The Looming Threat of Fascism - Part Two: The Beer Hall Putsch
There is a saying, attributed to Maya Angelou, that when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them the first time. Former president Donald Trump has shown Americans and the world time and time again who he is. Long before there was ever a question of whether he viewed himself as above the law in the role of president, and even before many had come to recognize that the support for his candidacy was a cult of personality, Trump made it all abundantly clear when in January 2016, at the outset of his campaign, he stated to his adoring fans at a rally, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters,” and his supporters laughed and told him they loved him. While in office, he defended neo-Nazi violence at Charlottesville, and shortly afterward, a video emerged that showed members of his “alt-right” supporters, at a Washington, D.C., conference, giving Nazi salutes to celebrate his election, shouting, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Considering how much neo-Nazis openly love the guy and believe he fights for them and their cause, he has long been suspected of courting their support, if not of being a white supremacist himself. Apologists will argue that he was simply trying to be even-handed and fair in his assessment of Charlottesville, and that he cannot help the fact that neo-Nazis like him. He has, after all, condemned them when asked, if only vaguely, seemingly begrudgingly, and coyly. However, he continually gives the public honest reason to suspect he has Nazi sympathies. For example, earlier this year, Trump posted a 30-second video on his social media account that featured fake newspaper headlines about the economy booming and the border being closed following a hypothetical landslide victory for Trump in 2024. A blurry newspaper headline in the background featured the words “INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED... DRIVEN BY THE CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH.” Understandably, the Biden campaign seized the opportunity to point out that that “this is Hitler’s language – not America’s.” The Trump campaign took the video down and explained that it was posted by a staffer who hadn’t seen the language in the background, and Trump had been too busy to approve the video himself because—wait for it—he was in court, defending himself in one of his numerous criminal trials. In fairness, it does appear that it could have been a genuine mistake. As it afterward turned out, the video in question appears to have been created using the “newspaper vintage history headlines promo” template on a stock video website called Envato Elements. If that is the case, and the headline was automatically included as part of a design template, it’s hard to blame the Trump campaign for anything other than negligence and being cheap. However, I visited Envato and examined the video template myself, and it appears that all the background headlines default to Lorem ipsum, the Latin placeholder text. That means the headlines must have actually been added by the staffer in question. The text appears to have come from a Wikipedia entry on World War I, so the Reich in question was not Hitler’s, but nevertheless, it does seem that the staffer purposely populated this text into the template. Still, can we only fault the staffer and Trump’s organization with cutting corners and sloppiness? We might argue this, but it is exceedingly strange that this was not even the first time that such an incident occurred. And this is something you don’t hear the media talking much about. In July of 2015, when Donald Trump was already spinning up a presidential campaign for the following year, he posted an image to Twitter that featured his face superimposed over the waving American flag, in the stripes of which could be discerned images of U.S. currency, the White House, and soldiers. The problem was, those soldiers wore Nazi uniforms. It was a stock photo of actors, but they were indeed wearing Waffen-SS uniforms. In that case too, Trump blamed a staffer, saying that he was away on business in, get this, Charlottesville, Virginia, and was therefore too busy to approve the post personally. What’s interesting, I think, is not just that Nazi imagery and language keeps getting posted onto his social media, but that in each case it just happens to be someone else’s fault, though the implication remains that otherwise, if it weren’t for other obligations, he usually does personally oversee anything posted to his account. It begins to make one wonder if these incidents might actually have been not just oversights but actual Nazi Easter eggs meant to function as dog whistles. After a certain point, his courting of the neo-Nazi vote cannot be denied. After all, in 2022, he had a cozy little dinner with openly white supremacist pundit Nick Fuentes, along with Kanye West, who was then right in the middle of his Hitler-admiring era. Can we possibly write this all off, as Trump supporters who are still not quite pro-Nazi tend to do, as mere unsavory politics? Is Trump only playing a game, trying to please even constituents he doesn’t himself agree with? Wouldn’t we need examples of Trump actually expressing admiration of Hitler himself to suggest he was a Nazi sympathizer? Certainly we have ample examples of Trump praising dictators and wanting to imitate their successes. In the face of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, he praised Putin as “smart” and “genius.” Previously, he had spoken about how well they got along, which comes as no surprise in the face of all the evidence that Putin’s regime had a hand in getting him elected. He spoke glowingly of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, saying of their correspondence, “We fell in love.” He calls Turkish President Recep Erdogan and Chinese President Xi Jinping friends and admires their strength, specifically admiring that Xi Jinping is a “strong man,” which is essentially a synonym for a militaristic autocrat. In fact, after meeting Xi Jinping, he told Republican donors that he found the idea of serving as president for life very appealing, saying coyly, “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot someday.” As for his thoughts on Hitler, we have only second-hand reports. In interviews conducted by Jim Sciutto for his book, The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War, Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said that Trump expressed a wish that his generals would be more loyal, more like Hitler’s generals. Kelly pointed out that German generals had tried to assassinate Hitler three times, and when Kelly reportedly pointed out that Trump should not want to be a commander like Hitler, Trump allegedly said, “Well, but Hitler did some good things.” Trump’s alleged admiration of Hitler was only apparently only for his rebuilding of the German economy, but considering everything else, his admiration of dictators, his desire to rule as an authoritarian himself, and his demands for absolute loyalty, we can certainly presume that he also admired Hitler’s strongman approach to leadership, at the very least. In this way, Trump is certainly like Hitler, for when Hitler tried to seize power, he did so following the fascist playbook of Mussolini, who had preceded him. Like Hitler, Trump too appears to be inspired by his authoritarian contemporaries.
