Trump’s Behavior is Increasingly Reminiscent of Violent Haitian Dictator Papa Doc

GOP Leaders are Gaslighting America on Trump’s Insanity

The evil dictator Donald Trump is most often compared to is pre-1933 Adolf Hitler. While there are many parallels with the Fuhrer, the autocrat which most reminds me of Trump is Haiti’s fearsome dictator Francois Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, who ruled Haiti with an iron fist from 1957 until his death in 1971.

Like Trump, Papa Doc captured the public’s imagination with a carefully cultivated image that masked the extent of his psychopathology.  The Haitian strongman masqueraded as a caring, compassionate family physician who helped cure a rare skin disease in his poverty-stricken country by introducing Penicillin.

Meanwhile, Trump manufactured his image as a successful businessman, first by planting stories in New York’s gullible media, then furthering his myth by publishing the largely fictional, ghostwritten autobiography, The Art of the Deal, and finally solidifying his fable by starring in the reality TV show, The Apprentice.

Like Trump, Papa Doc was elected president on a populist platform in 1957. His campaign was divisive, pitting black Haitians against fellow mulatto (mixed race) citizens. The primary difference between Papa Doc and Trump, is that Duvalier’s transformation from friendly country doctor into bloodthirsty monster surprised voters. Trump is openly, proudly and defiantly telling voters what he plans to do if he wins the upcoming election.

Are we crazy enough to empower this madman? Polls say the odds are even.

On Fox News, Trump called his political opponents “the enemy from within”. He singled out Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others as “radical left lunatics” who are “evil” and “dangerous.” Trump offered a chilling solution to silence his perceived enemies:

“They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick. We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick and they’re so evil.”

Trump concluded his foes, "should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

Tragically, but not surprisingly, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), shrugged off these menacing threats when confronted by CNN’s Jake Tapper. “Jake, you know that’s not what he’s talking about there. What he’s talking about is marauding gangs of dangerous [immigrants, gang members].”

“Nope. He talked about Adam Schiff and the Pelosis,” Tapper said, challenging Johnson’s outright lie,  To emphasize his point, Tapper read Trump’s direct quote. That didn’t deter the oleaginous Johnson, who proclaimed with a straight face, “Donald Trump can bring order back to the chaos. They know that. So, they’re willing to give a little on his social media posts and some fun language he uses at rallies.”

Promises of hunting down and punishing political rivals is reduced to “fun language”? I guess that makes sense if you’re the perverse party that describes Trump’s deadly January 6 coup attempt as a “tourist visit.”

MSNBC’s Morning Joe contributor and former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) wisely called out Johnson, a born-again Christian, for religious hypocrisy. She suggested he consult his Bible and seek forgiveness for committing the grievous sin of “bearing false witness”. It often seems that the hyper-religious Johnson asks, “What Would Jesus Do” (WWJD), so he can do the opposite.  

The supposedly mainstream Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, carried out the same stupefying tap dance with Tapper, ludicrously saying that the CNN host was “misinterpreting and misrepresenting his thoughts.”

With exasperation, Tapper replied, “I’m just reading you his [Trump’s] quotes.”

The Republican Party has now officially entered Orwellian territory, reminding us of his passage from the book 1984: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

In unguarded moments, Republicans will spit out the truth about their dangerously surreal movement. In Bob Woodward’s new book, War, the author quotes Sen. Lindsey Graham reportedly saying, “Going to Mar-a-Lago is a little bit like going to North Korea. Everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in.”

Is such obedient, kowtowing behavior—meekly groveling, devoid of dignity, to the irrational orders of an all-powerful potentate—what a majority of voters want for their children’s future? I guess we will find out the answer in a couple of weeks. But for a Party that incessantly prattles on about masculinity, is there anything less masculine than Graham, Johnson, Youngkin, JD Vance and the rest of the cast of conservative lemmings bowing down to lick Trump’s boots on command?

For those who say, “this is America, fascism can’t happen here, it’s already happening for half the country, who have surrendered their intellectual honesty, patriotic duty, and fealty to the US Constitution in subservience to Trump’s whim, will and mood swings. For those who journey to Mar-a-Lago to cozy up to the wannabe authoritarian, Kim Jong Un-style sycophancy has already arrived.  

In Brett Baier’s interruption-filled joke of an interview with Kamala Harris on The Fox, the network decided they didn’t want to go down the Orwellian rabbit hole. Instead of embarrassingly denying what Trump said, right after he said it, it chose to mislead its audience by omitting a clip where Trump called his opponents “the enemy within.” Instead, The Fox sleazily acted as apologists for Trump by airing a clip showing his brazen obfuscation of his original, bone-chilling comments.

“They were saying I was threatening, I'm not threatening anybody," Trump said in the clip that Harris was shown. 

To her credit, Harris fought back against this sin of omission and told the reality-starved Fox audience the truth:

"With all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the 'enemy within,' that he has repeated, when he's speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed in all fairness and respect to you.”

