William L. Shirer wrote the first definitive history of the Nazis’ rise to power and their awful comeuppance. His book is titled, appropriately enough, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
After the Allies made spectacular gains in North Africa and then invaded Sicily in 1943, Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini fell into a deep funk. He knew the jig was up. The Italian citizenry demanded “food, freedom, and peace.” He had to be bucked up by his pal, Adolf Hitler, several times that summer before he was summarily deposed by his opposition (including his son-in-law, Count Ciano) and King Victor Emmanuel III. Germany was forced to transfer many divisions from its fight with the USSR into Italy in order to halt the US/UK advance. It can be said the European war was essentially won at that point, only Hitler and his toadies refused to see it.
Anyway, Shirer, in his book, wrote of Mussolini after Il Duce had been arrested:
So fell, ignominiously, the modern Roman Caesar, a bellicose-sounding man of the 20th century who had known how to profit from its confusions and despair, but who, underneath the gaudy facade, was made largely of sawdust.
Now, about a hundred years after Il Duce took power in Italy, another bellicose-sounding leader who knows how to profit from his century’s confusions and despair and who, similarly, presents a gaudy facade, has emerged. I can only hope Li’l Duce‘s fate will be the same.
But let’s not forget that Hitler rescued Il Duce after his arrest by a daring commando operation that gave Mussolini another two years respite as a puppet ruler of a fake Northern Italian “country.” Trump will do anything he can, like Il Duce, to hold on to power, real or imagined, and the Constitution be damned.