Here are a few highlights how Trump and Trujillo mirror each other:
How To Be A Dictator #1
You think Baby Trump invented calling people insulting names? It's hard to gauge how people process the name calling, being called "criminal, lying', shady, sneaky, crazy, etc." but it's obviously intended to denigrate those that challenge him, his intellect or otherwise. There's even a Wikipedia page: List of nicknames used by Donald Trump
"Had he given him that nickname too, before he rebaptized him, in his heart of hearts, as the Walking Turd? Probably. Since his youth (Trujillo) had been good at making up nicknames. Many of the savage labels he stamped on people became part of their very flesh and eventually replaced their real names. That's what happened to Senator Henry Chirinos...they used only his devastating epithet: the Constitutional Sot."*
How To Be A Dictator #2
Could have been talking about the Baby Trump Whitehouse with Trump sadistically pitting one against the other.
"It amused Trujillo - an exquisite, secret game that he could permit himself - to observe the subtle maneuvers, the secretive stabbings, the Florentine intrigues devised one against the other by the Walking Turd and Egghead...and almost everyone else in his close circle, move ahead, be closer to and deserve greater attention, a closer hearing, more jokes, from the Chief....And in order to keep them always on the alert, to keep them from becoming moth-eaten and to avoid routine and ennui, he alternated them on the list, sending one, then the other, into disgrace."*
How To Be A Dictator #3
Trujillo insisted on fastidiousness. If a tie was slightly crooked or pants didn't have a knife-sharp crease, that would be enough to send Trujillo round the bend. One of the reasons Baby Trump ostensibly dismissed Joseph diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing was because they were too disheveled. I would say Trump has a way to go on this one, the way he dresses. Trujillo was meticulous about his dress.
How To Be A Dictator #4
Baby Trump has portraits of himself all over the place plus fake Time magazine covers he had hung in his golf clubs and god knows what else is around. He may be sorry he signed the bill making permanent a ban on the use of government funds to pay for oil portraits of the president, vice president, Cabinet members and lawmakers but I'm sure he will give his portrait an exemption.
"She barely noticed the portraits and pictures of the Generalissimo - on foot and on horseback, in military uniform or dressed as a farmer, sitting at a desk or standing behind a lectern and wearing the presidential sash - that hung on the walls..."*
How To Be A Dictator #5
Well, womanizing could be about any yahoo but the Trump way is creepily sleazy. Trujillo, though, was a notorious libertine specializing in deflowering young virgins. Because dictators do what they want, take what they want, anytime they want.
Trujillo was mortally afraid of being assassinated, which he eventually was, but he ruled for thirty violent years. Baby Trump eats McDonald's because he is afraid of being poisoned. There is certainly an element of self-awareness if one is fearful of being assassinated or poisoned, right?
These are but a few characteristics of someone hellbent on being a dictator. What do you think?
Very highly recommend Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
* Feast of the Goat, #1 p. 111
* Feast of the Goat, #2 p. 177
* Feast of the Goat, #4 p. 390
