Donald Trump and Kaiser Wilhelm II

Donald Trump and Kaiser Wilhelm II: Is History Repeating Itself?

Charles Ray
Trustee and Chair of Africa Program at Foreign Policy Research Institute


March 9, 2024
Donald J. Trump, the GOP nominee for President in the upcoming 2024 elections, is without doubt one of the most polarizing figures in American politics in the twenty-first century, or, for that matter, in our nation’s history. His mercurial temperament, checkered history, and ego-driven activity are unlike anything this country has ever had to endure, and his administration, 2016-2020, was one of our most turbulent.


Since his move from the world of reality TV to the political arena, he’s been compared to a lot of unsavory historical figures, but it’s his similarity to a historical figure who is relatively unfamiliar to most Americans that is most troubling, but with him once again competing for our top office it is one that deserves much more attention than was given to it when historians and journalists first brought it up during his first run for office.

Many who oppose Trump compare him to Hitler because of his intemperate speech and often racist-tinged rhetoric. I’m not one of those, though. While Hitler was admittedly a nutter and a psychopath, he was smart. Sorry if it seems politically incorrect, but except for the street smarts of a common thug or drug dealer, the current subject of this treatise is not what I would call intelligent. He is self-centered, erratic, intemperate, overly sensitive, and quite frankly, sociopathic. In that, he very much resembles another historical figure, Kaiser Wilhelm II, leader of the German Empire prior to the start of the first World War.

Friedrich ‘Wilhelm’ Viktor Albert Hohenzollern, or Wilhelm II, born January 27, 1859, near Berlin, Germany took the Prusso-German throne on June 15, 1889, upon the death of his father, Frederick III. In short order he established a personal monarchy in which he, his minions and his military entourage took control of policy, including the appointment and dismissal of civilian officials, including Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who had unified Germany, and while he distrusted the Reichstag (the imperial parliament), pursued a policy that ensured Germany’s position in Europe without antagonizing powerful potential opponents like Britain. With Bismarck’s ouster, Wilhelm II abandoned his ‘balance of power’ approach to diplomacy, replacing it with one that could be described as reckless, inconsistent, and belligerent. In humble opinion, the historical figure that Trump most resembles, a resemblance that should worry us all, is Wilhelm II.

A full description of the similarities and their import could fill a thick book, so I’ll just outline a few that I think are most important and let readers come to their own conclusions.

Doubts about Wilhelm II’s sanity began to be expressed soon after he took the throne as German emperor in 1888. Bismarck, after he was dismissed as chancellor, was among the first to spread rumors of the young ruler’s mental problems. His erratic behavior was a cause of concern for many who knew him, and caused some to compare him to Ludwig II of Bavaria who had been declared insane and deposed in 1886. After Wilhelm I was forced to abdicate the throne in 1918, a number of people began to publish their diagnoses of his mental condition. Because of the political motivation behind these publications and the fact that none of the authors, including psychiatrists and physicians, had ever directly examined Wilhelm, his true mental state will probably never be known. But we can examine some of his behavior, which was on full public display throughout his rule.

While the armchair analysts of the day called Wilhelm, in effect, a psychopath, throughout his thirty years on the throne he was beset by scandals caused by his impulsiveness, erratic politics, inflammatory speeches, and ham-fisted appearances on the international stage. While he is credited with increasing Germany’s position as a great power in Europe by building a powerful navy and encouraging scientific innovation, he was also known for making tactless public statements and erratic foreign policy which antagonized the international community, especially Britain. His impulsive, arrogant, and often provocative statements and actions are thought to have been among the causes of the ensuing war and the fall of the German empire.

Wilhelm was the oldest child of Crown Prince Frederick (who for a brief time was Emperor Frederick III and Victoria, the oldest child of Britain’s Queen Victoria. His left arm was damaged at birth and never grew to full size, and many speculate that this ‘deformity’ was a main cause of his subsequent erratic behavior. It was, though, his parentage that is thought to have had the most impact on his behavior. His father was an honorable and intelligent man, but was not a dominating figure in his life. His mother, on the other hand, was serious, emotional, and stubborn. She was a person of feeling rather than intellect and was given to quick likes and dislikes. He had, therefore, difficult relations with both parents, and grew into adulthood beset by a panoply of internal contradictions and frustrations that caused him to be tense, restless, and irresolute, with a tendency to overcompensate, especially in his desire to be a tough warrior-king. He married Princess Augusta Victoria, a plain, unimaginative woman with very few intellectual interests and no talents to speak of who bored him and encouraged his reactionary tendencies.