Georges Sorel, French philosopher and radical identified by some as a proto-fascist.
As I said in part one of this series, making comparisons of contemporary politicians to Hitler and their movements to Nazism is not fallacious, it does not trivialize the Holocaust, if there are ample grounds for such a comparison, and Trumpism has given us plenty of that. It has been the view of some historians and politicians, especially during the heyday of Fascism, that it is a misnomer to refer to anything other than Mussolini’s regime as fascist. For example, when on February 6th, 1934, a far-right league of veterans’ organizations organized what appeared to many to be an insurrection, called by some a French March on Rome, it was viewed on the left as a fascist coup, while others at the time and since have argued it could not be, despite its similarities, because Fascism was a purely Italian historic phenomenon. Today, however, fascism, as a common noun with a lowercase first letter, is generally understood to refer not only to Mussolini’s regime but also to any regime or movement with a similar philosophy or comparable characteristics. A fascist government is autocratic, led by a dictator, and opposition is suppressed. Hitler and Nazism are almost universally accepted as a textbook example of a fascist regime, and not just because he was inspired by and later in league with the original fascist, Mussolini. Some, especially those on the right who resent being reminded that fascism arose from their end of the political spectrum, continually try to suggest that fascism is a leftist phenomenon. They draw attention to the fact that Mussolini was formerly a Socialist, even though his Blackshirts specifically targeted Socialists for violence. They point to the word “socialism” in the name of the Nazi Party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but it is the scholarly consensus that this name was adopted simply to give the party a broad appeal, with the words National and German appealing to nationalists and Socialist and Workers appealing to those on the left. In reality, Hitler’s was a far-right movement, opposed to liberalism, democracy, egalitarianism, and pluralism. While those who spearhead fascist movements may sometimes emerge from the left, they invariably have turned to the right, and this is true even of the pre-Mussolini roots of fascism. Some trace fascism to Georges Sorel, a French syndicalist and proponent of violence for the overthrow of capitalism who, when he came to view general strikes as failing to overthrow democracy, which in his view was aristocratic, he and his followers moved to the far-right, becoming more nationalist. So it seems fascism often arises among those dissatisfied with the far-left. It is, however, distinctly a position of the right, focused usually on suppressing the left. Having already compared Trumpism to Mussolini’s brand of fascism, it is useful, then, to also compare it to that other fascist movement that followed on the heels of Mussolini’s. But there is resistance to this. In the wake of the recent assassination attempt on Trump, the violence was blamed on those in the media or on the left who have claimed that Trump is “literally Hitler.” I understand this idea, since of course, there is a well-known thought experiment about whether a time traveler would be ethically justified in murdering Hitler as an infant. The concept goes all the way back to science fiction stories published during World War II, and it has even shown up in Marvel’s Avengers and Deadpool films. It is such a common idea that the likelihood of it coming up in conversations about time travel has come to be called “Godwin’s law of time travel.” To be abundantly clear, Trump is NOT “literally” Hitler, and neither am I nor really anyone suggesting he is. Political violence is wrong and must not ever be condoned. Nevertheless, comparisons of Trump to Hitler cannot be off limits. We must not be bullied into ignoring potential parallels if we hope to learn from history. And the simple fact is that, if Trump did not want people associating him with Nazism, he should not associate himself with white supremacists. Aside from his dinner with Nick Fuentes, he has surrounded himself with individuals that espouse beliefs that are, at their heart, racist and find clear parallels in Nazi ideology. For example, his former strategist, Steve Bannon, whom I just released a minisode about called “Trump’s Rasputin,” used to run Breitbart News, which was exposed in 2017 as a platform for neo-Nazis. Then there is his chief speechwriter and policy advisor, Stephen Miller, who espouses the racist “Great Replacement theory” and was caught sharing neo-Nazi websites in his private emails. The signs are all there, and it takes a really weird denialism to claim there are no reasons to link Trump to neo-Nazis and no grounds for the comparison of Trumpism to Nazism.
