This is the Tom Hartman program.

I want to start with the crisis that we're facing right now.

You know, T.S. Eliot and his poem, The Hollow Men, said, you know, this is the way the

world shall end.

This is the way the world shall end, not with a bang, but a whimper, if I'm remembering

correctly.

That's also typically how authoritarian, strongman, kinds of leadership end.

You know, Mussolini, whimpering and running and, you know, ultimately being hanged upside

down, not that I would recommend that to anybody here in the United States, but that's

what happened, you know, you know, when Mussolini went down, Hitler committing suicide.

You see these guys, you know, who are so happy to put children in cages and oversee the

death of hundreds of thousands of people in their own countries.

But when it comes time for them to face the music, or even just, you know, face losing

an election, they just start whining and whimpering.

And with Trump doing this, looks like this is how the Trump administration or the Trump,

whatever you want to call it, presidency is going to go out, is with a whimper also.

But there's still the possibility that it could go out with a bang.

If you read Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, that in the days before Hitler committed

suicide, he had ordered his army to turn their guns on Berlin to level the city.

Because, you know, I mean, they were at that point recruiting 12-year-old boys into the

army.

My friend, Armin Lehman, was 15 years old when he had been recruited two years earlier

...