Is this America’s Reichstag moment? The murder of conservative organizer Charlie Kirk, founder of the right-wing Turning Point USA organization, and the overheated response it generated in MAGA world, may come to be seen as its own turning point on the path to autocratic rule in the United States.
Officials in Utah on Friday announced the apprehension of 22-year-old Tyler Robinson as the suspected murderer. But in the less than 48 hours since the abhorrent assassination of a top Trump confidant, chilling echoes can be heard that remind us of how Adolph Hitler exploited a fire at the German Parliament, the Reichstag, in 1933 to remove his final impediments to unleashing a horrific dictatorship in the Third Reich.
Kirk had become a key figure in the Trump movement. His mobilizing on college campuses which was credited as spiking the youth vote for Trump. His ability at demonizing Democrats and the left, mainstreaming racism, and outspoken role as a 2020 election denier led Trump to call him “one of three or four people most responsible for my (2024) election.”
Trump and multiple followers quickly branded the murder as a violent attack on the entire Trump movement, “all of us,” promising threats of war.
Fox News talking head Jesse Waters declared, “We’re going to avenge Charlie's death.”
As usual, Trump led the recriminations and threats of retaliation.
“For years, the radical left has compared wonderful Americans like Charlie Kirk to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” said Trump in a widely broadcast address.
“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
In singling out attacks by the so-called “radical left,” Trump sought to create a counter-narrative of who is provoking political violence — for example, ignoring the recent murder of the Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman, the former state house speaker and her husband, Mark, by a reported Trump supporter, an act Utah Sen. Mike Lee initially blamed on “Marxists.”
In 2022, Trump and others on the right mocked the attempted murder of former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. Trump routinely urged supporters to assault protesters at 2016 campaign rallies. Most notably, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including those who assaulted Capitol police officers and some of whom have since been re-arrested and charged with subsequent crimes.
Further, some of the most notorious mass killings in recent years were committed by shooters with far-right and white supremacist leanings, including at an El Paso Walmart; a Buffalo grocery store; a Black church in Charleston; and a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Blaming the left and Democrats in general for the Kirk shooting, and the broader array of what Fox personality Sean Hannity calls “10 nonstop years of rage and hatred and a vile language” — and a left whose “ideology is pure evil,” as Rep. Rob Onder (R-MO) insisted on the House floor Thursday — signals the specter of a broader, dangerous response.
Since starting his second term, Trump has steadily moved to expand his authoritarian rule, emphatically evidenced by his draconian secret-agent deportation raids and use of federal troops to invade cities in Democratic-led states and cities not to “fight crime,” but as a warning to political opponents.
However, he has chafed against lower-court legal setbacks and other perceived restraints on his power grab and prepared for opportunities to take the next step. Kirk’s murder, and the vitriolic demands for further crackdown by influential members of Trump’s MAGA team and supporters, draw a parallel in history.
When Hitler was appointed Chancellor in Germany on Jan. 30, 1933, he still had some limits imposed by coalition partners and the aging President Paul von Hindenburg. A month later, on Feb. 27, 1933, a fire broke out in the Reichstag, gutting the building.
Hitler quickly seized on the blaze as an opportunity to fulfill his dreams.
Hitler boasted “We will show no mercy anymore,” notes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days. “Whoever gets in our way will be slaughtered.”
He meant Communists, but also proclaimed, “We also have to move against the Social Democrats. We are not sparing anyone.”
“You are now witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in German history,” Hitler told British journalist Sefton Delmer “that night as they watched the flames consume Parliament. The fire is the beginning,” recounts Ruth Ben-Ghiat in Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.
The next morning, Hitler persuaded the cabinet, and Hindenburg signed an executive order, the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State. The Reichstag Fire Decree, writes Benjamin Carter Hett in The Death of Democracy, “tore the heart out of the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic, cancelling at a stroke freedom of speech and assembly, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention.”
The decree not only “suspended all legal protection of speech, assembly, property, and personal liberty, and permitted authorities to arrest” people at whim,” observes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism, it had another provision that may look especially attractive to Trump.
“It gave the federal government authority over the state governments’ police power.”
Adds Carter Hett, it even “allowed the central government to remove any state government from office.”
A month later, following a new election that increased Hitler’s hold on government, an additional emergency decree transformed the “constitutional and temporary dictatorship” into what Fritzsche calls an “unconstitutional and permanent dictatorship.”
“Hitler had secured the ability to govern without any checks on the exercise of his authority,” says Ben-Ghiat.
“The fire allowed the Nazis to create a society where it was always wartime, the single act of terror a justification for emergency rule,” writes Fritzsche.
“The Reichstag Fire Decree became the legal foundation for Hitler’s twelve-year dictatorship,” says Carter Hett.
“The Left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk wrote on his X platform after Kirk’s murder.
“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization,” declared Trump’s influential friend Laura Loomer.
Trump reiterated the heart of these themes in his video address.
Will he make this his Reichstag moment? Only stepped-up opposition by all of us to dictatorship can stop him.
- Chuck Idelson, retired, is the former Communications Senior Strategist for National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and professional organization of registered nurses with 225,00 members.