One clear point of comparison, as mentioned previously, corresponds to the “identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause,” a defining characteristic of fascism according to Laurence Britt that is especially clear in Nazism. Often this characteristic of fascism goes hand in hand with another characteristic, that fascism is racist, as defined by Luis Britto Garcia, and this was obviously the case in Nazism. In other definitions, it is connected to the claims of victimhood, as in Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works and Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. A fascist regime finds a scapegoat and claims that they themselves and the nation as a whole are victims of that enemy, making the defeat or destruction of that enemy a unifying cause. As Umberto Eco recognized in Ur-Fascism, the fascist’s xenophobic promotion of an enemy threat, typically aimed at a marginalized group within that society, presents it as a plot or conspiracy. This aspect of fascism is overwhelmingly clear in Nazism’s antisemitism and claims of a Jewish enemy threat from within. Though Trump has support from and the occasional dinner date with white nationalists and neo-Nazis, he has not openly trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric since 2015, when his statements to the Republican Jewish Coalition seemed to echo Jewish World Conspiracy claims about their supposed control of governments through finance when he said, “You’re not gonna support me because I don’t want your money. You want to control your politicians, that’s fine.” Though he has not openly or explicitly represented Jews as an enemy or blamed them for any American woes, he certainly still does scapegoat marginalized groups. Since the beginning of his campaign, he has made immigrants the enemy, representing all Latin American migrants as violent criminals and all Muslims as terrorists. And among U.S. citizens, Trump and his followers present the LGBTQ+ community, and more and more specifically the transgender minority demographic, as conspirators involved in a plot to indoctrinate or convert children. Perhaps the clearest instance of Trump promoting an enemy threat, however, is his demonization of his political rivals. The Democratic party, which is politically centrist when compared to politics almost anywhere else in the world, is in his rhetoric a Deep State conspiracy to promote Socialism or Communism. Of course, Commies have long served as the red bogeymen of American politics, but it should be noted that Communists were also the vilified enemy of Nazis, and Hitler identified them all explicitly with the Jews, calling Communism a Jewish conspiracy, a pernicious myth that had already contributed to a great deal of antisemitic violence in Russia, for example. And it cannot be ignored that Trump’s rhetoric has recently begun to echo Hitler’s in this regard. As I mentioned previously, in a New Hampshire rally last November, Trump stated, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” and many have remarked on the fact that the use of the word “vermin” explicitly echoes Hitler’s terminology for Communists and Jews. What fewer have remarked on is his further statement in that same speech, when he said, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” He is again clearly echoing Hitler’s claims of the “enemies within” German society, identified by him, again, as Jews and Communists. But Trump wasn’t finished. The next month, he said in a speech that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” which many were quick to point out is very similar to a passage in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which he states, “All the great civilizations of the past decayed because the originally creative race died out, as a result of poisoning of the blood.” When these similarities were pointed out, Trump became the first U.S. President to have to deny that he has read Mein Kampf, and that alone should tell us that there are serious grounds for linking these two figures.
The likely origin of the MAGA slogan, despite the fact Hitler did at least once say something similar about making Germany great again.
