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92 Years Ago, today, Adolf Hitler Was Made Germany's Leader. How is Donald Trump Celebrating? [1]
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Date: 2025-01-31
There’s a lot of discourse about how Donald Trump admires and tries to follow the examples of other authoritarian leaders, most especially Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin. There’s surely truth in that, especially with Orban, who Trump insists is “highly respected.” But, there was reporting in the first campaign, which resurfaced during both the 2020 and 2024 campaigns, about an interview Ivana Trump gave in 1990 to Vanity Fair, in which she said Donald would regularly read a copy of My New Order, a compendium of speeches by Adolf Hitler, which he kept in a cabinet at his bedside. Ever since learning this, I’ve been convinced history isn’t just rhyming accidentally. Trump has been using Hitler’s words, and his tactics, as both a game plan and a script, which he adapts to the American context.
As the son of a Jewish mother who fled Hungary along with her family in early 1941, this a piece I’ve been itching to write for 10 years. I think Trump has been driven all his adult life to seek fame and glory, in addition to riches, and along the way became enamored with Hitler and plotted to follow in the dictator’s footsteps. I’m sorry if this is a long read, but there’s so much evidence that supports my suspicions about Trump and the political model he is so faithfully following.
There was an excellent piece by Timothy Ryback in The Atlantic earlier this month, tracing Hitler’s rise to power and how, in just his first 53 days as Chancellor, Hitler usurped the democracy by using the levers of democracy, purging the security police, and the gov’t, and military, pardoning and opening jails for his shock troops and deputizing them, legislation outlawing the Communist Party to rig a new election, and ultimately just forcing the legislature to bow to his will. All in less than 2 months.
Today is the 92nd anniversary of the day Hitler was made Chancellor. Of course, there was more than a decade of political agitation before then as he headed a movement to overthrow the liberal political order that emerged in Germany after the end of World War I. His rise to power is the subject of much scholarship, but for our purposes now, it’s important to study what he did to consolidate his power and set the stage for ending Germany’s democracy.
That’s the focus of Ryback’s piece in The Atlantic. Without mentioning Trump, Ryback paints obvious parallels, probably in no small part due to deliberate cherry-picking of events in 1933, in order to make the parallels with Trump seem so starkly compelling. I don’t think that should undercut the impact of the article, and really offers important perspective on so much of what we’re witnessing with Trump’s Presidency.
As recounted in The Atlantic article, when he was made head of a right-wing coalition government, Hitler was given just two seemingly less important Cabinet posts to fill.
In the event, Hitler was given a paltry two cabinet posts to fill—and none of the most important ones pertaining to the economy, foreign policy, or the military. Hitler chose Wilhelm Frick as minister of the interior and Hermann Göring as minister without portfolio. But with his unerring instinct for detecting the weaknesses in structures and processes, Hitler put his two ministers to work targeting the Weimar Republic’s key democratic pillars: free speech, due process, public referendum, and states’ rights.
Minister Frick laid out a plan to pass a law which would dissolve the government. It’s inconceivable that anything like that could happen here, because so much of our federal government is embedded in the Constitution, which itself has amendment rules which make it nearly impossible to change in our currently closely divided country.
However, Trump is attempting to do what he can within what he perceives as the limits of his authority, which is he is aggressively testing. Offering severance packages to federal employees is well beyond what he is allowed to do, given that Congress hasn’t allocated money for that, as is his Executive Order that sought to freeze and impound federal spending authorized by Congress.
I say all that is beyond his authority, but it is also possible that the Supreme Court will decide to rewrite our understanding of what the president’s authority is with respect to the Executive/Administrative agencies.
Right from the get-go, Frick was “suppressing the opposition press and centralizing power in Berlin.” It remains to be seen whether Trump will attempt to centralize power, or instead just gut the federal government in DC and then rely on lackeys mostly in red states to carry out his will. He could also exert great authority over blue states, via his local agency representatives. New regulations, as well his authority over various programs can demoralize, defund and devastate blue state governments and progressive policies there which rely in large part on federal tolerance and largesse.
Frick targeted the press, and even banned leading left-wing newspapers, “including the Communist daily The Red Banner and the Social Democratic Forward.”
Only slightly constrained by the 1st Amendment protections for the press, Trump is trying directly to blackmail much of the media with litigation and social pressure, and the media is caving to that. He has also suggested that MSNBC and CNN shouldn’t be allowed to continue because of their bias and purported lies. And now, PBS and NPR are being threatened, not just with the loss of federal funds, but with potential FCC action that would force them to close down the corporate sponsorships which provide far more funding than the federal government does. This issue is well covered in the excellent piece by DKoser Ellid, NPR and PBS face an existential threat.
Hermann Göring was tasked with “purging the Prussian state police, the largest security force in the country after the army, and a bastion of Social Democratic sentiment.” Anyone see any parallels with Kash Patel, what we’re hearing about ultimatums being given to FBI agents they don’t believe are sufficiently loyal to Trump? Or the purging of our Armed Forces, especially accomplished generals?
As Ryback recounts in The Atlantic piece, after purging police leadership, Göring followed up with an immunity rule for the police.
A Schiesserlass, or “shooting decree,” followed. This permitted the state police to shoot on sight without fearing consequences. “I cannot rely on police to go after the red mob if they have to worry about facing disciplinary action when they are simply doing their job,” Göring explained. He accorded them his personal backing to shoot with impunity.
Trump has often said the same about the police here — that they must be freed up to “do their job,” even and especially when they use their weapons to take down criminals and enforce order. I would expect that we will soon see either SCOTUS acting to strengthen qualified immunity, or legislation which will have the same effect. We already have the Laken Riley Act which is erasing any due process for undocumented immigrants.
There are so many examples of history rhyming here.
