You know what we really need right now? Someone with the guts and know-how to put the current situation in historical context by comparing President Joe Biden to German President Paul von Hindenburg. The writer should start pitching it to The Atlantic or the New Yorker right away.

“What two feckless and overly proud octogenarians that let economic discontent fuel the rise of a charismatic fascist have in common,” can be the sub-hed before like 12,000 words about how the US in 2021 to 2025 echoed the 1920s Weimar Republic and the interwar period in Germany. “No, Americans weren’t wheelbarrowing billions of reichsmarks to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread, but they sure felt like it every time they had to fill up their 2023 Ford Super Duty to drive to a national park to go fishing and rafting once or twice a month. That counts,” the writer can crank out.

The letters of some obscure Jewish academic based in Munich observing that about how the “podcast bros” of his day were getting rowdier and rowdier while his cohorts establishment class were too preoccupied with “enlightenment” and the petty day-to-day of their fields to notice. Of course that academic will have to have met a grim fate after the second half of the 1930s, so it’s better for this 21st century academic to pre-select their nervous German Jew as one who did not eventually escape to the United States or Mandatory Palestine. Then work backwards to find their contemporaneous writings and – Presto! – you have your “foreshadowing” element.

“Future historians may look back and summarize this way: The first reign of Kaiser Trump bookended a tumultuous period in which the rage of the masses fueled his rise as Fuhrer Trump,” the essayist could write, though maybe that’s a little too on the nose. A good PhD and/or MFA could do better.