A former to adviser to Mitt Romney compared Trump-supporting academics to intellectuals who praised Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin in a scathing assessment of President Trump in a book review.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, who advised Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and is now Hudson Institute senior fellow, said in his review of Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump, that those in the think tank and academics setting who praise Trump’s presidency are comparable to those who gave a favorable appraisal of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin in the early 20th century.
Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
“Anyone with an iota of historical awareness is familiar with the fact that intellectuals in Europe and the United States lauded Joseph Stalin even as he sent millions to the Gulag and their death. By the same token, Adolf Hitler, one of the 20th century’s other mega-mass murderers, also found his share of admirers in the academy, among them such brilliant minds as Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger,” Schoenfeld, who is advertised as an “public intellectual” on his speaker’s page, wrote in his review of the book.
“An entire branch of Western scholarship was devoted to the adulation of the genocidal Mao Tse-tung,” he added. “Whatever Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, it is a grotesque absurdity to compare him to history’s most terrible tyrants. My point is something else: If such monsters could find admirers among the highly educated, it is unsurprising that our infantile, ignorant leader has found an assortment of professors to sing his praises.”
In his book, Hanson praised Trump for the way in which he has navigated the morass of the “deep state,” the layers of bureaucracy, and political appointees that many Republicans argue are stymied the government’s ability to enact the president’s policies.
By working to dismantle “a state within a state,” Hanson says Trump has been able to shift away from he sarcastically calls “the judicious wise-men” of Washington, D.C., and embrace social and economic policies for which conservatives have clamored but have been ignored by perpetrators of “deep state.”
Schoenfeld, however, refutes Hanson’s assessment, saying that his examination of the Trump “tot lot” approach is not careful and thoroughly thought-out. He says, “Trump lies habitually. It seems that those like Hanson who choose to burnish the Trump cult must do so as well. At one point in his narrative, Hanson writes that ‘Loyalty or reciprocity were always Trump’s first ethical commandments.'”
The former Romney adviser wrote an assessment of the Romney campaign in 2013, his version of the Romney autopsy report highlighting critical failures of the 2012 presidential campaign against Barack Obama. He accused candidate Romney of not relying enough on his policy advisers and vetting policy stances which resulted in hurtful blunders.
