We must stop being bashful about calling Trump a fascist - the shoe fits
At the same time, America’s richest man is
retweeting antisemitism, rightwing influencers and radio/TV hosts are blaming
“Jews and liberals” for the “invasion” of “illegals” to “replace white people,”
and the entire GOP is embracing candidates and legislators who encourage hate
and call for violence.
Are there parallels between the MAGA
takeover of the GOP and the Nazi takeover of the German right in the 1930s?
Hitler fought in WWI but later blamed
Germany’s defeat on the nation being “stabbed in the back” by liberal Jews,
their fellow travelers, and incompetent German military leadership.
Trump cheered on Bush’s invasion of Iraq,
but later lied and
claimed he’d opposed the war. Both blamed the nation’s humiliation on the
incompetence or evil of their political enemies.
The economic crisis caused by America’s
Republican Great Depression had gone worldwide and Hitler used the gutting of
the German middle class (made worse by the punishing Treaty of Versailles) as a
campaign issue, promising to restore economic good times.
Trump pointed to the damage forty years of
neoliberalism had done to the American middle class and promised to restore
blue-collar prosperity. Hitler promised he would
“make Germany great again”; Trump campaigned on the slogan: “Make America Great
Again.”
Both tried to overthrow their governments
by violence and failed, Hitler in a Bavarian beer hall and Trump on January
6th. Both then turned to legal means to seize control of their nations.
Hitler’s scapegoats were Jews, gays, and
liberals. “There are only two possibilities,” he told a Munich crowd in 1922.
“Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of
the Jew.”
He promised “I will get rid of the
‘communist vermin’,” “I will take care of the ‘enemy within’,” “Jews and
migrants are poisoning Aryan blood,” and “One people, one nation, one leader.”
Trump’s scapegoats were Blacks, Muslims,
immigrants, and liberals.
Hitler called the press the Lügenpresse or
“lying press.” Trump quoted Stalin, calling our news agencies and reporters
“the enemy of the people.”
Both exploited religion and religious
believers. Hitler proclaimed a “New Christianity” for Germany and encouraged
fundamentalist factions within both the Catholic and Protestant faiths.
Every member of the Germany army got a
belt-buckle inscribed with Gott Mit Uns (God is with us).
Trump embraced rightwing Catholics and
evangelical Protestants and, like the German churches in 1933, has been
lionized by their leaders.
Hitler made alliances with other autocrats
(Mussolini, Franco, and Tojo) and conspired with them to take over much of the
planet. Trump disrespected our NATO and European allies and embraced the
murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia, the psychopathic leader of Russia, and the
absolute tyrant who runs North Korea.
Both Hitler and Trump had an “inciting
incident” that became the touchstone for their rise to illegitimate levels of
power.
For Hitler it was the burning of the German
parliament building, the Reichstag, by a mentally ill Dutchman. For
Trump it is his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the
martyrdom of his supporters after their attempted coup on January 6th.
Hitler embraced rightwing Bavarian street
gangs and brawlers, organizing them into a volunteer militia who called
themselves the Brownshirts (Hitler called them the Sturm Abeilung or
Storm Division).
Trump embraces rightwing militia groups and
motorcycle gangs, and implicitly praises his followers when they attack people
like Paul Pelosi, election workers, and prosecutors and judges who are
attempting to hold him accountable for his criminal behavior.
While Trump has mostly focused his public
hate campaigns against racial and religious minorities, behind the scenes he
and his administration had worked hand-in-glove with anti-gay fanatics like
Mike Johnson to limit the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.
His administration opposed the Equality
Act, saying it would “undermine parental and conscience rights.” More than
a third (36%) of his judicial
nominees had previously expressed “bias and bigotry towards queer people.” His
administration filed briefs in the
landmark Bostock case before the Supreme Court, claiming that civil rights laws
don’t protect LGBTQ+ people.
His Department of Health and Human
Services ended Obama-era
medical protections for queer people. His Secretary of Education, billionaire
Betsy DeVos, took apart regulations
protecting transgender kids in public schools. His HUD Secretary, Ben
Carson, proposed new rules
allowing shelters to turn away homeless queer people at a time when one-in-five
homeless youth identify as LGBTQ+.
German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous
poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out
because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer
people.
A year before Nazis began attacking union
leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores
on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in
Berlin.