It has sometimes been claimed that Trump’s MAGA slogan, Make America Great Again, was also inspired by Hitler, who it is said also claimed he would “make Germany great again.” This is misleading in some ways. First, it seems far more likely that Trump was actually just copying Ronald Reagan, whose campaign poster said “Let’s make America Great again.” Also, Hitler never used the term “Make Germany great again” as a campaign slogan. Hitler didn’t campaign. He never held elected office. Hitler did, however, use this phrase, at least once making the remark that Nazism was a “strong new idea to carry new strength which would make Germany great again.” This comparison is rather weak, in my estimation, as plenty of slogans promise a return to prosperity. However, it approaches closely to an important point of comparison. Both Trumpism and Nazism are based on a myth of a plot to betray the people. One of the formative circumstances that allowed Hitler’s Nazi party to grow was a myth that Germany had been “stabbed in the back.” Hitler did not invent this myth himself. It appeared after World War I, when Field Marshall von Hindenburg, who along with General Erich Ludendorff had been appointed to a position of executive power during the war, claimed that Germany did not emerge victorious and only signed the armistice because it had been betrayed by politicians who had “stabbed the army in the back.” But this was untrue. The generals had focused to much of their efforts on submarine warfare, and their disruption of shipping inadvertently brought America into the war. Germany was struggling with food scarcity and victory continued to elude them, until finally the generals themselves pushed for the formation of a new government that could undertake armistice negotiations. Despite these facts, Hindenburg’s “stab-in-the-back” myth became very popular, especially in the years after the signing of the Versailles Treaty, which blamed Germany for the war and saddled the country with reparations debt. In the years leading up to the rise of Nazism, the German people suffered greatly from inflation as the German mark became more and more worthless, such that one had to spend millions on basic subsistence. And who did they blame for this? Not the Kaiser, not the Iron Chancellor, not the generals who actually lost the war and pushed for armistice, but rather the Social Democrats and Socialists of the new Weimar Republic who inherited the whole mess. Then Hitler came along and said that Germany’s abject condition was the result of a conspiracy, by Communists and Jews, to bring Germany low so that they could control it, and only he and his Nazis could make Germany great again. In much the same way, Trump blames any and all of America’s problems on a plot driven by politicians on the left, or more nebulously, Deep State bureaucrats. His position on immigration is, for example, deeply tied to a conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party is soft on border security for the express purpose of stealing elections with illegal votes.
Since the economy had largely recovered from the Great Recession during the Obama administration, Trump had few concrete economic woes to galvanize his base. He only promised to grow the already robust economy that he inherited by 4% every year, a goal he never achieved even before the coronavirus recession. So instead of economic problems that he could blame on his “enemy within,” he blamed them for cultural changes that scared or enraged his base, suggesting that the left betrayed American values with their political correctness, or “wokeness” as he would say today, and that they assaulted traditional norms with their inclusivity and multiculturalism, making War on Christmas and whatnot. But in a few ways, he has echoed the old stab-in-the-back myth of Weimar Germany almost exactly, characterizing more than a dozen major treaties and international agreements as unfair to America, much as Hitler characterized the Versailles treaty. He withdrew the U.S. from global human rights organizations, refugee arrangements, climate agreements, diplomatic protocols, and arms treaties. He even threatened to withdraw from the World Trade Organization and The North American Treaty Organization, either of which would be catastrophic. And all of his withdrawals were based on his “America First” doctrine, which I should again remind everyone was originally, historically, the name of an organization made up in large part by literal Nazis who did not want America to enter the war against Nazi Germany. And now, after the coronavirus recession hit the economy so hard during his administration and supply chain disruptions contributed to rampant inflation during economic recovery under the next administration, Trump too points to economic woes and blames them on those he characterizes as enemies who betray the real Americans. Specifically it is the inflation he blames on the “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” It is certainly not the hyperinflation of post-WWI Germany, but the parallel is still striking. Even though the causes of Germany’s inflation were far more complicated, Hitler claimed it was “instigated and carried through by Jews,” his scapegoat. Likewise, Trump too oversimplifies this complex economic issue in order to lay blame on his “threat from within,” whom he mischaracterizes as “radical socialists.” He has claimed that there was no inflation during his administration, though there was about 2% year over year, and that under his presidency the economy was the strongest in the history of the world, which is, of course, a ridiculous claim. In the history of the world, we’d have to compare the American economy to India’s, which along with China’s was the largest economy for most of the Common Era. Even just looking at modern economies, China’s economy outpaced ours in purchasing power ten years ago. If we want to ignore China’s ascendance and presume, based on GDP, that America’s economy remains the largest in the world, the economy under Trump was still not our best economy. The era that marked the most prosperity in the U.S. was the postwar period, sometimes called the golden age of capitalism, from 1946 until the energy crisis of the 1970s, which led into a period of stagnant economic growth and high inflation, called stagflation. But like the stab-in-the-back myth, it doesn’t matter what’s true as long as you can convince your followers that the “enemies within” have betrayed the people and that only you, an outsider strongman leader, can bring the nation back to its former glory.
Paul von Hindenburg, originator of the stab-in-the-back myth and later, the man who appointed Hitler chancellor.
