This question is flying around a lot right now, so writing this purely from memory. Hitler grew up in a home with a mother who spoiled him and a father who was very strict. His parents had lost many of his siblings in their infancy which must have affected the mood at home and must have shaped young Hitler as well. Perhaps his mum spoiled him for fear of also losing him, and perhaps at the same time she stayed somewhat detached from him early on, because she could lose him as well. Add a strict father to that and some natural intelligence and you can guess how that could go wrong in terms of narcissism, paranoia and megalomania.

His sister, Paula, seems to have been very loyal to him, but never sought the spotlight. Hitler wanted to be a artist, but got rejected by the academy in Vienna essentially because he was not able to paint faces or didn’t care to. His paintings do show talent, but nothing that truly stands out. When his parents were both dead he was still very young and survived on a small inheritance and some support for orphans. When that ran out he painted postcards which a fellow bum sold for him. This partner urged him to paint more, but Hitler was rather lazy. Perhaps the only friend he ever had, Kubizek, said that he constantly went to the opera, read a lot, and fantasized about fixing all kinds of problems, such as the sewer system of Vienna. Kubizek found this rather strange, a bum thinking he could reorganize the sewer system of a huge city.

Hitler ghosted Kubizek, because he was too proud to tell him that the academy had rejected him. The next time they’d meet Hitler would already be the Führer and the most powerful man in Europe. When World War I broke out he felt that the too multiethnic Austria-Hungary would not survive this and he enlisted in the German army instead. His service at the front seems to have been brave, he was decorated and complimented by officers, including jewish ones. He became a runner, carrying messages at the front, certainly not without its risks. He got wounded in a gas attack, was blinded (may have been psychosomatic) and was devastated when he learned the war was over. It’s here he espoused the idea of the ‘stab in the back.’ He believed the German army had never lost a battle during the war and the war was lost because the Jews and the communist sabotaged the war effort at the home front. After the war he stays in the much reduced army of the Weimar Republic.

The Versailles treaty limited Germany to an army of 100,000 men. As a soldier he gets the assignment to attend the meetings of a small radical right wing party. Ironically it’s this assigment that catapults him to a political career. At one meeting he jump and starts railing. The little party recognizes his oratory talent and eventually Hitler takes over the party and makes it his own vehicle. Eventually this little party rises to some fame and Hitler and his cronies, including the former war pilot Göring, try to stage a coup in 1923. They are inspired by Mussolini who with a small band of followers marched on Rome and rather easily took over the country. Hitler is arrested and brought to trial, but he used the trial to take the stage and speech. Even the judge finds it all rather amusing. He gets a short prison sentence for trying to overthrow the government and sort of vacations in prison. He’s allowed to have prisoners. He also walks around the courtyard and speeches and even the guards clap.

In prison he writes his book ‘mein Kampf’ which is a sloppily written book about how he came to his political ideas. He doesn’t hide his most radical ideas, but this book is bought a lot, but not read. The book later becomes quite the bestseller because newly wed couples get the book, party members buy it and this makes Hitler a relatively rich man. He then forms his Sturmabteiling under Ernst Röhm, a gay militarist, who with his thugs of the SA beats up all political opponents, smashes printing presses, etc. Once Hitler is the Führer Hitler kills Röhm and disbands the SA. Stalin praises Hitler for executing such a perfect move to become the uncontested power in the land. During the election campaigns Hitler is tireless and is one of the first to use a plane to make sure he can speech at multiple rallies all over the country. He never wins a majority of the votes, never even gets 40 percent, but he becomes impossible to ignore and his political opponents agree to make him Reich Chancellor. They are convinced they will be able to play this little loud upstart who never rose above the rank of corporal and was a bum before the war as a sucker.