“I'm telling you that was the question we asked him," Baier absurdly responded before Harris insisted, "No, no, that's not what you showed."

Perhaps Republicans are so gung-ho on “drill baby drill” because they need endless energy sources to fuel their incessant gaslighting? Their fantastical contortions to rationalize Trump’s threat to the Republic is as breathtaking as it is alarming.  

To vote for Trump one must erase all traces of American values. Not only has he called his political detractors “the enemy from within”, Trump has demeaned the media as “the enemy of the people”, and most recently threatened to pull the broadcasting license from CBS because he didn’t like the way the network edited its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.

Additionally, Trump said he will be a dictator on Day 1 and wanted to “terminate” parts of the United States Constitution that he disagrees with. To vote for Donald Trump is to conveniently overlook these rancid rants and unpatriotically support a political team at the expense of our country. If Trump follows through on even a fraction of his nutty promises, America would be unrecognizable and a global threat to peace and prosperity. Lapdog Republican lackeys should stop deflecting Trump’s un-American pronouncements and voters must begin to wake up and take him deadly seriously.

Not believing Trump means exactly what he says would be a historic mistake, which brings us back to the terrifying comparisons between Trump and Papa Doc. Upon taking office, Papa Doc purged the military and government and replaced public servants with loyalists.

Similarly, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is Trump’s puritanical plan to transform government into a MAGA cult, placing Trumpy hacks in key decision-making positions. Government experts would be eliminated in favor of extremists. The organization’s radical president, Kevin Roberts said that the country is in a “second American Revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”

The media usually focuses on the scary policies within the Project 2025 totalitarian blueprint. However, what should terrify people most is the Project 2025 database, a key part of the Presidential Transition Project. The Heritage Foundation promises, “with properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them [undemocratic, right wing policy proposals], we will take back our government.”

In other words, when Trump wants to go after his political opponents and the media, the Heritage Foundation will have a deep roster of toady goons to carry out Trump’s edicts. Unlike his first term, there will be no adults in the room to stop his worst impulses and few guardrails to halt his insanity. The alarm is amplified by the spooky realization that the MAGA captured Supreme Court provides Trump criminal immunity from misdeeds performed while in office, placing this amoral, convicted felon above the law.

The comparison of Trump and Papa Doc is especially ominous when one understands that Duvalier’s second term in office was much worse than his first. In 1959, the diabetic Haitian dictator fell into a coma. When he woke up, the already violent autocrat lost all inhibition to carry out bloody purges, resulting in the murder of more than 30,000 of his countrymen.

Similarly, Donald Trump has unambiguously suffered from severe mental decline this year, recently evidenced by his bizarre rally where he swayed to music for a half hour and his creepy story about the size of golfer Arnold Palmer’s member. Never a beacon of sanity, Trump is more demented than ever and fully consumed by burning grievances, ego eruptions and unchecked rage. His campaign slogan is essentially, “I am your retribution”, an eyebrow-raising line he spewed to the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in 2023.

Trump’s glaring and growing mental illness, combined with his advanced age, make him significantly more dangerous and dramatically increases the possibility he will punish his real and perceived enemies—including Republicans who don’t toe the party line. I would not be surprised if an increasingly paranoid Trump follows the lead of Papa Doc and creates a militia of partisans.

In Haiti, Duvalier created the fearsome Tonton Macoute, which infiltrated every aspect of Haitian society. Trump would likely pardon the radicalized, Jan. 6 domestic terrorists and use these thugs as his personal army. He would lionize these traitors as heroes, turn them loose on disfavored citizens and send the frightening message that these ruffians are beyond the law. [Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis already set the template for creating a private, state-funded militia]

There are other striking similarities between Trump and Papa Doc. Both are megalomaniacs who need constant praise. Papa Doc had the Lord’s Prayer rewritten to include his name. Trump’s name is tattooed on many of his supporters and the former president believes that his orange visage should be carved into Mount Rushmore.

Papa Doc’s main motivation was enriching himself by stealing from the Haitian people. Trump’s first term was a self-dealing kleptocracy that rained money on him and his corrupt family members. His second term promises to be a heist of epic proportions. A preview of such grifting is on full-display in Oklahoma, where disreputable School Superintendent Ryan Walters is trying to funnel public funds into purchasing $3 million in tacky Trump Bibles to curry favor with the Republican nominee. 

Finally, both Trump and Duvalier eagerly exploit religion to stay in power. Papa Doc was an atheist who pretended to be a Voodoo master to fool his population. Trump feigns being a right wing Christian to satisfy his gullible base of Evangelical stooges, who he diabolically uses like cheap tools to advance his power.

Donald Trump is increasingly unstable, unbalanced and unhinged. Papa Doc is one of many dictators who share similar traits with Trump, which are chronically ignored or rationalized by the GOP. The clumsy attempts by Republicans to “sane wash” this raving madman are a threat to our democracy. If our country falls into the hellish abyss in the coming weeks, no one can say we weren’t adequately warned.