An obsession with the glorious past of Germany was one of the principal drives of Hitler as he entered the political sphere in 1919, along with his fixation on Jews and Communists as being the “invisible foes” who had brought Germany low. He was a dropout, a drifter, a failed artist, and later a soldier. His background could not be more different from Donald Trump’s, and this should be conceded. But like Trump, he took over a political party, the German Worker’s Party in Munich, and remade it through demagoguery to suit his purposes. Renaming them the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, Nazis for short, he looked to the example of Mussolini and his Fascists. He established his own version of the Italian squadristi, which he called the Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers. Like Mussolini’s blackshirts, Hitler’s storm troopers came to be known as brownshirts. In an interview, he made clear his intentions to follow in Mussolini’s footsteps, saying, “If a German Mussolini is given to Germany, people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.” So he set about planning his own march on the capital, with the express purpose of overthrowing the democratic Weimar Republic. To his cause he recruited General Ludendorff, the hero of the Great War, who he believed could unite Germany. He presented himself only as “The Drummer,” the harbinger who would announce the arrival of the next great German leader. But he had other ambitions. Upon hearing about a November 8th, 1923, meeting at a beerhall in Munich at which the three most prominent leaders of Bavaria intended to speak, Hitler feared that they intended to beat him to the punch and declare Bavarian independence from the republic. So he scrapped plans for a march on the capital and instead organized his coup to begin at the beerhall. With armed Nazis gathered outside, he entered with his pistol in the air and announced that the national revolution had begun. He then led the three Bavarian leaders into a private room at gunpoint, demanding they support his coup or be killed. Though he said Ludendorff was on board, the revolutionary government he outlined in that room would, he said, be directed by himself. When Ludendorff finally appeared, he felt Hitler had dishonestly maneuvered himself into the position of power that should belong to him. Nevertheless, he stuck with the insurrectionists. Unlike the March on Rome, however, and much like the January 6th Capitol attack, Hitler’s coup, called the Beer Hall Putsch, was an abject failure. Just as the legislators were evacuated from the U.S. capitol in 2021, the hostages in the beer hall in 1923, including the three prominent Bavarian leaders Hitler had forced to endorse his revolution, just kind of left amid later confusion. And just as Vice President Pence and other Republicans, whom Trump hoped would be kowtowed by the insurrection into stopping the certification of the election results, withstood the coercion and did their constitutional duty in 2021, in 1923, the Bavarian leaders promptly issued statements to local radio stations indicating that they were revoking any support for Hitler’s coup, revealing that their agreement in the beer hall had been made at gunpoint. With Nazi forces still occupying the beer hall, Ludendorff convinced Hitler to march on the Field Marshals’ Hall, the headquarters of one of these Bavarian leaders, and confront him again. Much like Trump in 2021, Ludendorff was convinced that, if he were present with the marchers, any opposition from police would simply melt away. This was not the case. In a shootout on the way to their destination, 16 Nazis and three policemen were killed. But much as January 6th was not the end of Trumpism, the Beer Hall Putsch was not the end of Nazism. Just as January 6th insurrectionists are today praised as heroes and martyrs by those on the right, Nazis would go on to commemorate November 8th every year, to praise the “old fighters” of the Beer Hall Putsch as heroes, and to remember the fallen insurrectionists as martyrs.
Just as Trump now faces criminal charges for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and has been indicted specifically for “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding,” so too Hitler and Ludendorff, as well as others, were indicted and prosecuted for high treason in the wake of their efforts to overthrow Weimar democracy. The charge of high treason in this case referred specifically to efforts to subvert or change the German constitution through violence. By all rights, the defendants should have been tried in the state court in Leipzig, but Bavarian authorities refused to recognize this law and tried them right there in Munich, where there remained much sympathy for Hitler’s abortive putsch. And much as Trump has been aided by his own Supreme Court appointees by being awarded immunity for certain of his acts, a powerful Bavarian court composed of right-wing reactionary judges would also intercede on Hitler’s behalf. His case was assigned to the Bavarian People’s Court, which was known to circumvent the traditional legal process by issuing swift verdicts and allowing for no appeals. It was presided over by judges and citizens, but since the citizens were always hand-picked by the judges, and since there was no system of judicial review, the judges of this court were considered “judicial kings,” free to remake law according to their partisan whims. And they were decidedly right-wing partisans. In the five years since they had been established, they found right-wing defendants in political violence cases to be not guilty more than 92% of the time, whereas leftist defendants they only found innocent 25% of the time, usually convicting them and giving them much longer sentences than they gave to those on the right. To left-wing defendants, they gave death sentences about half the time, and they never sentenced a right-wing defendant to death. Hitler’s trial was a media circus, and the public followed it in newspapers as if it were a serialized novel, as one newspaper put it. It was feared that the trial was making the country look bad on the world stage. Critics on all sides dismissed the trial as a farce, a “deplorable comedy.” Hitler used the trial as a platform to spread his conspiracy theories, and despite being tried for treason, Hitler’s popularity among many did not wane. He was depicted as a martyr, the victim of a corrupt system. It was suggested that the prosecutors themselves were treasonous, though of course they were only doing their duty. Fear ran high that Nazis would breach the courtroom and carry Hitler off to undertake another putsch. During actual testimony, Hitler swore he would take revenge, saying that “a time will come when today’s accused become the accusers!” In the end, the well-respected Ludendorff was acquitted, and Hitler, along with three coconspirators, was given the absolute minimum sentence of five years. The right-wing chief judge praised Hitler’s motives even as he convicted him, calling his intentions “patriotic…noble…[and] unselfish.” Though Hitler should have faced deportation as an Austrian citizen, the judge disregarded this law simply because the defendant had served in the German army and “considers himself to be German.” Cheers and Nazi salutes filled the street when Hitler appeared at a window after the verdict, and his subsequent, rather comfortable stay at Landsberg prison afforded Hitler the time to write his manifesto, Mein Kampf. He would end up only serving eight months of his sentence, and his conviction and imprisonment would do nothing to prevent his eventual rise to power.
