Trump's new actions mirror an old familiar playbook

On this day in 1936, Nazi Germany's Reichstag (one-party parliament) passed a law giving the Gestapo absolute authority to hunt down and kill anybody they saw as a threat.

The Gestapo’s heinous actions which lead to the Holocaust were completely above any legal review. Remember that when I bang home a sharpened point in a minute.

For now, a quick primer on the Gestapo and its leader Heinrich Himmler (pictured) from PBS’s American Experience:

In January 1929 Heinrich Himmler was appointed head of the SS, a small body of 200 men that he would soon transform into the racist and deadly army of the Nazi police state. By 1933 Himmler's SS numbered 52,000 members of Hitler's "master race." Himmler then began a massive effort to separate the SS from the SA. To distinguish his troops, he introduced black SS uniforms that were unlike the SA's brown shirts. On June 30, 1934, under Hitler's orders, Himmler and Hermann Göring arranged the murder of SA leader Ernst Röhm and other senior SA officials in a massacre that would become known as The Night of the Long Knives. As a result, Himmler became chief of the German Police, including the Gestapo, the secret police.

You see where I'm going with this ...

One of the very first things the America-attacking Trump did upon assuming power on January 20th, was pardon his 1,500 or so fellow-convicted felons who beat up law enforcement officers, threatened lawmakers’ lives, and stormed our Capitol in an effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.

This sent a clear and unmistakable message to the right-wing terror groups in America to once again “stand back and stand by.” Anybody who defends the lawless Trump will be defended and rewarded. Anybody who stands against him will pay.

From my view, it is not a question of if Trump will deploy these anti-American groups against U.S. citizens, it is only a question of when. If, God forbid, a Big Mac, or the evil bile that flows through his body doesn’t kill him first, this broken, mess of a man has every intention of not relinquishing power in 2028.

It took him no time to admit as much on Thursday…

Much of his first three gruesome weeks in the White House have been about setting the pretext for absolute power, and the one-party loyalty that is due only to a dictator.

He is dismantling our government and just this weekend sent his pathetic, fawning Vice President JD Vance out to claim his right to this unchecked power.

This was from Vance’s Twitter account:

“Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.”

“Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power …”

Sound familiar?

In other words: The executive’s actions are completely above any legal review just as they were in Hitler’s Germany …

The door to hell is wide open.

This is stunning, and wildly dangerous. The warnings should be coming from Democrats across the map, and our working press. Except as usual, not much was made of these hair-raising developments by our mainstream media, which these days have shown themselves to be either complicit, simply incapable of framing up this terrifying moment in American history, or a terrible combination of both.

Too many Democrats have been slow to the mark, or haven’t bothered diving into the fray at all. Here’s where I remind you they work for us, and to call them regularly: (202) 224-3121.

Listen to me: Republicans are in the process of stealing our democracy forever. This isn’t idle speculation it is a disquieting fact.

I’ll have more to say on this in the coming days, but I could not allow this significant day in history to pass without given it the chilling attention it deserves.

As Mark Twain wrote: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.