Leaders like Roosevelt and Gandhi stepped into moments of cultural and political opportunity and (generally) did everything they could to make the world a better place. The world is literally filled with people small in absolute numbers, but many in any case who have the leadership talents and skills to rise to opportunities to positively reshape the world.
The Republican Great Depression, for example, gave FDR the mandate he needed to reinvent American capitalism and kick off a new era of democratic socialism. Similarly, Reagan's gutting the American middle class with his neoliberal free trade, tax-cut, and anti-union policies gave Trump the opening he needed to blame the plight of formerly middle-class white men on Blacks and Hispanics.
The difference is Trump's psychopathy, combined with his inborn and learned talent to charm and convince people of whatever it is that he happens to be selling on any particular day. Like with Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin, it's a deadly but rare combination.
As far as I can tell, there aren't any other Trump-types queuing up in the GOP. DeSantis and Ramaswamy have Trump's psychopathy but lack his charm and salesmanship. Haley has Trump's charm but lacks his psychopathy. Christie has neither.
The other usual suspects (Cruz, Scott, Hawley, Tillis, Abbott, etc.) lack Trump's charm and salesmanship, even if many share his psychopathy.
In other words, Trump, like his role model Hitler, is almost certainly a singular threat.
If you think of it as a cult, it all makes sense. None of the major cults in modern days have survived the deaths of their leaders with the level of strength and vibrancy they had when the leader was alive or before the leader was discredited.
The last cults that survived the death of their leaders were probably the Mormons and the Seventh Day Adventists.
But after the loss of their leaders, both had to substantially reinvent themselves and become less dangerous and toxic in order to make the transition into a modern day religion.
The Hare Krishna movement, the Transcendental Meditation movement, and smaller cults that once populated the American landscape are all now ghosts of themselves because of the loss of their leaders. When they died or were discredited, their movements died.
Psychopathic political leaders are almost always also cult leaders, and Trump is no exception. Nazism didn't survive the death of its leader, and Trumpism won't survive the disability or removal of Trump from the political stage.
Which is why we can safely do everything possible to end Trump's political career and encourage our courts to throw his ass in prison for his many crimes.
Thus, there's no "Trump 2.0" waiting in the wings, and if history is any guide it'll be years before another one comes along. So let's get about the business of kicking him off the ballot and restore some normalcy to American political discourse.
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