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In the late 1920s and early '30s, the pace of change in Germany was insane. The emperor was gone. Women could vote. People were communicating by telegraph and flying across the continent in planes and not just walking until they died of cholera. Part of Hitler's appeal was that -- and it sounds bizarre to say this -- he seemed like he had a mastery of this hip new cholera-less way of life, a way of life that terrified a lot of people. He used POSTERS, for god's sake. That's the 1933 equivalent of putting your campaign speeches in an Instagram story.

When we're scared, we want solutions, and Hitler provided those. When German industrialists got spooked that socialists were gonna take all their stuff, Hitler and a few others helped to persuade economist Walther Funk to join the Nazi Party to put their minds at ease and keep them funneling cash into their pockets. Were the solutions that Funk provided particularly complex? No, god no. But they sounded really good. And guys like Paul Manafort have made tens of millions of dollars off that maneuver in fairly recent years.

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Before he was Donald Trump's campaign manager, Manafort basically did PR for dictators and wannabe dictators all around the world. In 2005, he went to work for Victor Yanukovych, a Ukrainian presidential candidate who was losing despite probably poisoning his opponent with dioxin. Yanukovych lost that election, but Paul started coaching him on American-style political tactics. He had Yanukovych emphasize the divide between the East and West, and told party candidates to stop giving detailed answers about a bunch of different questions and start focusing on a single issue every week. He also ordered Yanukovych and his representatives to only wear super fancy suits so they'd look rich and powerful.

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It was a cynical, gross, dumb plan to win an election, and it totally worked. Yanukovych and the Party of Regions came to power in 2010. Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014, and that sparked a bloody civil war that continues to this day, but the point is that Manafort knew what he was doing.