Before law, I was a student of political psychology. Specifically, the psychology of intl bad guys. Terrorists/tyrants/crime lords/etc. I studied it, I worked under one of the gods of the field, & I wrote in it. At one point in late Aug/early Sept 2001 I actually wrote a ...

profile of this guy who seemed to be making waves & should be paid more attention to. You can probably guess who.

But this isn't about me. I mention it just to give you context for what I'm going to say next.

See, I've read all the studies. I've read the analyses done in ...

the 60s by CIA trying to figure out what made Hitler tick. I've read the case files & reconstructions of some of history's most notorious names, from Pol Pot & Stalin to Jones & Kaczynski.

Trump is different. I'm not saying he's WORSE, mind you. Just different. Or maybe ...

it's more accurate to say that what WE KNOW about Trump is different.

Hitler is a good example. He was a certifiable nutjob. We know that NOW, but it wasn't immediately obvious THEN. He didn't have the ability to broadcast his thoughts to everyone ALL THE TIME. And that, I ...

believe, is one of the things that allowed him to rise to power & retain it. He was an absolute savant of a public speaker & a master manipulator. But the people saw him only sporadically, because that was all the technology of the time allowed. He'd give an impassioned ...

speech & rile everyone up into a hateful frenzy, & THEN HE'D LEAVE. The people who didn't see him speak only heard about it from others, & so he had a MYTH.

The problem with myths is that they don't normally survive for long when the actual person is there in front of you.

I'm fully convinced that if you gave Hitler Twitter or allowed him to call into a tv station whenever he felt like venting, people would've learned a lot sooner exactly how unhinged he was.

You can say the same about most of history's most famous--or infamous--ideologues.

And that's what we're seeing here. It's not that Trump is the first crazy ideologue to believe that injecting sunshine & bleach into your veins will cure disease. All those other guys probably held similarly insane thoughts. It's that this is just the first time WE'RE SEEING IT.

Most of the time this information comes out after the fact. "Well, he might've looked normal, but he secretly thought spiders were implanting eggs in his brain when he was asleep." So when you wonder if Trump is just crazier than all the rest because they never made speeches ...

like that, he's not. It's just that they COULDN'T, & he can.

So no, Trump is not crazier than Hitler, Stalin, Jones, or Kaczinski. He just seems that way because this is the first time in history that people have been able to see the crazy in real-time.

Objectively speaking, he's relatively sane compared to those guys.

I mean, that's a low bar, but fair's fair. He's still a reprehensible person who should spend his life behind bars. But he's not Hitler.

He just looks like it.