This is how you derail a therapy session: In the middle of a carpeted room with calming pot plants stooped weakly in softly lit corners, you tell a 65-year-old qualified mental health practitioner, beneath her framed medical degrees and her various accomplishments, that she doesn’t understand the American film director Michael Mann, who is not Michael Bay.

There’s a thing that happens in Michael Mann movies where too much stuff gets on top of a person and that person just burns their life to the ground and moves on. It happened in Thief – James Caan drops his bulletproof vest on the street and walks off. It happened in Heat – de Niro leaves his girlfriend in the car and disappears in the crowd. They shed the material, the personal, the emotional, their car, their girl, and they walk away.

I explained that Michael Mann film colours are a whole palette on their own, that they’re blue and orange and saturated but washed out at the same time, and that it’s weird how the colours are so strong because Michael Mann films are about men who feel nothing. The men in Michael Mann movies are obsessive and dead inside; saturated and washed-out at the same time. They don’t even feel the emotion of vomit. As a mode of dealing with a white noise of emotion in your own personal world, a Michael Mann movie is like taking an emotional sleeping pill.

He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?

His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.

mid 1990s Xmas: Demand to see the Double Issue Radio Times

mid 2000s Xmas: Demand to use your parents’ PC to check your email

mid 2010s Xmas: Demand your host’s wifi password the minute you enter their home

These questions should inspire two feelings. The first is humility. We can never know what a universe without Hitler would have looked like. But the implicit argument that his removal would improve history must also consider that his removal could make it worse. Indeed, recent experience should make us doubt our abilities to bend the course of human events towards our will. The Bush administration naively claimed that toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 would produce a vibrant liberal democracy in the largely illiberal Middle East. Instead it brought about regional instability, ethnic cleansing, civil war, and ISIS.

The second is relief. We live in cynical times, which masks the fact that we live in extraordinary times. Atrocities still occur, but human rights are now a normative value throughout most of the world, even if their enforcement is imperfect. Conflicts are still fought, but the great powers have avoided another world war for seven decades. Racism and anti-Semitism still exist, but pre-war forms of colonialism and pogroms have largely disappeared. This is not the future for which Nazi Germany fought and fell. Removing Hitler from history would gamble with one irrefutable truth: He lost.