The Beer Hall Putsch
Of course, the differences are apparent. Hitler actually marched with and clashed with police alongside his insurrectionists. He did not orchestrate it from a position of power. His intentions to overthrow the government were explicit. Yet again, the parallels give me pause. Trump’s efforts to subvert the election also failed and he too was indicted for it. Sympathetic judges have worked to ensure he too will not be held responsible. His supporters believe him a martyr and victim of a witch hunt or conspiracy, further radicalizing many in his base. And his trials have drawn much media attention, allowing Trump the opportunity to fan the flames of conspiracism on which his political career is fueled. Perhaps most analogous is the lying on which both relied. Trump’s problem with lying is well known. Over the four years of his presidency, the Washington Post documented more than 30 thousand lies he told. This did not cease, of course, after his ouster. There is the most obvious lie, dubbed the “Big Lie” by the American Press, of election fraud, and there have been numerous lies regarding his various criminal trials. He has lied about infringement of his right to testify, about the kind of defenses he is allowed to make, about paying bail, and most egregious, about his entire prosecution having been orchestrated by his political rivals for purely political reasons. In 1924, during his own trial, Hitler too took the opportunity to tell many lies, about his background, for example, about the timeline of his involvement in the Nazi Party, and the size of the party, vastly inflating his number of followers, which we might compare to Trump’s obsession with crowd size. While Trump’s lies about election fraud have sometimes been likened to the stab-in-the-back myth, they are more typically called his Big Lie, which is itself a reference to Hitler and his political philosophy about lying. And I think this is the most pertinent comparison to be made. In Mein Kampf, Hitler told the world that he thought lying was an especially effective political tool. He coined the phrase “the big lie,” explaining that in it
there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
Though in his book, he is attributing such big lies to his “invisible foes,” Communists and Jews, historian Jeffrey Herf has argued convincingly what I think we can all clearly recognize: that during the course of his regime, Hitler cynically employed this propaganda strategy himself. And I think that this description of the “big lie” also describes clearly how most Trump supporters refuse to disbelieve his false claims and never see him for what he is, continually making excuses for him and searching for alternative explanations, typically resorting to conspiracism in the absence of clear evidence to exonerate their leader.
