Trump Represents A Threat Approaching Hitler And The Nazis
Just yesterday, the idea of an American president fomenting a violent rebellion to retain his office was the stuff of fictional cinema and not real life. A president accused of paying hush money to a prostitute so she didn’t damage his candidacy was equally ludicrous.
Equally unbelievable was a president who crafted a conspiracy to allow him to illegally remain in office after he was handily defeated by the polls; and to have the lie believed by millions of Americans.
A few short years ago, comparisons between Adolf Hitler and trump were considered paranoid ramblings that trivialized Hitler and the Holocaust. The comparisons between Adolf Hitler and trump are no longer in the realm of the paranoid, lunatic fringe. There are too many similarities between the two historical tyrants to ignore any longer.
In the past, linking Hitler and trump was an example of a condition known as Godwin’s Law or Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies. The concept was coined in 1990 by a lawyer, Mike Godwin, originally to apply to Usenet newsgroup discussions. Godwin’s Law states that the longer a conversation continues, the more likely it is that someone will use the Hitler analogy. Godwin introduced the “law” as an experiment in memetics to address the widespread use of such comparisons, which he believed trivialized the Holocaust. His intention was to have people think more deeply about the gravity of historical events, like the Holocaust, and avoid making hasty and inappropriate comparisons.
Read another way, Godwin’s Law states that when a discussion reaches a comparison to Nazis or Hitler, the validity of the conversation is over. Or put another way, passion leads to analogies that are proportional to the dearth of real information.
Godwin’s Law no longer applies to correlations between trump and Hitler.
Both leaders claimed extreme nationalism and constantly dwelled on a vision of Armageddon, a dystopian nation that is being challenged by hoards of invaders and where the “other” is the enemy of America and the cause of the demise of the nation’s once great values. Hitler was a dangerous, manipulative narcissist who unleashed demagogic spells through a steady diet of fear, greed, loathing, lies, and envy. Trump is made of the same toxic mixture while each has castigated what they claimed to be an inefficient and corrupt government.
The parallels between trump and Hitler are not exact but they should be sufficient to produce fear and not to be ignored as the rantings by two mad men.
Hitler and the Nazis referred to the media as “lugenpresse,” literally translated as “lying press.” Similarly, trump has consistently disparaged the media as pushing “fake news.”
The Nazis told the millions of Germans that their goal was “Deutsche Größe wiederherstellen.” It translates into “restore German greatness,” shockingly similar to the trumpian mantra, “Make America Great Again.”
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, crafted a program to promote Hitler’s extremism by giving out radios to all Germans, bypassing the German media. The radios had one channel, the Nazi leader’s channel.
For trump, Twitter (now known as X) has taken the place of the Nazi radios. Trump spread his propaganda and lies through his persistent and incessant use of tweets. Through tweets, trump has rolled out his uncensored and uncontrolled personal views, rife with lies, threats, bigotry, fear mongering, exploitation and scapegoating to millions of gullible Americans. Trump rails about “American Carnage,” a failing nation “that has lost its confidence, its willpower and its strength. We are a nation that has lost its way.”
Trump has promised to “demolish the deep state, we will expel the warmongers from our government — we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Marxists, the communists and fascists. We will rout the fake news media, we will drain the swamp. … We will be a liberated country again.”
Hitler used his radio broadcasts to glorify the white, Christian Aryan race and to demonize Jews. Trump has tweeted support for white supremacists, and castigated African Americans, immigrants and virtually anyone who disagreed with him.
Both promised to cleanse their nations by eliminating foreign elements. Trump proposes a massive wall and mass deportations and confinements. Hitler had his murderous concentration camps.
A hallmark of Nazism and Trumpism is the orchestrated mass rallies, designed to show the leaders’ passionate almost nihilistic supporters. The Nazi rallies were broadcast through artfully created newsreels while the trump rallies rely on bloated crowd estimates and carefully controlled seating of supporters and the images of overflow crowds.
Like Hitler, trump has demonized his domestic political opponents, calling them “parasites, criminals, cockroaches, and various categories of leftist scum.” He has called for jailing opponents, has labeled Mexicans as rapists, referred to “shithole countries” primarily occupied by people of color. He has plans to imprison immigrants in vast concentration camps while cleansing the government of thousands of civil servants trump deems insufficiently loyal. Trump has mocked Muslims, gay and transgender people, and disabled people, all to the approval of millions of supporters.