He was 28, when his grandfather, Wilhelm I died at the age of 90 and was replaced by his father. Frederick III, however, was dying of cancer, and a year later, at 29, Wilhelm replaced him. He and his mother had disliked Chancellor Bismarck, and within a year, Wilhelm forced him to resign. While Bismarck hadn’t been able to solve Germany’s political and social problems, but Wilhelm had no plan to do so either. He had vague pals for helping the working classes, but dropped them as soon as he ran into opposition from the royal court, and he allowed Bismarck’s successors to decide against renewing the 1`887 treaty with Russia which opened the way for Russia to ally itself with France, Germany’s implacable enemy, in 1891. Between 1889 and 1897, he went through three chancellors, resulting in a deteriorating domestic situation and a foreign policy that was ‘exciting,’ but ultimately dangerous. He alienated Britain by sending a telegram in 1896 congratulating President Paul Kruger of the Republic of South Africa for his defeat of a British-led raid, and further angered the British with German Naval Bills of 1897 and 1900 which appeared to challenge Britain’s domination of the seas. When Britain settled its disputes with France in 1904, Wilhelm went to Tangier to show support for Moroccan independence from France. His stated aim was to show France that Britain was of no value as an ally, a strategy that backfired when the Germans were forced to accept French control of Morocco at the Algeciras Conference of 1906. In 1908, after a visit to England, Wilhelm gave an interview to The Daily Telegraph in which he said that many Germans were anti-English. When there was blowback from this interview, he replaced his chancellor.

In an effort to save Austria-Hungary from collapse, Wilhelm had encouraged the Austrians to be uncompromising, which transformed what had been a local conflict into World War I. During the war, despite his bombastic claims that he was the man ‘who made the decision,’ it was his generals who ran the show, and when in 1918 it was undoubted that Germany had lost the war, he refused to abdicate. He was finally ‘persuaded’ to seek asylum in the Netherlands to avoid captivity and possible conviction as a war criminal, which meant he had to give up the throne.

The parallels between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Donald Trump are not new. In a May 1, 2017, Washington Post article, columnist Richard Cohen described Wilhelm as a ‘Trump-like figure.’ He was, Cohen wrote, “a tweeter before his time, firing off letters, telegrams and orders without pausing to wonder about contradictions or policy or even common sense. (He demanded plans for invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico and New York.)” He was further described as someone who ‘spoke, wrote, telegraphed, scribbled and ranted more or less continuously.’

The Europe of 1914 lacked stability. The old alliances were crumbling, and the great powers, such as Germany and Britain were at odds. The world of that time needed clarity, wisdom, and consistency, not a juvenile, delusional leader with a god complex. The world of today needs stability and wisdom. The difference between then and now is that the leaders then were decided by dynastic succession. A bad leader was sometimes unavoidable. Today, in the U.S., we have a democratic process whereby the people get to decide what kind of leader they’ll have. We’ve already demonstrated in 2016 that we can make bad choices.

Will history repeat itself? Think about what you’ve just read

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The Donald Trump-Kaiser Wilhelm Parallels Are Getting Scary
Both men were insecure and undisciplined — and in charge of governments in thrall to the military.
Walt-Steve-foreign-policy-columnist20
Stephen M. Walt

October 12, 2017, 9:00 AM

At this point, it is not exactly headline news that America is being “led” (if that is even the right word) by a bizarre and erratic president. Nine months into the Donald Trump administration, all those Republican foreign policy experts who warned he was “unfitted to the office” during the 2016 campaign have been proven right.

