One characteristic that all despots have in common is a fearsome predilection for architecture. They are also similar in that they are men, in that they become lazy very quickly, in that they lack compassion and remorse, in that they do not escape the mental disorder that takes hold of every human being who has no limits to his impulses or the whims of his will. It is known that Donald Trump never arrives at his office before eleven, and that Hitler, Stalin and Mao were night owls who stayed up late watching films or reciting monologues in front of their courtiers, and since no one dared wake them, they slept like idle old men until noon. The love of cinema is curious. Franco watched films with the same punctuality with which he recited the rosary. Stalin and Hitler admired the glittering musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which were forbidden to their subjects. A man of an age in which cinema becomes as irrelevant as the written word, Donald Trump spends the hours of day and night with the remote control in one hand and his cell phone in the other, spouting misspelled messages of vengeance or simple delirium, or watching Fox network programs, many of them slimy ones dedicated to arousing a vanity as boundless as his lust for money or his contempt for any human being other than himself.
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