Trump Is a Lot Like Kaiser Wilhelm: Vanity Itself

An admiral writes of a world leader who is familiar to us: “He is vanity itself, sacrificing everything to his own moods and childish amusements, and nobody checks him in doing so. I ask myself how people with blood rather than water in their veins can bear to be around him.”

I cheated by putting my first sentence above in the present tense. These words were, in fact, written in July 1914 by Germany’s Albert Hopman, about Kaiser Wilhelm II. A fellow historian who, like me, has written a book about the outbreak of World War I, messaged this week, asking if I share her view of the character matches between Wilhelm and today’s US president.