First as tragedy, then as farce

Donald Trump is probably not going to start a war. Adolf Hitler was the tragedy; Trump is the farce. But even farces can do great damage. In this case, the principal victim of his antics will be the international rule of law, a fragile and relatively recent invention that has probably spared us from a nuclear war for the past 80 years.

Donald Trump, left, and Adolf Hitler. Both Hitler and Trump took advantage of relatively new communication technologies to spread their message—radio and mass-circulation newspapers in Hitler’s case, Fox and X in Trump’s–and they both made lavish use of the so-called ‘Big Lie,' writes Gwynne Dyer. Photographs courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

February 27, 2025

LONDON, U.K.—Nineteenth-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote that “all great world-historic facts and personages appear twice.” It was Karl Marx who said that Hegel forgot to add that these repeating events happen “first as tragedy, then as farce.” You kno...

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