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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I think for Trump hangers on bumbling around and acting like an idiot is thought to be a required social signal.

I suspect few have a relationship they trust with Trump, dude is erratic, prone to strange influences (twitter) and the only way hangers on can think to signal they are doing good work is effectively… act out in a way that gets attention.

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This is known as "Working Towards the Führer" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Kershaw#%22Working_Towards...

> Kershaw sees this rivalry as causing the "cumulative radicalization" of Germany, and argues that though Hitler always favoured the most radical solution to any problem, it was German officials who, for the most part, in attempting to win the Führer's approval, carried out on their initiative, increasingly "radical" solutions to perceived problems like the "Jewish Question", as opposed to being ordered to do so by Hitler.[65] In this, Kershaw largely agrees with Mommsen's portrait of Hitler as a distant and remote leader standing in many ways above his system, whose charisma and ideas served to set the general tone of politics.

Thank you, I figured it had to have been a cited phenomenon elsewhere as well.

First I’ve heard of this. It’s quite fascinating!

I have read a lot of literature on the subjects at hand and never have I seen this come up.

Usually Hitler in particular is characterized as a delegator and more adept than this makes it out to be. Frankly I’m not surprised, but interesting history none the less

Gives you plausible deniability, he never actively told you to do anything, you decided to act in that way by yourself. The president keeps saying that "he doens't know", "that's up to someone else", so he isn't taking any illegal actions or directing them, the people under him are doing it themselves.

This is also exactly how it works in Russia today.

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