Is Donald Trump a Threat?

Last week I wrote a column about Orange Trump and said that he was too lazy to be any kind of threat. Some of the folks who read my column on Medium took some friendly umbrage at my remarks and posted comments stating their own views about why they thought I was wrong, and that Trump was someone who should be feared.

Here’s one of the comments which made me decide that I needed to respond at length: “I think I’m going to disagree with a Mike here. They said the same thing about Hitler too.”

My problem with the continuing narrative about how Trump is such a threat to democracy is that the conditions that resulted in the collapse of democratic regimes in countries like Germany were so different from what exists in our country today, that making any kind of comparison between the two situations confuses rather than explains anything at all.

Yesterday the Labor Department issued its analysis of the 2nd quarter economic numbers and noted that the economy grew at the rate of 2% over the same period a year ago, much of the growth coming from continued strength in consumer spending. In the late 1920’s the German economy collapsed to the point that most of the middle class was completely wiped out.

The Weimar Republic, Germany’s first democratic government, was 15 years old when it collapsed in 1933. The current United States…