While watching the hearings of the Jan 6 Committee, I kept wondering what was Trump’s fantasy of The March on the Capitol that he was setting in motion.

Was he dreaming of something like the March on Rome in October 1922 of Mussolini and his fascist paramilitary Blackshirts? Their threat of violence caused the terrified King to dismiss the legal government and make Mussolini the Prime Minister!

Or was he encouraged by Hitler’s attempted coup d’état, the Beerhall Putsch of 1923. Hitler had gathered around him his supporters, the disgraced retired general Erich Ludendorff, along with Ernst Roehm and his paramilitary Brownshirts. It was Ludendorf who rallied the Putsch at a moment of hesitation by shouting “We will march!!” The ensuing march, led by Hitler and Ludendorf, met unexpected government resistance and the coup failed. However the leaders of the Putsch were given trifling sentences. They soon resumed where they’d left off, met little resistance, and enslaved Germany.

Or, I wonder if Trump was caught up in Sergei Eisenstein’s glorification of the Bolshevik Storming of the Winter Palace, the seat of Russia’s provisional government, in his film October: Ten Days that Shook the World. Eisenstein shows revolutionary mobs fighting and killing guards and forcing their way into the Winter Palace. Once inside, the horde rampages through the palatial halls and long corridors. They kill anyone who resists, plunder the wine cellar, seize the members of the government, and vandalize the living quarters of the Tsar and his family. (see youtube.com/watch?v=tQ9GCi4Gjso). The attack on the Winter Palace in Eisenstein’s movie and the behavior of the mob depicted there are sadly similar to Jan 6’s Storming of the US Capitol.

Mussolini led his March on Rome — well, not really, but he was photographed with the marching Blackshirts — and as Il Duce became the dictator of Italy. Hitler suffered a setback on the march of his Beerhall Putsch, but the resistance he met and negligible consequences he faced only delayed and did not prevent his eventual dictatorship. Bolshevik leaders let the mob achieve their goal of bringing down the Provisional Government by inciting them to attack the Winter Palace. 

They wouldn’t let Trump lead The March on the Capitol. So he sat back while the mob was doing his work. What consequences will he face? If tried at all, will Trump be acquitted like General Ludendorf, or if convicted, will he, like Hitler, be given five years reduced to eight months in cushy confinement, to go on to self-identify as a martyr, and continue to poison the United States even after his death?