This situation may be something of a first for Americans (though some other presidents had their quirks), but plenty of other countries have had to deal with outlandish buffoons (or worse) who somehow made it to high office. Trump is frequently compared to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, another glib, unscrupulous, lying, preening sexual predator who managed to keep getting elected even though his personal conduct was deplorable and his policies were a disaster. Strutting and corrupt popinjays like Benito Mussolini, Carlos Menem, and Jean-B;del Bokassa of the Central African Republic come to mind as well, along with other dictators who constructed cults of personality about themselves and treated their countries as a personal possession.

But lately I’ve been struck by the parallels between POTUS 45 and the last Hohenzollern emperor: Kaiser Wilhelm II. I’m not the first person to notice the similarities — Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute wrote a nice piece on this topic back in January — but the common features go beyond their individual characteristics. Not only do Trump and the kaiser share some unfortunate personality traits, but there are also striking similarities between conditions in Wilhelmine Germany and the situation in the United States today. There are also some important differences, but they are not entirely reassuring.

Consider first the personalities of these two leaders. Wilhelm II was by all accounts a pretty smart guy, but he frequently acted like a spoiled teenager and was prone to rash and bellicose remarks that undermined Germany’s image and international position. In a notorious 1908 interview with the London Daily Telegraph, for example, he declared, “You English are mad, mad, mad, as March hares.” One wonders what he would have said on Twitter. Wilhelm also had little patience for domestic opposition, saying, “I regard every Social Democrat as an enemy of the Empire and Fatherland.” Not to be outdone, Trump has called the U.S. media the “enemy of the American people.”

Historian Thomas Nipperdey once described Wilhelm as “superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success — as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday.”


Another distinguished historian, the late Gordon Craig of Stanford, offered a similar appraisal, writing that “[Wilhelm] had as much intelligence as any European sovereign and more than most, but his lack of discipline, self-indulgence, his overdeveloped sense of theatre, and his fundamental misreading of history prevented him from putting it to effective use.”

Craig also describes Wilhelm as “never having learned anything thoroughly” and “constantly on the move,” and German Army Chief of Staff Alfred von Waldersee described Wilhelm in the 1890s as having “a certain understanding of parade-ground movements, not, however, of real troop-leading.… He is extraordinarily restless, dashes back and forth, … intervenes in the leadership of the generals, gives countless and often contradictory orders, and scarcely listens to his advisers. He always wants to win and when the decision … is against him, takes it ill.”

Sound familiar? The similarities don’t end there. Both men led lives of privilege from birth: Wilhelm was heir to the German throne and Trump inherited a sizable fortune from his wealthy real estate developer father. Wilhelm was understandably sensitive about his congenitally withered left arm; Trump seems defensive about his “small hands.” Wilhelm loved military displays and said he had “found his family” while serving in the Potsdam Guards; Trump attended military school and admires generals despite his ignorance of military affairs and his own efforts to evade military service. And, like Trump, Wilhelm was fond of traveling with a large and expensive entourage (at public expense, of course), while neglecting his public duties.

So much for the personal parallels. Now consider some other similarities between Wilhelmine Germany and the contemporary United States.

For starters, both countries exhibit the familiar warning signs of excessive military influence. In Germany, the Army was essentially “a state within the state,” and scholars such as Craig, Gerhard Ritter, Fritz Fischer, and Jack Snyder have all documented how military dominance distorted German thinking about its security and led to an overreliance on military power and an overly confrontational foreign policy. The German military used domestic organizations like the Navy League and the writings of co-opted academics to make its case to the German people; in America, the Pentagon runs its own public relations operations and weapons manufacturers give generously to think tanks that favor increased defense spending.

Moreover, Germany under Wilhelm abandoned Bismarck’s sophisticated reliance on diplomacy and subordinated that function to the dictates of the General Staff. When asked about the wisdom of the Schlieffen Plan, for example, Foreign Minister Friedrich von Holstein replied “if the Chief of the General Staff … considers such a measure imperative, then it is the duty of diplomacy to concur in it and to facilitate it in every way possible.” Instead of war being “politics by other means,” German diplomacy was supposed to support whatever cockamamie scheme the generals dreamed up.