In 1930, the Institute had
pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director,
Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific
papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized
in the field of sexual and gender studies.
Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely
tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on
January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target.
Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with
especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.
German states put into law bans on
gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of
deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put
into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and
magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and
libraries.
Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire.
It was the first major Nazi
book-burning and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the
nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to the libraries and public
high schools.
The conservative elite of Germany,
particularly Fritz Thyssen, Hjalmar Schacht, and Gustav Krupp were early
supporters of Hitler, as he promised to crush the German labor movement and cut
their taxes.
Without the support of rightwing
billionaires funding Cambridge Analytica and Trump’s campaign he never would
have won the electoral college in 2016.
Hitler couldn’t have risen to power without
the support of the largest outlets in German media. Some treated him as “just
another politician,” normalizing his fascist rhetoric. Others openly supported
him.
After his failed beer hall putsch, he was
legally banned from public
speaking and mass rallies but, in 1930, German media mogul Alfred Hugenberg — a rightwing
billionaire who owned two of the largest national newspapers and had
considerable influence over radio — joined forces with Hitler and relentlessly
promoted him, much like the Murdoch media empire and 1,500 billionaire-owned
rightwing radio stations across the country helped bring Trump to power in 2016
and still promote him every day.
Hitler’s first major seizure of dictatorial
power was his use of the Weimar law Article 48 which,
during a time of crisis, empowered the nation’s leader to suspend due process
and habeas corpus, turn the army’s guns on people deemed
insurrectionists, and arrest people without charges or trial.
Its American equivalents are the State of
Emergency Declaration and the Insurrection Act, both
of which Trump has promised to invoke in his first days in office if he’s
re-elected in 2024.
Once Hitler had seized full control of the
German government, he set about changing the nation’s laws to replace democracy
with autocracy. His enablers in the German Parliament passed the “Enabling Act”
that gave Hitler’s cabinet the power to write and implement their own laws.
Trump promises to use the theoretical
“unitary executive” powers rightwing groups claim the president holds, but has
never used in our history, to have his new cabinet rewrite many of our nation’s
laws.
Hitler followed the Enabling Act, six
months later, with the Act for the Restoration of the Professional
Civil Service which authorized him to gut the German Civil Service and
replace career bureaucrats with toadies loyal exclusively to him. It was the
end of any semblance of resistance to the Nazis or preservation of democracy
within the new German government.
In his last three weeks in office, Trump issued an executive order called Schedule F that ended Civil Service protections for around 50,000 of America’s top government officials, including the senior levels of every federal agency, so he could replace them all with political appointees (Biden reversed it).
The Heritage Foundation is
reportedly now vetting over
50,000 people to fill these ranks if Trump is reelected and, as promised,
reinstates Schedule F.
The last bastion of resistance to Hitler
within the German government was the judiciary, and Hitler altered the German
Civil Service Code in January 1937, giving his cabinet the power to remove any
judges from office who were deemed “non-compliant” with “Nazi laws or
principles.”
When Judge Jon Tigar of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Trump’s new rules barring people from receiving asylum in 2018, Trump attacked Tigar as “a disgrace” and “an Obama judge.”
He added that the
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is “really something we have to take a look at
because it’s not fair,” adding, “That’s not law. Every case that gets filed in
the Ninth Circuit we get beaten.”
Because the German Supreme Court was still,
from time to time, ruling against Hitler’s Gleichschaltung or
Nazification of the German government and legal code, and he had no easy legal
mechanism to pack the court or term-limit the justices, in 1934 he created an
entirely new court to replace it, which he called the People’s Court.
Trump packed the US Supreme Court with
rightwing ideologues, many of whom are heavily beholden to oligarchs and
industries aligned with Trump and the GOP. If they continue to go along with
him — and there’s little to indicate they won’t — he won’t need to create a new
court.
When Hitler took over the country in 1933,
the military leadership was wary of him and his plans. While they shared many
of his conservative views about social issues, most still held a strong loyalty
to the German constitution.
It took him the better part of two years, with heavy
support from his Brownshirts (who he’d by then integrated into the military) to
purge the senior levels of the Army and replace them with Nazi loyalists.
