, but it will be bad enough, and it will certainly be much worse than Japan under Nobusuke Kishi in the late 1950s. Expecting prosecution to prevent Mr Trump from winning the presidential election is as misguided as Germany's conservatives believing they could tame Hitler.

History has proven that sometimes crime pays.

(The author was born in the Netherlands in 1951. He is a historian and writer. He currently teaches at Bard College in the United States. His most recent book is The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II. The original title of this article is " Could Donald Trump join the rogues' gallery of history's criminal politicians? ", published by Canada's "Globe and Mail" website on September 11, 2023. The hyperlink belongs to the original text. Listen to the bridge translation.)