Hitler had his detractors killed.
Trump has little in the way of policies, other than his relentless attacks on the government, in much the same way as Hitler campaigned on slogans while he had his detractors imprisoned or killed. Both said existing structures could not address the dire state of their respective nations.
Both relied heavily on a well-crafted cult of personality, with Hitler and trump declaring that they had the unique abilities to lead.
Trump presents himself as a man of the people, a stunning, amazing success story and a great leader, which contradicted his real story as an entitled, bankrupt, corrupt businessman. A failed painter, Hitler conjured up his own story as a loyal soldier, not in line with the reality of his military service, whose only goal was to lead his nation back to greatness and to last a thousand years.
Hitler spread his story through his infamous, poorly written, venomously anti-Semitic autobiography, “Mein Kamf” or “My Struggle,” which was read by millions of Germans. Trump spread his propaganda through his own, ghost written autobiography, “The Art of the Deal” while he built his image not through books but as a reality media celebrity through his popular television show, “The Apprentice.”
Trump is bent on enhancing his powers to become the nation’s authoritarian leader. He is following the general path of Hitler.
Hitler did not take power by force but used powerful tropes to persuade Germans that he was a populist leader sent from God. The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic but leadership was granted to Hitler who used his hypnotic abilities to convince Germans of his brilliance, in and out of government. Trump, through coopting the Republican Party, is attempting the same kind of bloodless coup and overthrow of democracy.
The German president, Paul Von Hindenberg, was pressured by his advisors in 1933 to appoint Hitler as the nation’s chancellor. In February 1933, the Reichstag parliament burned to the ground and Hitler blamed the communists and Bolsheviks and seized on the incident to justify suppressing civil liberties. On March 23, 1933, the German parliament passed the Enabling Act which allowed Hitler to bypass the parliament and make unilateral decisions. Hindenberg died on Aug. 2, 1934, and Hitler quickly consolidated his authority and declared himself absolute dictator or Fuhrer.
Trump has tried to gain unquestioned powers as he undermines the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Justice Department and the democratic electoral system, all with a goal of seizing power.
Trump’s bombastic diatribes pale in comparison to Hitler’s rank exhortations. But the similarities are hard to ignore.
In an address to the Reichstag on Sept. 1, 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland, Hitler said, “But I am wrongly judged if my love of peace and my patience are mistaken for weakness or even cowardice.”
On Feb. 1, 1933, Hitler blamed Marxism and Bolshevism for the German problems. “Beginning with the family and ranging through all of the concepts of honor and loyalty, Volk und Vaterland, culture and economy, all the way to the eternal foundation of our morality and our faith: nothing has been spared by this negating, all-destroying dogma.”
He said that if Bolshevism survives, “The richest and most beautiful cultural areas of the world today would be transformed into chaos and a heap of ruins.”
The government will “preserve and defend the foundations upon which the power of our nation rests. It will extend its strong, protecting hand over Christianity as the basis of our entire morality, and the family as the germ cell of the body of our Volk and State.”
He said the government “will establish reverence for our great past and pride in our old traditions as the basis for the education of our German youth. Thus it will declare a merciless war against spiritual, political and cultural nihilism.”
In a speech in Munich on Jan. 1, 1932, Hitler told Germans that he was “not demanding that you do anything illegal, I am not requiring anything which would bring your conscience in conflict with the law, but I do demand that you follow me loyally on the path which the law permits and which my conscience and my insight require, and that you join your fate with my fate.”
Hitler declared that German must pass through “a purgatory of slander, lies, misrepresentations, terror, and suppression.”
In a March 11, 1933 speech at the Berlin Exhibition Grounds, Hitler told the throngs that “The strength which Germany needs to survive its struggle for existence will return, and from this strength will come justice and honor and with them, one day, freedom.”
“The German nation will find its way back to its own by combining its efforts; but we will bear one thing in mind: nothing in this world is free. And so we shall fight and work,” Hitler said.
On April 22, 1933, Hitler addressed a convention of Nazi leaders in Munich. He told his followers, “It is not the ones who are half-hearted and neutral who make history, but rather the people who take the struggle upon themselves.”