Trump’s 2024 playbook is straight out of Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’: Yale historian Timothy Snyder

NPR on Thursday aired an alarming report on "the clear and present danger of Trump's enduring 'Big Lie.'"

"When a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the goal was to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and install Donald Trump in a second term. Call it an insurrection or a coup attempt. It was fueled by what's known as the "Big Lie": the verifiably false assertion that Trump won. Joe Biden won 306 votes in the Electoral College, while Trump received 232. In the popular vote, Biden won by more than seven million votes," Melissa Block reported.

Law school professor and election law expert Rick Hasen offered NPR a dire warning.

"I've never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now, because of the metastasizing of the 'Big Lie,'" Hasen said. "This is not the kind of thing I expected to ever worry about in the United States. I kind of feel like a climate scientist from five years ago, or [an] expert on viruses a couple of years ago, sounding the alarm and just hoping that we're not too late already."

Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder noted Adolf Hitler used a similar strategy.

"Part of the character of the 'big lie' is that it turns the powerful person into the victim. And then that allows the powerful person to actually exact revenge, like it's a promise for the future," he explained. "The lie is so big that it reorders the world. And so part of telling the big lie is that you immediately say it's the other side that tells the big lie. Sadly, but it's just a matter of record, all of that is in Mein Kampf."

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