The cultish aspects of Trump’s support aren’t just organic. They’ve been cultivated by Trump, who offers up iconography similar to Hitler’s including the Trump flags which seem to be almost as ubiquitous as the American flag displays by his followers. Hitler even had Hindenburg sign a decree which “permitting the National Socialists’ swastika banner to be flown beside the national colors.”
After Hitler gained more control of the government in a snap election helped in March of 1933,
an Article 48 decree was issued amnestying National Socialists convicted of crimes, including murder, perpetrated “in the battle for national renewal.” Men convicted of treason were now national heroes.
Trump’s crusade about the Jan. 6 “hostages” and the pardons he issued may not be just political expediency. It may have been inspired by Hitler’s own actions in pardoning the hooligans who supported him. Will Trump deputize the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys as Göring did with the brownshirts? That might be just a little too brazen for the US in the 21st Century, but there were will surely be some effort, perhaps just at the state level, to enlist civilians in rounding up Trump’s designated enemies of the state.
Why does Trump have such an obsession with tariffs? One answer might be that doubling tariffs on grain imports was one of Hitler’s early promises.
The alliance with Musk may have been accidental, due to circumstance, but it feels to me that Musk is a willing amalgam of Otto Wolf, a German industrialist who “was said to have “cashed in” on his financing of Hitler’s movement,” and Joseph Goebbels. When the Nazis increased the numbers of seats they held via the snap election, perhaps the most significant change to the government was the addition of a Cabinet post, the Minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, a job which went to the now infamous Goebbels.
Musk certainly understands the value of propaganda. In his brand new book, The Siren’s Call, Chris Hayes writes that our attention is our most valuable, central possession. Per Hayes, Trump’s superpower is in his brokenness as a human being, paired with his intuition about dominating social media and our attention. Hayes similarly describes Musk as a broken human who also craves attention above everything, and also understands how to dominate our attention. Thus, their alliance naturally came together to help deliver us the reinstallation of King Donald, a new Glorious Revolution.
Trump began his first campaign attacking Mexican migrants, Muslims in general, and promising to “Drain the Swamp.”
Hitler had campaigned on the promise of draining the “parliamentarian swamp”—den parlamentarischen Sumpf—only to find himself now foundering in a quagmire of partisan politics and banging up against constitutional guardrails.
This was a fascinating insight for me in the Atlantic article, as I thought that Trump’s draining the swamp rhetoric had domestic origins. Washington, DC, was built on swampland, and so it’s not an uncommon metaphor for our politics. Seeing this about Hitler though, I now have to believe Trump’s rhetorical mantra came Hitler himself.
Of course, Trump’s often made references to vermin poisoning the blood of Americans. Much has been written about how that echoes what Hitler said about Jews and Communists, and other disfavored groups.
Then, there’s the unhinged press conference Trump offered up yesterday, insinuating that the National Airport Potomac River air disaster was due to an FAA policy that discussed potentially hiring people with intellectual disabilities, psychiatric illness, and even dwarfism. When he first started talking about this, I wasn’t just struck by the sheer stupidity and rank dishonesty of the claim. I was physically revulsed by a clear echo of the eugenics that turned the power-mad evil of the Nazis into a global campaign of mass slaughter and genocide.
There are cautionary warnings as well in Trump’s threats toward Panama and Denmark over Greenland. There are definitely echoes there of Trump’s aggressive, militaristic threats which led to the takeover of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, the Anschluss which saw Germany swallow up Austria, and finally the demands and threats to Poland over Gdansk/Danzig which touched off the most devastating conflict in human history.
I don’t believe that these are just deliberate distractions, as many claim. Or even just bizarre quirks of Trump’s lust for power. I believe these are deliberate efforts by Trump to adapt Hitler’s steps to our modern, American context. I fear it is only a matter of time before Trump and the people around him will move to serious discussions about sending US forces into Mexico, take on the cartels.
As Ryback wrote about Hitler’s installation:
“After a thirteen-year struggle the National Socialist movement has succeeded in breaking through into the government, but the struggle to win the German nation is only beginning,” Hitler proclaimed, and then added venomously: “The National Socialist party knows that the new government is not a National Socialist government, even though it is conscious that it bears the name of its leader, Adolf Hitler.” He was declaring war on his own government.
Trump began doing this in his first term, and ran up against all manner of constitutional safeguards, and agency personnel that pushed back against illegal directives. Even before he was first elected, he was speaking out against a Deep State, and his seemingly paranoid rants only accelerated over his term. Now, we see a much more deliberate and determined effort by Trump and his fellow-runners to dismantle the government and create what Trump surely imagines would be a Fourth, American Reich.
Ryback offers this thesis:
“Both Hitler’s ascendancy to chancellor and his smashing of the constitutional guardrails once he got there, I have come to realize, are stories of political contingency rather than historical inevitability.”
I don’t know where we’re headed, or how far down this road that Trump will take us, but it’s vitally important that we recognize where he’s pointing. If history appears to be rhyming, it’s not just coincidence. This is not normal, or even extreme conservatism. Trump is a man on a mission, literally following in Hitler’s footsteps.
There may or may not be a new equivalent of the Reichstag fire (to justify emergency decrees), but the attacks on vulnerable minorities, the shows of dominance over legislators, the efforts to unwind the neutral administrative state, the purging of security forces and police, along with the plans to unleash an unfettered police against designated enemies, the effort to crush free press and dissenting voices, the coming aggressive militaristic challenges to neighbors — all quite deliberately taken from Hitler’s playbook, even if some of these things are also in Project 2025.
The ultimate question is whether our Constitution and our democracy will be able to survive this all-out assault over at least the next 4 years?
Ryback’s piece in The Atlantic closes with this observation from Goebbels, then backwards looking, but now seemingly prescient and penetrating insight into democracy:
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