The night before January 6th, newly-elected
Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville joined Trump’s sons to help organize the coup
planned for the next day. As the Alabama Political Reporter newspaper reported at the
time:
“The night before the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville and the then-director of the Republican Attorneys General Association met with then-President Donald Trump’s sons and close advisers, according to a social media post by a Nebraska Republican who at the time was a Trump administration appointee.
“Charles W. Herbster, who was then the national chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Advisory Committee in Trump’s administration, in a Facebook post at 8:33 p.m. on Jan. 5 said that he was standing ‘in the private residence of the President at Trump International with the following patriots who are joining me in a battle for justice and truth.’ …
“Among the attendees, according to Herbster’s post, were Tuberville, former
RAGA director Adam Piper, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Trump’s former National
Security Advisor Michael Flynn, adviser Peter Navarro, Trump’s 2016 campaign
manager Corey Lewandowski and 2016 deputy campaign manager David Bossie.”
Tuberville is now holding open the top
ranks of the US military, presumably so if Trump is reelected he can pack our
armed forces with people who won’t defy his orders when he demands they seize
voting machines and fire live ammunition at the inevitable protestors.
When Hitler took power in 1933, he quickly began mass arrests of illegal immigrants, gypsies, union activists, liberal commentators and reporters, and (as noted earlier) queer people.
To house this
exploding prison population, he first took over a defunct munitions factory in
Dachau; within a few years there were over a hundred of these camps where
“criminals” were “concentrated and separated from society.” He called
them concentration camps.
The New York Timesreports that Trump
is planning to “build huge camps to detain people,” and “to get around any
refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would
redirect money in the military budget.”
How many people? “Millions” writes the Times.
And not just immigrants: Trump is planning to send his enemies to them, too.
Will he succeed in getting around Congress?
He did the last time, with money to build his wall taken from military housing.
So far, that’s as bad as it gets: what he
has already promised. But these are early days.
Hitler was unbothered by the deaths of
German citizens, and was enthusiastic about the deaths of those he considered
his enemies.
On April 7, 2020 all three TV
networks, The New York Times and The Washington Post all
lead with the breaking story that Black people were dying at about twice the
rate of white people from Covid. The Times headline, for
example, read: “Black Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb.”
A month earlier Trump had shut down the
country, but when this report came out he and
Kushner did an immediate turnabout, demanding that mostly minority
“essential workers” get back to work.
As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s
team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration’s PPE
response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:
“The political folks believed that because
it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those
governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”
It was, after all, exclusively Blue States
that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and
Connecticut. And there was an election coming in just a few months.
Trump even invoked the Defense Production
Act and issued an Executive Order requiring mostly minority slaughterhouse and
meatpacking employees go back to work. It led to a half-million unnecessary
American deaths and to this day neither Trump nor Kushner have
ever apologized.
In the final years of the Third Reich, Hitler authorized his “final solution to the Jewish problem” that included building death camps in countries outside Germany to methodically exterminate millions of people.
These were different from the hundreds of prisons and
concentration camps he’d built within Germany for “criminals and undesirables,”
although at those camps people were often worked to death or slaughtered when
the war started going south.
So far, Trump and his people haven’t
suggested the need for death camps in America, although Ron
DeSantis and Greg Abbott seem particularly eager to see
immigrants die either from razor wire or gunshot.
But, then, the Nazis never officially
announced their external death camps either; like Bush’s criminal “black sites” overseas where hundreds of
innocent Afghans and Iraqis were tortured, often to death, they figured they’d
never be found out.
There are few Americans alive today who
remember Hitler, and for most of us the details of his rise to power are lost
to the mists of time. But Donald Trump is bringing it all back to us with a
fresh, stark splash of reality.
When I lived in Germany I worked with
several Germans who had been in the Hitler Youth. One met Hitler. Another, Armin Lehmann, became
a dear friend over the years and wrote a book about his experience as the
16-year-old courier who handed Hitler the news the war was lost and stood
outside Hitler’s bunker room as he committed suicide.
They were good people, children at the time
really, and were (they’ve all died within the last two decades) haunted by
their experience.
It can happen here.
We’ve been sliding down this slippery slope
toward unaccountable fascism for several decades, and this
coming year will stand at the threshold of an entirely new form of American
government that could mean the end of the American experiment.
To the extent that our Constitution is
still intact, the choice for our democracy to rise or fall will be in our
hands.
THOM HARTMANN is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
