Are there parallels between the MAGA takeover of the GOP and the Nazi takeover of the German right in the 1930s?
It began with a national humiliation: defeat in war. For Germany, it was WWI; for America it was two wars George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied us into as part of their 2004 âwartime presidentâ re-election strategy (which had worked so well for Nixon with Vietnam in 1972 and Reagan with Grenada in 1984).
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Hitler fought in WWI but later blamed Germanyâs defeat on the nation being âstabbed in the backâ by liberal Jews, their fellow travelers, and incompetent German military leadership.
Trump cheered on Bushâs invasion of Iraq, but later lied and claimed heâd opposed the war. Both blamed the nationâs humiliation on the incompetence or evil of their political enemies.
The economic crisis caused by Americaâs 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 âmake Germany great againâ; Trump campaigned on the slogan: âMake America Great Again.â
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.
Hitlerâs scapegoats were Jews, gays, and liberals. âThere are only two possibilities,â he told a Munich crowd in 1922. âEither victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.â
He promised âI will get rid of the âcommunist verminâ,â âI will take care of the âenemy withinâ,â âJews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood,â and âOne people, one nation, one leader.â
Trumpâs scapegoats were Blacks, Muslims, immigrants, and liberals.
He said he will âroot outâ âcommunists ⊠and radical left thugs that live like verminâ; he would destroy âthe threat from withinâ; migrants are âpoisoning the blood of our countryâ; and that under Trumpâs leadership America will become âOne people, one family, one glorious nation.â
Hitler called the press the LĂŒgenpresse or âlying press.â Trump quoted Stalin, calling our news agencies and reporters âthe enemy of the people.â
Both exploited religion and religious believers. Hitler proclaimed a âNew Christianityâ 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 âinciting incidentâ 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 Sturmabteilung 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 âundermine parental and conscience rights.â More than a third (36%) of his judicial nominees had previously expressed âbias and bigotry towards queer people.â His administration filed briefs in the landmark Bostock case before the Supreme Court, claiming that civil rights laws donât 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 Niemöllerâs famous poem begins with, âFirst they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.â 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. Itâs 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 â with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people â across German media.
German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of âpublic display of deviance,â enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nationâs 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 wouldnât 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 Trumpâs campaign he never would have won the electoral college in 2016.
Hitler couldnât have risen to power without the support of the largest outlets in German media. Some treated him as âjust another politician,â 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 â a rightwing billionaire who owned two of the largest national newspapers and had considerable influence over radio â 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.
Hitlerâs first major seizure of dictatorial power was his use of the Weimar law Article 48 which, during a time of crisis, empowered the nationâs leader to suspend due process and habeas corpus, turn the armyâs 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 heâs re-elected in 2024.
Once Hitler had seized full control of the German government, he set about changing the nationâs laws to replace democracy with autocracy. His enablers in the German Parliament passed the âEnabling Actâ that gave Hitlerâs cabinet the power to write and implement their own laws.
Trump promises to use the theoretical âunitary executiveâ powers rightwing groups claim the president holds, but has never used in our history, to have his new cabinet rewrite many of our nationâs 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 Americaâs 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 ânon-compliantâ with âNazi laws or principles.â
When Judge Jon Tigar of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Trumpâs new rules barring people from receiving asylum in 2018, Trump attacked Tigar as âa disgraceâ and âan Obama judge.â He added that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is âreally something we have to take a look at because itâs not fair,â adding, âThatâs not law. Every case that gets filed in the Ninth Circuit we get beaten.â
Because the German Supreme Court was still, from time to time, ruling against Hitlerâs 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 Peopleâs 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 â and thereâs little to indicate they wonât â he wonât 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 heâd 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 Trumpâs sons to help organize the coup planned for the next day. As the Alabama Political Reporter newspaper reported at the time:
âThe 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 Trumpâs sons and close advisers, according to a social media post by a Nebraska Republican who at the time was a Trump administration appointee.
âCharles W. Herbster, who was then the national chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Advisory Committee in Trumpâs administration, in a Facebook post at 8:33 p.m. on Jan. 5 said that he was standing âin the private residence of the President at Trump International with the following patriots who are joining me in a battle for justice and truth.â âŠ
âAmong the attendees, according to Herbsterâs post, were Tuberville, former RAGA director Adam Piper, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Trumpâs former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, adviser Peter Navarro, Trumpâs 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and 2016 deputy campaign manager David Bossie.â
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 wonât 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 âcriminalsâ were âconcentrated and separated from society.â He called them concentration camps.
The New York Times reports that Trump is planning to âbuild huge camps to detain people,â and âto get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget.â
How many people? âMillionsâ 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, thatâs 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 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: âBlack Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb.â
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 âessential workersâ get back to work.
As an âexpertâ member of Jared Kushnerâs team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administrationâs PPE response noted to Vanity Fairâs Katherine Eban:
âThe 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.â
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 has ever apologized.
In the final years of the Third Reich, Hitler authorized his âfinal solution to the Jewish problemâ 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 heâd built within Germany for âcriminals and undesirables,â although at those camps people were often worked to death or slaughtered when the war started going south.
So far, Trump and his people havenât 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 Bushâs criminal âblack sitesâ overseas where hundreds of innocent Afghans and Iraqis were tortured, often to death, they figured theyâd 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 Hitlerâs bunker room as he committed suicide.
They were good people, children at the time really, and were (theyâve all died within the last two decades) haunted by their experience.
It can happen here.
Weâve 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.
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