First of all, I want you to know you're special because my wife said this headline wouldn't attract many readers. :-)
Having been mostly lazy and undisciplined as a student in my formative years, one of the few subjects I eagerly devoured on my own time was European history. So stuff like Donald Trump's rise reminds me of…European history.
We'll avoid the Hitler analogy this time. Kidding, you Trump fans.
So how's Trump like Lenin, you ask?
In 1917, during World War I, a desperate German government hoped to sow chaos in Tsarist Russia and knock her out of the war. Their bold plan was to send a revolutionary troublemaker in a sealed train from his exile in Switzerland through Germany and back to Petrograd. It worked. With Vladimir Lenin in charge, the Bolsheviks muscled to the front of the Russian Revolution, seized power and promptly took Russia out of the war, ceding a huge amount of territory to the Germans.
Was Bill Clinton channeling World War I German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg? Did he urge Donald Trump to run as a Republican precisely because he knew what intra-party chaos would ensue? Clinton says he didn't. Some sources say he did. Bill Clinton is one of the most astute political minds in America, even if he's wrong on a lot on issues, and this sounds like something he would do.
Like Lenin, Trump has brought chaos and revolution to Republican Party headquarters. Love him or hate him, Trump as a revolutionary leader is upending a GOP leadership that was already rotten and weak from years of sellouts and betrayals of its own stated values to grassroots conservatives. No less than Ronald Reagan's biographer, Craig Shirley, said Republicans in Washington today "more (resemble) a crime family than a movement of ideas."
What began in the 1854 as a party built around human liberty, the GOP today is run largely by weak, unscrupulous leaders beholden to moneyed interests and pushing their own form of a big government agenda. They're very poor imitations of Democrats and, as the majority party, are even more damaging.
The Republican Party leadership today is as out of touch with its base as Tsar Nicholas II was to his, and is just as ripe for overthrow. Donald Trump is bringing it.
On the German plan that would one day backfire, a general later admitted, "We neither knew nor foresaw the danger to humanity from the consequences of (Lenin's) journey...to Russia."
If Bill Clinton did goad The Donald into running, he must have laughed a lot about it, initially. But now he must wonder what force he helped unleash. And if Donald Trump faces Hillary Clinton in the general election, the Clintons will suffer the blowback from the Trump Revolution.