It must also be emphasized that when Hitler did come to power, it was not through his unlawful coup. After his release from prison, he devoted himself to accumulating power legally. Indeed, it became something of a joke how careful he was to remain within the letter of the law, such that the press gave him the nickname “Hitler the Legal.” While Mussolini may have used his insurrection to attain a position of power and then worked within the system for some years before seizing absolute dictatorial power, Hitler’s putsch had failed and he was forced to work within his country’s electoral system for far longer before consolidating and seizing dictatorial power. After his release from prison, the Weimar Republic chose a right-wing president in Hindenburg, the originator of the stab-in-the-back myth. While the Nazis and other nationalists hoped this would mean the end of the Republic, Hindenburg at first governed in strict accordance with the Constitution. As inflation eased and the German economy recovered, extremist parties lost ground to moderates in ensuing elections, and Hindenburg played by the rules. Only when the American Stock Market crashed in 1929 and the Great Depression reached Germany did he begin to display autocratic tendencies, dissolving parliament because they would not pass his budget. With deepening economic problems came further extremist activities on the left and the right. Moderates lost ground and Nazism rose in popularity as a perceived bulwark against Communism. As Hindenburg struggled to govern through executive decree, running through numerous ineffectual chancellors who more than once dissolved parliament in hopes of finding the next one to be more cooperative, Nazi power grew in the Reichstag. Eventually, in 1933, Hitler was in a position to demand the chancellorship. At first, his government did not look so very different from others that preceded it. It too was composed of a coalition of establishment parties. Besides his, only two other cabinet positions were held by Nazis. Hindenburg and others, including industrialists who had helped him get to where he was, believed his position to be weak. In the view of many, he was an uneducated buffoon, a “roaring gorilla,” as one newspaper editor called him, whose radical aspirations would be tempered by the reality of government. It was thought that he would not last in his position, or that if he did, he would have to play by the rules like everyone else, which would itself quell Nazi agitation. But then four weeks into his administration, a Dutch communist broke into the Reichstag at night and started a fire, and Hitler seized on this event as the first sign of a Communist uprising in Germany. He introduced a bill that he called the Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich, otherwise known as the Enabling Bill, giving him unprecedented but temporary emergency powers to deal with the perceived threat of Communism. Again, it was all perfectly legal to change or even suspend the Weimar constitution through an act of parliament, and those who voted for the bill knew what it meant. It allowed Hitler to pass his own laws without parliamentary or presidential approval, even if those laws violated the constitution. It was essentially the founding document of the Nazi Reich, making possible all the repressions, the persecution, the warmaking, and the atrocities that would follow. Yet still, as many a Fascist do, Hitler insisted on keeping up the pretense of democracy, retaining the trappings of the republic. The law only granted him his emergency powers for a period of four years, but he simply kept renewing the law by fiat, because the law allowed him to do so, and occasionally he would still make a show of convening “parliament,” though by then it was just an assemblage of Nazis gathered to applaud his pronouncements. A year after seizing power, he purged the country of all he considered disloyal, executing around a hundred or more people and arresting more than a thousand.
More than a decade after his failed coup, Hitler, having since seized absolute power, addresses his Nazis in the same Beer Hall in commemoration of the event’s anniversary. (AP photo)
After releasing the first part of this series, I had a longtime listener state on social media that they used to like this podcast but that “making comparisons like these is demented.” I knew when I decided to produce these episodes that they would upset some listeners. My hope is that some who, like this listener, believe such comparisons to be unwarranted might come to realize that they are not as groundless as they think. Parallels have been noted by numerous legacy news media outlets, explored in many peer-reviewed academic journal articles, studied by historians and described at length in recent books. To suggest that all of this analysis is being done by demented or irrational people is close to believing in a vast media conspiracy, which is itself baseless and untenable. Those who suggest that all the people sounding this alarm are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS, a pejorative way of dismissing continued criticism of the former president, miss the simple fact that, when so many reasonable and intelligent people are preoccupied with the idea that he is a credible threat to democracy, it means there are concrete reasons for them to be concerned. I have tried to assemble the reasons and draw the parallels here in a clear and organized way, but I am not alone in seeing these parallels. Like Hitler, Donald Trump was underestimated as something of a buffoon by most establishment politicians and pundits when he came to power legally in 2016. As was thought about Nazis in 1933, many believed that a Trump presidency would mean the de-radicalization of many extremists in his base, as there would be less for them to get worked up over when their candidate won. Many also thought, as they did of Hitler’s government in ’33, that Trump’s government would not end up being so very different from other Republican administrations even though he was a government outsider. None of these predictions were accurate then or now. Just as Hitler was quite open about his intentions to seize absolute power, even if just for a limited time, Trump too has made the same thing clear. He more than once threatened to deploy active duty military domestically, considering declarations of martial law openly during the George Floyd protests, asking, according to his Secretary of Defense, why he can’t just have soldiers shoot protesters. And also, according to one Homeland Security