The opposite happens and Hitler steadily kicks out the communists and other parties until there is only party left, his NSDAP. He later makes sure all big enteprises have to pay him a tiny subsidy, the Hitlerspende, in exchange for not paying heavy taxes. Hitler renounces his salary, but this is a ridiculous symbolic move, since even before he becomes the Führer he is already a wealthy man. Hitler doesn’t pay taxes, but curiously keeps paying the taxes he is due to the Church, even though he doesn’t actually identify as a Christian, his religious beliefs are complex. From the start people try to assassinate him. There are many assassination attempts and they all fail. Of these he says: “It seems that Providence has ordained that I should live. My survival is proof that I have been chosen for a special mission.” He is ruthless when it comes to punishing those that attempt to assassinate him. He enjoys watching videos of executions of his opponents. He bores his entourage with long monologues at night. Doesn’t like to drink alcholol, but loves sugar. He is also gradually more and more doped up by his rather experimental physician, Morell. Some historians claim that some of his more erratic decisions were made under the influence of a cocktail of drugs. Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler is a good, relatively recent, book on this topic.

Hitler loves to pick complete amateurs for important assignments. His minister of foreign affairs, Ribbentrop, was a wine seller before the war. The minister of armaments he picks after Todt dies in a suspicious plane crash is Albert Speer, an architect who at that point knows nothing about weapons. Sometimes these picks were lucky and sometimes they were not. He is much too loyal to people who don’t rub him the wrong way. Göring becomes addicted to morphine and a very lavish life style and fails as the boss of the Luftwaffe, but Hitler doesn’t replace him. Eventually he also allows Himmler, who is not a general, but in charge of the extermination of the Jews, to mess up the situation at the front as a military commander in the last stage of the war. Personal loyalty to Hitler is the crucial factor to get assignments and big rewards. Hitler probably never personally murdered someone, though there are reasons to believe he may have murdered his own niece who he forced into a highly unusual relationship with him and she wanted out.

Eventually he develops a relationship with Eva Braun who becomes instrumental in making pictures of him. He meets her at his photographer’s office, Hoffman. He keeps her hidden from the public and prefers having a ‘dumb’ woman as his partner. He refuses to have kids because he thinks kids of a genius never fare well in life. It’s possible he couldn’t have kids, there have always been theories that he had only one testicle or that his genitals were otherwise deformed. He only marries her at the very last, underground in bombed out Berlin. The guy officiating has to ask what he asks all to be married couples, he has to ask Hitler if he is Jewish. The history of the Third Reich is rife with all kinds of absurdities. Hitler thrived on chaos and often created two similar departments and gave them overlapping responsibilties. When these departments inevitably started arguing they could only turn to Hitler or one of his aids, such as Bormann to resolve the conflict. This made Hitler irreplaceable. Whether this was his intuitive way of having all the power or a deliberate strategy is not clear.

Hitler made a lot of decisions based on his gut feelings. These were often eerily correct, but sometimes outright disastrous. Intitially he makes some daring decisions and wins great victories. It’s often not explained how these early successes could have easily gone entirely the other way. For example when he boldy attacks France through the Ardennes he creates what must have been the largest traffic jam in history. The allied air power could have bombed all his tanks before they could cut around the strong Maginot line. Hitler was exceptional in being able to exploit and spot the weaknesses in his opponents. He does completely underestimate the Soviet Union. Initially he, but also many of his generals, assume the Soviet Union is a big rotten barn. If you knock on the door the whole thing will come crushing down. Not so.

One of his last succesful intuitive decisions is that he forbids a tactical retreat in the Soviet Union in the winter of 1941/1942. This stabilizes the front, but from then on Hitler doesn’t know of any other order then to tell his troops to stay put, destroying the tactical mobility the German army has. He makes a lot of other mistakes from that point on, like the massive investment in V(ergeltungs)-Waffen, miracle weapons that are supposed to turn the tide. A focus on always attacking instead of developing effective defensive weapons, not giving enough attention to his submarine fleet or to his army in North-Africa, etc. Eventually he commits suicide and blames the German people for being too weak to execute his plans. He condemns the German people to death in the last months of his life and sees the outcome as the war as proof that the Mongolian hordes of Stalin are the superior race, his German have lost the right to survive. The ultimate proof of his vengeful nature and his utter inability to see his own flaws. You will of course have spotted some similarities with Trump, but there are some crucial differences.

