Echos of Adolf Hitler's pre-World War II tactics are at the heart of Donald Trump's classified documents scandal, according to a new analysis by two top legal experts.
Harvard Law's Laurence Tribe, who has argued three-dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, penned the analysis with Dennis Aftergut, a fellow high court litigator.
"In the annals of successful political extortions, few rival the one that took place in Munich more than 80 years ago," Tribe and Aftergut wrote for The Bulwark. "On September 29, 1938, two days before a deadline that Hitler had announced for invading Czechoslovakia, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain yielded and agreed to meet with the German chancellor. In the Bavarian capital, they signed a 'nonaggression' pact that ceded the territory to Hitler without consulting the Czechs. Hitler successfully bargained for something that wasn’t his (a piece of a neighboring nation) by agreeing to yield something that didn’t belong to him (the territory of other neighboring nations, which he agreed not to invade)."
The pact was ignored by Germany when it invaded Poland, launching World War II.
"Former President Donald J. Trump is mimicking Munich by leveraging claims to things that aren’t his (America’s national secrets) against something which does not belong to him (the public order, which he threatens to overturn). On October 8, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt reported that in 2021, Trump sought to negotiate a deal with the National Archives by which he would return presidential documents (including some marked 'top secret') that he had spirited away to his beachfront resort at Mar-a-Lago," they wrote. "Neither the documents he had stashed at his resort nor those he sought from the Archives belong to him."
The attorneys wrote that Trump's mental health challenges are at the heart of the issue.
"Those qualities of character are lacking in the extreme narcissist: One who thinks that everything exists to serve his purposes. Such as America’s would-be caesar. Experts who study disordered personalities understand that narcissists are pure transactionalists," they wrote. "For such disordered individuals, other people, other hearts, other interests do not exist. Nor is there any such thing as an asset that does not belong to the narcissist for purposes of trading so as to advance their own person."
Tribe and Aftergut argued a similar dynamic was at play when Trump tried to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the phone call that resulted in his first impeachment.
"That aid was not Trump’s to hold back. Only a narcissist would think it was. And only a narcissist would be blind to the lethal consequences of withholding aid to a country in Ukraine’s position," they wrote.
"Those in charge of prosecuting the former president should keep in mind history’s clearest example of everything wrong with appeasing a narcissist: the calamity of Munich," they wrote.
Read the full analysis.
