By Eric Green / Arlington, Va.
History doesn’t always end well for big mouths like the former president.
If Donald Trump wants to get elected President again (heaven forbid), not to mention avoid being sentenced to prison (heaven please), he might take to heart a little history about your friendly next-door dictators who apparently didn’t know the meaning of when to keep their traps shut.
In the latest iteration of his never being shy about calling attention to himself, Trump announced he expected to be indicted on Tuesday (March 21) by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg over alleged 2016 hush-money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels. No such showdown occurred, as the canny prosecutor chose not to play by the Trump handbook.
In a replay of his call to supporters to protest the 2020 presidential election that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, the Donald called for mass protests if he was led on a perp walk to be formally arrested for falsifying business records.
In mid-December 2020, Trump called for protesters to descend on Washington on Jan. 6, tweeting, “Be there, will be wild!” What message would he give to his minions now? How about, “Let’s really burn down the Capitol this time!”
Wouldn’t it be nice comeuppance for all of his transgressions if Trump, in his role as potential prisoner #10022 at the Rikers Island Detention Center in the Bronx, were seen being led on a frog march into the Manhattan courthouse in handcuffs? Perhaps his big yap is one reason why he’s in the pickle he finds himself in.
Trump is just the latest of many other motormouths in autocratic history who loved to hear themselves talk.
Exhibit A was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who would fulminate to his disciples from the balcony for hours on end and never knowing when to stop. Those listening down in the audience must have been afraid to nod off or leave the rally because they were afraid something fun might transpire involving Mussolini’s Fascist Party Blackshirts, who probably were paid at least 25 lira an hour to sit there and hear their idol yammer on.
Il Duce’s big mouth contributed to his countrymen, sick of Benito’s blathering into eternity, deciding to string him up with piano wire upside down from a metal girder.
One reason perhaps that dictators like Mussolini gave long speeches is because, as Robert Service, a professor of Russian Studies at Oxford University, said, “the speaker doesn’t have to worry about the audience running away.”
Speaking of windbags, Mussolini’s old buddy, Adolph Hitler, was himself not shy about holding forth for hours on end. If you happened to lose interest during the blatherthon and showed signs of leaving the Hitler rally because it started to sound old, his Brownshirts might have a nice little surprise for you too. But, of course (though not soon enough), Hitler and those Brownshirts got what was coming to them as well.
Imagine poor Eva Braun having to hear all of her fiancé’s ranting and raving about backstabbers and griping that nobody liked or appreciated him anymore for all the “great things” he had done for his people. His nonstop talking only got worse when things started going south for his Nazis and the lovely couple had to move to their new honeymoon suite at an
undisclosed underground bunker.
The bunker, as we all know, is where life turned rather darker and gloomier for the Fuhrer, Eva, and their German Shepherd, Blondi, who must have asked what she did wrong for Hitler to send her to the dog pound in the sky.
We mustn’t forget Cuban maximum leader Fidel Castro, who holds the Guinness Book of Records title for the longest speech ever delivered at the United Nations: a windy hours and 29 minutes, in September, 1960. But he was only warming up. His longest speech on record in Cuba was seven hours, 10 minutes in 1986 at the III Communist Party Congress in Havana.
Maybe El Presidente’s long-windedness had something to do with what he himself claimed were the more than 600 attempts on his life, which reportedly included poison pills, a toxic cigar, exploding mollusks, a chemically tainted diving suit and powder to make his beard fall out so as to undermine his popularity.
We don’t necessarily want to throw her in the same noxious category as Hitler, Mussolini, and Trump as far as being “wonderful servants” to their people. But a few years back, former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner gave a nearly four-hour speech to the Argentine Congress defending herself against charges of a criminal coverup. TV might have shown the audience falling asleep or even worse (or better) walking out during her harangue.
As ridiculously long as the speech lasted, maybe it could explain why things didn’t exactly work out so well for Fernández because she later ended up, despite her Richard Nixon-sounding “I am not a crook” rambling, being indicted for corruption.
Fernández’s Eva Peron-style Don’t Cry for Me Argentina pity party serves as a reminder of what can happen to world-class blowhards who never know when they’re trying the patience of their captive audiences.
But let’s not minimize Trump’s standing as the contemporary leader in the clubhouse for authoritarian types who feel every word they utter is a pearl.
The MAGA standard-bearer recently gave an hour-and-a-half speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference, which he started with a nice little opening that certainly reminded everyone of Abraham Lincoln: “As we gather today, our country and our movement, the greatest political movement in the history of our country, as nobody going to even question it, even the fake news media, that’s a lot of fake news back there…” Blah, blah, blah.
Notably, Trump got booed as he prattled on and on about being cheated out of being re-elected as President and who knows what else since he probably sent half his audience to dreamland.
As one of his many defense lawyers by now has surely advised his garrulous client, “Donald--please shut the f--k up.”
Sure, like he’d ever listen to anybody.
Eric Green has had many former incarnations. Topping the list is news writer for the U.S. State Department and U.S. Information Agency, newspaper reporter in Maryland, press aide to a U.S. Senator on Capitol Hill, and ESL teacher in Washington, D.C. Presently a freelance writer, his articles have appeared in such places as the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and Highbrow Magazine. In an attempt to be a latter-day Art Buchwald or Erma Bombeck, he writes satirical pieces about political figures and celebrities that appear on various humor websites. He is the author of several books, including Temporary Insanity: Costa Rica: My Way and My Penciled-in-Life, A Hoosier Pens a New Story in D.C.
I'm not sure that I understand the point that the author is trying to make--the long-windedness of Mussolini, Hitler and Castro did not prevent them from disastrous control of their respective countries. Hitler even recovered from a stay in prison. If a motor mouth was enough to undo Trump, he would have long since been out of media focus and out of our lives.
Susan Epstein