Trump, Brexit and Echoes of World War I

Of all the famous things Mark Twain never actually said, perhaps none is repeated more often and with less justification than "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." And since the election of Donald Trump as president, history as verse has become a farce: He is Hitler, he is Stalin, he is Mao, he is Caligula, he is Cyrus the Great, he is Pharaoh, he is Joe McCarthy, he is Charles Lindbergh, he is King George III (both the sane and insane versions), he is Julius Caesar, he is Hamlet, he is the Know-Nothing Party, he is Charles Manson, he is Jimmy Carter, he is Andrew Jackson, he is Herbert Hoover, he is Woodrow Wilson, he is -- wait, what: Woodrow Wilson? Seriously?

"Ironically," writes Trygve Throntveit in Time, "Trumpism finds ample historical precedents in the immediate and long-term aftermath of U.S. intervention in World War I." He adds that in pledging to "make the world safe for democracy," Wilson was foreshadowing "Trump's make-America-great-and-safe-first foreign policy."