official, as well as the findings of the January 6 Committee, he also considered declaring martial law on January 6th. These threats have since become even more transparent, as during his current presidential campaign, he has promised to deploy troops to the southern border and to invoke the Insurrection Act in order use the military as a domestic police force, all while promising “retribution” and explicitly stating he would arrest and jail lawmakers and prosecutors who have moved against him. As Hitler was before him, we know that Trump is obsessed with loyalty, and we also know that he wants to perform an unrestrained purge of any who are disloyal to him. We see this in the simple fact that turnover in his executive office and cabinet was astronomically higher than previous administrations. He just fires anyone who pushes back. It’s his thing. But he has also tried to implement a more extensive purge, something called Schedule F, which would make it possible for a president to not just fire his own political appointees, but also to wipe out while swathes of the federal government, terminating any civil servants deemed disloyal to the President and replacing them with appointees. His organization already has lists of inexperienced devotees and sycophants who will follow his every order, ready for appointment. Schedule F would massively increase the president’s personal control over every aspect of the federal government, stripping away the protection of as many as 50,000 public sector employees, career civil service personnel whom Trump and his organization portray as a Deep State conspiracy. It must be emphasized that I am not suggesting such mass firings are the same as extralegal executions, nor am I suggesting Trump would order murders. I am only indicating his willingness to purge any who do not fall lockstep in line. The thing is, it’s hard to tell what a fascist is capable of before they seize absolute power. And just like Hitler before him, Trump has explicitly said that he will take dictatorial power, but only for a limited time. In his exclusive town hall with Sean Hannity on Fox News, he was prompted to promise America that he “would never abuse power as retribution against anybody,” and he responded: “Except for day one.” And then he immediately doubled down, tellingly paraphrasing Hannity’s prompt as the question: “You’re not gonna be a dictator, are you?” and answering again, “No, no, no… other than day one…. After that I’m not a dictator.” And yes, perhaps even a Trump with dictatorial powers would not end up a literal Hitler. Perhaps Trumpism would not prove capable of producing such inhuman atrocities as Nazism produced. But why on Earth should we give him a chance to prove how different he really is? Far better to never allow him to retake power. In the Weimar Republic, members of parliament were intimidated into signing Hitler’s Enabling Law. If, on the many occasions when Hitler made it clear what he was and what he would do, the people had believed him, then perhaps he would never have risen to supreme power in Germany. And so again, I say of Trump, he has shown us who he is, and we must believe him.
This election year, remember, even if Trump is not “literally Hitler,” and even if it is unfair to call him a Nazi, it is undeniable that he is the favorite of neo-Nazi voters and that he continues to give valid reasons for concern of his authoritarian tendencies. That alone should be enough for America to vote against him and protest any further moves he makes to steal the election.
Further Reading
“Breitbart Exposé Confirms: Far-Right News Site a Platform for the White Nationalist ‘Alt-Right.’” Southern Poverty Law Center, 6 Oct. 2017, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/10/06/breitbart-expos%C3%A9-confirms-far-right-news-site-platform-white-nationalist-alt-right.
Cillizza, Chris, and Brenna Williams. “15 times Donald Trump praised authoritarian rulers.” CNN, 2 July 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/politics/donald-trump-dictators-kim-jong-un-vladimir-putin/index.html.
Evon, Dan. “Hitler and Trump: Common Slogans?” Snopes, 4 March 2016, www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-germany-great-again/.
Hardinges, Nick. “'Unified Reich' Reference Contained in Video Posted to Trump's Truth Social Account?” Snopes, 21 May 2024, www.snopes.com/fact-check/unified-reich-trump/.
Hayden, Michael Edison. “Emails Confirm Miller’s Twin Obsessions: Immigrants and Crime.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 25 Nov. 2019, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/25/emails-confirm-millers-twin-obsessions-immigrants-and-crime.
Hett, Benjamin Carter. The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic. Henry Holt and Company, 2018.
King, David. The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany. W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.
Lombroso, Daniel, and Yoni Appelbaum. “'Hail Trump!': White Nationalists Salute the President-Elect.” The Atlantic, 21 Nov. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/.
Narea, Nicole. “Donald Trump’s Long History of Enabling White Supremacy, Explained.” Vox, 29 Nov. 2022, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23484314/trump-fuentes-ye-dinner-white-nationalism-supremacy.
Nunn, Joseph. “Trump Wants to Use the Military Against His Domestic Enemies. Congress Must Act.” Brennan Center for Justice, 17 Nov. 2023, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trump-wants-use-military-against-his-domestic-enemies-congress-must-act.
Richards, Zoe, and Peter Nicholas. “Trump once complained that his generals weren't like Hitler's, book says.” NBC News, 8 Aug. 2022, www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-complained-generals-werent-hitlers-book-says-rcna42114.
The Rise of Adolf Hitler. Edited by Annette Dufner, Greenhaven Press, 2003.
The Rise of Nazi Germany. Edited by Don Nardo, Greenhaven Press, 1999.
Smith, Peter, and Tiffany Stanley. “US Jews Upset with Trump’s Latest Rhetoric Say He Doesn’t Get To Tell Them How To Be Jewish.” Associated Press, 25 March 2024, apnews.com/article/trump-jewish-voters-democrats-antisemitism-a43bf6f6266d9c6a4b761b82281aa512.
“Trump says maybe U.S. will have a president for life someday.” PBS News, 4 March 2018, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-maybe-u-s-will-have-a-president-for-life-someday.
Ullrich, Volker. Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler’s Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis. W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.