Trump has no Sturmabteilung, he is not as organized as Hitler. If Trump ever stages a coup it will be because he calls on his supporters to organize it for him, spontaneously as he has already very unsuccesfully tried in the past. Trump does not have the organisational talent to create an army within the state to pull this off and can also not get the Us army behind him like Hitler very succesfully pulled off. I don’t see Trump as capable, at this point, to outright have political opponents shot, but his rhetoric in the past suggests otherwise. I don’t see Trump plotting to invade other countries and annexing them and depopulating them. The worst thing that Trump does in that regard is his unconditional support for Israel and their systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, in slow and in fast ways. There are differences in personality that are not very relavent, such as Trump’s womanizing and adultery. Hitler was a true sex symbol and even before his rise to power his friend Kubizek said Hitler was always getting attention from women. He was always very shy around women and didn’t take advantage of his status as a sex symbol to grab them by the you know what. It’s not entirely clear if he had a sex life with Eva Braun or what the nature of it was if they did have one, but interviews with staff at his house indicate that they did have sex. Hitler may have had some homo-erotic tendencies, but most likely only in some platonic form. When you see pictures of him and Albert Speer they almost look romantic, but the two never had any kind of sexual relationship.

These differences in personal traits are not very relevant. One can also point to the fact that Hitler was relatively well-read and Trump most definitely isn’t and has probably never read a book cover to cover in his adult life. Hitler was an autodidact in many ways and didn’t attend any fancy schools, he was always an outsider, even after rising to prominence he could never fully shake off his humble beginnings. The same is true for Trump who deep down feels like the elite of the country look down on him. More relevant is that neither of them are true statesmen. Hitler did not build a dynasty and he was the only thing that made a chaotic state aparatus run. I suspect that because Trump has kids he does dream of creating some sort of dynasty with some of his kids winning the presidency later. Hitler was good at speaking to the common man, and Trump who spent a hell of a lot of time on construction sites is also very good at speaking to the backbone of the country, the people who do the hard work. Hitler had a very, very detailed vision of what he wanted to accomplish, which in general terms was nothing short of world dominance.

The goal of Trump seems to be to be number one in America and be the toughtest, most talked about, most controversial guy on the block. As long as he gets the most attention Trump thinks he is doing fine, but of course he always craves more and is eternally scared of slipping from the spotlight. It’s almost certain he sees his vice-president as a threat in that regard and can perhaps only tolerate him beside him because right now the apprentice will not outshine the master. In my opinion Hitler, who, and this is the most obvious difference, personally organized a gigantic genocide and had also millions of non-jews murdered and starved to death, was a much bigger threat to society. Trump is far from harmless, but he is not the new Hitler. Also when Trump allows Israel to viciously oppress and kill the Palestinians he doesn’t do that out of any personal hatred towards them, he just doesn’t care and backing Israel helps him reach his goal.

Trump is much more of a pragmatist, much more vapid in his core, than Hitler was, who did have certain obsessive beliefs he cared a lot about, he was less flexible than Trump, but in some ways much more systematic and organized to do some serious damage. Both Hitler and Trump wrote books, their books are in both cases about becoming a person of character, but Hitler throws in a lot more history, politics and philosophy and many other topics. Hitler never becomes an entertainer like Trump, but both gave rousing speeches in which they made fun of political opponents. Both liked to arrive late at rallies, out of disregard for the people waiting, but also to seem more important. People only wait for who’s important.

Trump’s main drive is to prove his is the strongest, loudest, most in control of himself, most unperturbed, unfazed guy who ever lived. On his path to cling to the spotlight he does enable others who do have crazy beliefs they really do care about, unlike Trump, to do some damage to the US and other countries. In my personal opinion someone like Nikki Haley is a much bigger threat to world piece than Donald Trump for example, but it’s partly thanks to Donald Trump and the extremely weak Democrats, that the dangerous crazies on the Republicans can rise to some prominence. Note that Hitler kind of accidentally took over a political party, his army assignment was to basically spy on the party, and note that Trump launched his presidential campaign back in 2015 as a stunt because Gwen Stefani was making more money as a TV host than him. This is a theory Michael Moore has put forward and he’s been right about Trump many times in the past.

What kind of similarities or differences do you see between Trump and Hitler?