Chuck Idelson, Common Dreams

Is this Trump's Reichstag Fire moment?

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.

This Trump tactic is a dire warning of something awful

In April, Jesús Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old construction worker near Bryan, Texas, was grabbed, detained, and ultimately deported in shackles to Venezuela under false charges that he was a member of the Tren de Aragua gang.

His story was detailed last week by the Texas Observer. He’d worked for the same employer, a Venezuelan Pepsi affiliate, for nearly two decades, and had no criminal history or record of gang activity. The arresting officers claimed his Air Jordans — a brand 24 percent of sneaker wearers in the U.S. reportedly own — were a symbol of gang membership.

Federal agents in President Donald Trump’s high-profile military occupation of Washington, D.C. are zeroing in on food delivery drivers, many of them on mopeds, making them easy targets for abduction, the Washington Post reports.

Gabriel Ravelo Torrealba, 22, needed hospital treatment for hand and leg injuries inflicted in his arrest.

Christian Carías Torres, shot with a stun gun during his arrest, was branded a “suspected gang member,” an allegation, the Post noted, “the Trump administration has repeatedly used without providing evidence.”

Those rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal policing agencies are far from the “worst of the worst” boasted by Trump in his campaign mass deportation pledge. ICE’s own data shows 72 percent of those detained “have no known criminal convictions or pending criminal charges,” as Fortune magazine reported in July.

To meet his arbitrary quota of seizures, deportation fanatic Stephen Miller scuttled any emphasis on the “worst” by racially profiling ordinary working people at Home Deport parking lots, farms, other work sites, and outside court hearings they’d attended to meet legal obligations. Numerous legal immigrants and even citizens continue to be grabbed.

“The President does not want to see Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, or Venezuelans here,” Escalona Mújicas said one of his arresting agents told him.

Similarly, in the D.C. operation, ICE and other federal agents are avoiding “the city’s high-crime areas,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote.

“There are soldiers patrolling the National Mall; armored vehicles parked at Union Station; and ICE agents manning checkpoints on U Street, an area known for its bars, restaurants, and nightlife. They’re not there for safety, but for show.”

“If Trump is genuinely concerned about the safety of D.C. residents, I would see National Guard in my neighborhood. I’m not seeing it, and I don’t expect to see it,” one resident of D.C.’s Congress Heights neighborhood told Times reporter Clyde McGrady.

“I don’t think Trump is bringing in the National Guard to protect Black babies in Southeast.”

Corollary consequences for the Gestapo-style raids and domestic military campaigns extend to the distortion of federal budget priorities. The D.C. occupation alone is costing $1 million a day, according to an analysis by Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project.

One less publicized provision of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” was the gift of $75 billion in extra funding for ICE, “making it by far the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government,” CBS News reported.

National Nurses United researchers found far more useful ways to allocate that funding rather than on terrorizing immigrant families and communities.

For the same $75 billion, we could eradicate all medical debt accrued by 31 million people, cover over two years of universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, pay for nearly all tuition and fees for students in public universities across the U.S., and substantially reduce the costs of child poverty in the nation or most of the homeless crisis in California. The same amount could also end both extreme and chronic hunger around the world for two years.

The militarization has a deeper, malevolent purpose, wrote Monica Potts in The New Republic.

“Trump isn’t actually worried about crime. He’s not trying to make the district safer for its residents, and he’s certainly not weighing the data and evidence when he calls on governors to send guardsmen. Parading troops through an American city is a brazen authoritarian power grab.”

"There is not a crime crisis in D.C.," former D.C. Metropolitan reserve police officer Rosa Brooks who now teaches at Georgetown Law School told NPR, which reiterated Justice Department data that crime in Washington has plummeted with violence reaching a 30-year low last year.

"This is police state territory, banana republic police state territory," Brooks said.

Potts notes: “This is what it means to learn to live in an authoritarian police state, and people are using the only tools they have: cell phones and sandwiches. The longer ICE raids and military takeovers go on, the more they will inspire protests around the country, which may be the only excuse Trump is waiting for to claim that cities are full of disorder and then crack down even harder.”

Trump says he is targeting Chicago and New York next for his next Democratic majority-city occupations. He may also have in mind “an intimidation tactic to try to suppress voters in cities ahead of the 2026 midterm,” Potts observes.

“It’s definitely part of Trump’s only true and unwavering project: consolidating power (Italics added). Even as he’s posting on Truth Social about crime in D.C., he’s cheering efforts in Texas to redraw district maps to elect more Republicans to the House next year and launching an effort to get rid of mail-in ballots.”

As with Trump’s march to autocratic power, the parallels with Hitler and Nazi Germany are unmistakable and should be chilling to everyone. Within two months of being handed power by the conservative old guard Weimar Republic in January 1933, Hitler made two major moves, as Peter Fritzsche describes in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.

First, he persuaded his conservative coalition partners to call for new elections by early March.

Then, the Nazis engineered or at least exploited a fire in the Reichstag in late February, Germany’s Capitol building, to invoke emergency decrees. They served, Fritzsche notes, to “suspend civil liberties, expand protective custody” and other authoritarian powers that “symbolized the death of representative government and the rule of law.”

It also gave the Nazis the opening to complete a takeover of German policing to engage in arrests, detention, and violent assaults on all political opposition.

Coupled with the election, in which the Nazis increased their political power through domination of the media, mobilization of state resources, demonization of their version of “enemies from within” (mainly Jews and Communists), and the traumatizing impact of an increased militarization, Hitler and the Nazis had the means to manufacture mass consent, silence dissent, and cement fascist rule.

Potts is unimpressed with much of the Democratic leadership response. She cites Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s dismissal of Trump’s takeover of D.C. as a “political ploy” and an “attempted distraction” from problems like the tariffs and Epstein files. But, she emphasizes, “the federal agents and troops are not the distraction. They are the whole point — quite literally the spear in Trump’s increasingly fascist assault on American democracy.”

Democratic leaders, Potts added on the Daily Blast podcast with Greg Sargent, “should start calling things like they see them and they should say, you’re not coming to our cities, you’re not coming to our towns with the military, you’re not going to turn this country into a dictatorship. The idea that there’s still time is really critical. And voters like it when elected leaders fight for them.”

That is the immediate challenge we face with Trump and Trumpism today.

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