Trump Parallels With Hitler Will Become Clearer With Election Victory
“The big joke on democracy,” Joseph Goebbels, the future Nazi propaganda chief, said in 1931, “is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.”
The outdated U.S. electoral college system would lead Goebbels to make similar observations today.
The final vote tallies for president won’t be determined for weeks and while it is clear that trump won the vote in the electoral college, he may have lost in the popular vote to Vice President Kamala Harris. In 2016, trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton only to win the electoral vote. In 2020, trump again lost the popular vote to Joe Biden but he also fell short in the electoral vote.
The electoral college system could allow a political leader to power with just 37 percent of the popular vote, much like it almost did for Adolf Hitler.
The parallels between trump and the Nazi era are important to point out now that trump is back in office and the nation is experiencing many of the factors that led to the rise of Hitler, including “political fragmentation, social polarization, hate-filled demagoguery, a legislature gridlocked by partisan posturing, and structural anomalies in voting processes,” according to an April 26 story in Time.
At the time Goebbels made his prescient comments on the flaws of democracy, he was a delegate to the Reichstag, the German seat of government, and the Nazis were not yet supreme.
The Nazis entered the 600-member Reichstag in 1926 after winning just 12 seats in national elections. Three years later, Nazi membership surged after the worldwide financial crash of 1929. The Nazi party, known as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was soon the nation’s largest political movement with Hitler at the helm.
Under Germany’s parliamentary system, the largest political party usually named the chancellor. As president, Von Hindenburg at first refused to allow Hitler’s appointment because of his hate mongering, and anti-Semitism. Hitler used the party’s growing power in 1933 to force Hindenberg to rule by “emergency decree.” Hitler was then named chancellor and he was well on the way to twisting a democratic republic into a constitutional dictatorship.
In a courtroom in September 1930, Hitler said he would destroy democracy through the democratic process. A judge asked Hitler if he meant “only through constitutional means?” and Hitler answered with a firm and decisive, “Jawohl” or “yes.”
Hitler never received more than 37 percent of the vote in a free and open national election but he was a maestro in exploiting the flaws in the democratic system. In his first and only race for president in 1932, Hitler lost by six million votes, with just 36.77 percent of the electorate. Hitler sued to overturn the results, claiming he was a victim of voter fraud. The suit was rejected.
Like trump, Hitler was not swayed by facts and often distorted information to his own ends. Hitler would have been like a proud father when at his first inauguration in 2016, trump looked out at the mall and many vacant seats and declared “This is the largest crowd that’s ever been.”
After his loss in the race for president, Hitler used the original though illogical trumpian logic in arguing that 37 percent was 75 percent of a simple majority of 51 percent.
“So in a democracy, I have the majority of the simple majority and therefore I should be chancellor,” said Hitler whose claims fell on deaf ears.
Using the democratic process, Hitler held rallies across the nation to win backing for his efforts to smear “Bolsheviks, social democrats, immigrants, Jews, even fellow rightwing nationalists.” He derided the ruling elites and vowed to make Germany great again.
Hitler pushed for a referendum to abrogate the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed to end World War I. The treaty required Germany to disarm, make territorial concessions and pay huge reparations, leading future historians to claim it planted the seeds for World War II. Hitler wanted signatories of the treaty to be executed for treason. To gain momentum, Hitler and his cronies lied when they claimed that the German government at the time of the treaty was drafting German teenagers and selling them into slavery abroad to service reparation debts.
The Nazis lost 2 million votes in the November 1932 election leading one observer to note, “Hitler is a man with a great future behind him.” A month later Hitler was named chancellor because of a series of factors completely out of his control.
Hans Frank, Hitler’s private lawyer, once said the faltering world economy and anger over the continuing Versailles Treaty made the ascendancy of someone like Hitler “possible in Germany only at that very moment.” Frank was later hanged for complicity in Nazi atrocities.
Trump’s luck is outlined in a new biography, “Lucky Loser” by Pulitzer Prize winners Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig. The book shows how trump’s empire, funded by his father, was crumbling through bankruptcies, mismanagement and lawsuits. It was around this time that trump found a life line when he was invited to host a new TV program, “The Celebrity Apprentice.” It was hugely fortuitous as trump went on to earn millions through endorsement deals on the show. His riches were revived, setting the stage for his future in politics.
Timothy Ryback wrote in his 2024 book, “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power,” that Hitler’s rivals and allies underestimated him or thought they could “tame” him once he took office. Ryback points to the pivotal year 1932 when the media magnate Alfred Hugenberg, representing the nation’s industrialists, boosted the Nazis in his vast newspaper chain.
In 1920, Hugenberg founded a populist tabloid, the Berliner Illustrierte Nachtausgabe, which became his most profitable newspaper, with a daily circulation of 216,000 by 1929. The Hugenberg papers constantly hammered the mantra that the ruling Weimar Republic was born of the “stab-in-the-back” by its “November criminal” leaders, allegedly backed by wealthy Jews, who agreed to the Versailles Treaty.
Hugenberg hoped to use radical nationalism to overthrow the Weimar constitution and install an authoritarian government. In an essay, Hugenberg wrote that Germany needed a leader who had the charisma to “attract the masses behind him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin…Only a few will and can do this. We, the entire spectrum of non-socialists, can do no more than prepare the way for these few. Hopefully we will find that which we desire.”
The Hugenberg newspapers heavily covered the Nazi Beer Hall putsch in Munich in November in Munich in 1923. The failed coup d’état was led by Hitler, who was portrayed in Hugenberg’s news as a well-meaning, misguide patriot who was using the wrong tactics toward the legitimate goal of ending the Weimar Republic.
In an editorial in his newspaper, München-Augsburger Abendzeitung, Hugenberg praised Hitler as an “exceptionally popular speaker” who had “liberated” the minds of “innumerable workers from international socialism.”
After he became chancellor, Hitler quickly distanced himself from his perceived enemies, including Hugenberg, who in turn, lost any influence he may have had over the Nazis. In a review of Ryback’s book, Clare McHugh warned about trump and the misguided influence of billionaires.
“Peril awaits a leadership class willing to align itself with political extremists, seeking to counter forces which it perceives to be more unsavory,” McHugh wrote. “The lessons to be gleaned from this are eternal.”
Trump, like Hitler could whip his crowds into an orgasmic frenzy and both often used humor to win over the masses. For example, trump often received howls of laughter when he claimed “I’ve been indicted more times than Alphonse Capone.” The fanatic Hitler could also get his followers to laugh with him, leading Noah Berlatsky to write in a column in Foreign Policy, “A dollop of humor makes the anti-establishment rage go down.”
The Nazi propagandist Goebbels once said that “Horseplay is necessary” by leaders. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of “Strongmen,” said in an interview that Benito Mussolini, “had the same twisted sense of humor” as trump. Shorthand transcriptions of Communist Party and Politburo meetings under the ruthless Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin also showed the leader often joking at the expense of somebody about to be purged.
Like trump’s rants against immigrants, Hitler supported “blood Germans” over foreigners. And trump’s threats to get even with his adversaries was another quality in common with Hitler, who said, “If I’m appointed chancellor, heads will roll.”