What if Trump had been president in 1940?

Those troubled by the actions of today’s Trump Administration should be aware of their good fortune to have been able to live in a Democratic Republic. They are fortunate in the sense that the Donald Trump we know today did not come on the political scene in the late 1930s to defeat, the incumbent president Franklin D. Roosevelt in the November 1940 election.

Recall that throughout 1940 a beleaguered Great Britain was at war with Adolf Hitler‘s Nazi Germany and was suffering under the German Air Force’s unrelenting blitz of its cities and towns. In December 1940, Winston Churchill, Britain’s understandably desperate prime minister, conceived of a lend lease program wherein America would be able to supply Britain with war materials without immediate payment.

What if Trump had been president rather than Roosevelt in the lend-lease meeting with Churchill? Trump who was skilled in the art of the deal, would have held the meeting in his Oval Office with plenty of press coverage. There he would berate Churchill via his transactional poker game-like diplomacy — telling him he had no cards.

And so it would come to pass that America never became an “arsenal of democracy,” but rather an autocracy, Britain was subjugated by Germany, Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for getting Great Britain to agree to peace on Hitler’s terms, Trump joined the world’s strongmen power brokers who began eliminating all who they considered undesirables from the world’s population.

Sad to say, this could very well have been a true story.

Frank G. Splitt

Mount Prospect