It's a dog-eat-dog world.

 “The future does not belong to the globalists. As president of the United States, I will always put America first. Just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always and should always put your countries first."

     Donald Trump, to the UN general assembly, Sept, 2017

Give Trump credit. He has a coherent world view.

I consider it a dangerous and incomplete one.  

I got valuable insight into this Trump era by listening to a professor talk about Adolph Hitler. Hitler, too, had a world view. Timothy Snyder discusses it as intellectual history, not as polemic. I am not claiming that Trump is Hitler. I am saying that Trump and Hitler share a dog-eat-dog view of the natural state of existence.

Timothy Snyder is a History professor at Yale. He is America's foremost scholar of Eastern Europe. Yale makes audio recordings of the 23 lectures in his survey class on Ukraine available free to the public.  A video version is free on YouTube. It is like being in college again, but without the tuition, tests, or needing to live in New Haven. 

Hitler understood that communism aspired to be an international movement. International movements are contrary to Hitler's idea of the true meaning of a nation, a people with a common race, culture, and language. Hitler perceived Jews to be a separate people, loyal to their tribe, and therefore a pathogen inside Germany. He saw the rich farmlands of the Slavic countries to the east, especially Ukraine. Hitler considered human history to be an endless struggle for land and resources. He considered the Slavic people living there inferior and weak, so Germany would take it.  

Hitler wanted to duplicate our treatment of America's indigenous people. Between disease and warfare, we killed nearly all of them and took their land. He thought it the natural order of things. What was un-natural were rule-based constraints. 

Trump isn't Hitler. But nor was Hitler. Hitler wasn't the "Hitler" of our later understanding until after 1940. Trump and his supporters have a notion of the "real" American people, but Americans won't tolerate the open racial talk that Hitler employed. Indeed, Trump's strongest supporters insist that their critics are the racists. Trump wanted to buy Greenland, not take it from the Danes.  

My observation today is that Trump has an understanding in common with Hitler that rules-based constraints on power are unnatural. It shows up in flouting rules. Trump was openly critical of Jeff Sessions' having obeyed rules requiring him to recuse himself from the investigation of the Russian connection to the Trump campaign. Everyone in the GOP leadership understood that Sessions was right, but no one dared cross Trump. Mitch McConnell's refusal to let Obama fill a Supreme Court seat, and then rushing through the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett, was on-brand for a GOP. It was brazen hypocrisy, but it could be done and therefore should be done. Trump's open and public effort to overturn the 2020 election nudges the boundary of what is acceptable for GOP voters. It troubles some, but not others. An overwhelming majority of Republicans like the result, but it had too little pretext of legality. Americans weren't prepared for such a blunt assertion of doing something just because you can get away with it. Trump is resolute, saying his effort to get Georgia's Raffensperger to change the vote was "perfect." Trump is resolute saying the Vice President should have awarded the election to him. No serious legal scholar agrees, and yet there is the temptation of stolen fruit for GOP voters. It's natural. Lions do not cooperate with antelopes. Lions kill and eat antelopes. Marquess of Queensbury rules of sportsmanship are for suckers. 

There is another view. Humans survive because of social bonds, with rules of behavior. Rules make us human. There are language rules, cultural norms, notions of courtesy, and formal laws. Humans punish outlaws. Anarchy is not a stable equilibrium state; power is too disorganized and incoherent. Peace has not proven to be a stable equilibrium state, either. Nor is war. Wars end. New arrangements are established for a time, then they break down. Humans cycle into war and peace. My sense of the nature of human conflict is that ambitious leaders will always emerge to end a peace.

But now the consequences of open war are mutual suicide, so a rules-based peace is our best option. Indeed, the only one.