Trump's America Is No Weimar Republic - Bloomberg
Opinion
Niall Ferguson, Columnist

'Weimar America'? The Trump Show Is No Cabaret

Detractors have been equating the U.S. with 1920s Germany for 85 years, and they are still wrong.

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Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”

Exiting: German democracy.

Photographer: Central Press/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

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“Life is a cabaret, old chum,” sang Sally Bowles in the musical based on Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories.” I suspect the movie version of “Cabaret,” which won Liza Minnelli the Oscar for best actress, is the nearest older Americans ever got to the Weimar Republic.

Still, it’s not a bad place to start, if you want to talk Weimar and its relevance to Donald Trump’s America.

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