In
late 2016 and early 2017, in the months
following Donald Trump’s election, a number of
my essays about him were posted on the History
News Network. Some, like “A Lesson from the Nazi
Era Is that We Must Be Wary”,
mentioned parallels between Hitler and Trump,
as well as those who supported them, but
cautioned “Trump is no Nazi or fascist...and
history never exactly repeats itself. Our
president-elect has some resemblances to
Hitler...and the conditions that elevated him
to power have some parallels.but he is a
unique phenomenon.”
Now,
almost seven years later, there is more
evidence that the parallels are even closer
than I feared in 2016-17. As with Hitler, the
truth about Trump’s true character has become
clearer with each passing year.
Let’s
first take the question of truth-telling.
Right after Trump’s last State of the Union
address on 4 February 2020, historian Heather
Cox Richardson wrote in
her “Letters from an American” newsletter
(which has more than a million subscribers):
“Trump began by touting the successes of his
administration, but it was all lies. I mean,
it was gobsmacking lies.”
Later
in a 2020 essay, I quoted two
books on Trump’s lies and false statements.
“In 2018, Michiko Kakutani’s The
Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age
of Trump wrote
of the ‘monumentally serious consequences of
his [Trump’s] assault on truth.’ At the
beginning of June 2020, Donald
Trump and His Assault on Truth: The
President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and
Flat-Out Lies, by
several members of The
Washington Post Fact
Checker team, appeared on bookshelves. It
declared, ‘Donald Trump, the most mendacious
president in U.S. history . . . . [is] not
known for one big lie—just a constant stream
of exaggerated, invented, boastful, purposely
outrageous, spiteful, inconsistent, dubious
and false claims.’”
“Most mendacious president in
U.S. history”? Compare Volker Ullrich in
his Hitler:
Ascent: 1889-1939 :
“Former [German] Finance Minister Lutz
Schwerin von Krosigk identified ‘bottomless
mendacity’ as Hitler’s primary personal
characteristic. ‘He wasn’t even honest towards
his most intimate confidants,’ Krosigk
recalled. ‘In my opinion, he was so thoroughly
untruthful that he could no longer recognise
the difference between lies and truth.’”
What
else Ullrich says in that passage regarding
Hitler also reminds us of Trump:
“The artistry with which
Hitler was able to conceal his real
intentions from both friends and foes was
another main key to his success as a
politician. . . . Hitler—the consummate role
player who had repeatedly got the better of
his conservative allies—continued to fool
them....[He was able] to subjugate his
conservative coalition partners ...although
they were convinced that they had co-opted
him for their ends.”
An
older biographer of Hitler, Alan
Bullock, adds
another wrinkle to
the political operations of Hitler. His
political ideology was an “instrument of his
ambition,” rather than a ironclad guidance
system. Remind one of Trump and his dealings
with the Evangelicals?
Besides
his mendacity, his utter disregard of truth,
Trump resembles Hitler in his ability to
exploit the anger and fears of voters. In
Hitler’s case, it was in regard to German
losses in World War I; towards minorities,
especially Jews; towards the WWI victors; and
toward the Great Depression, which hit Germany
even worse than it did the USA. As Ullrich
wrote, “Like no one else, he was able to
express what his audience thought and felt: he
exploited their fears, prejudices and
resentments.” With Trump, he has exploited
fears of illegal immigrants and educated
liberal, big-city elites. According to
an article
this month in
the British paper The
Guardian historian
Richardson believes that exploiting anger was
also crucial to Trump and “he quite
deliberately tapped into that emotional anger
that he could spark with racism and sexism.”
Since
Trump’s election there has been a steady and
increasing number of writings that have warned
us about increasing threats to our democracy.
The main dangers? Trump, his followers, and
all the craven Republican politicians who cave
into Trumpism. One of the first sources was
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How
Democracies Die.
They are Harvard political scientists, and the
book came out in January 2018, only a year
into Trump’s presidency.
The
authors wrote that most democracies since the
early 1990s have not died because of “military
coups and other violent seizures of power,”
but because “elected leaders have subverted
democratic institutions.” They realize that
Hitler was more the exception than the rule in
being a democratically-selected “subverter”
already in the 1930s, but they pay more
attention to modern-day subverters of
democracy like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and
Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey.
In
Chapter 8, “Trump's First Year: An
Authoritarian Report Card,” they outline some
of his early attempts to tar and discredit
those who opposed him. He “began his tenure by
launching blistering rhetorical attacks-on his
opponents. He called the media the ‘enemy of
the American people,’ questioned judges'
legitimacy,” and tried to rewrite “the rules
to tilt the playing field against opponents.”
The
authors continue by writing, “Never has a
president flouted so many unwritten rules so
quickly....Where President Trump really stands
out from his predecessors is in his
willingness to challenge unwritten rules of
greater consequence, including norms that are
essential to the health of democracy.” As
examples, they mention his nepotism and “his
unprecedented conflicts of interest.” And as a
preview of much worse to come after the
publication of their 2018 book, they add:
“President Trump also violated core democratic
norms when he openly challenged the legitimacy
of elections [claiming
“millions” of illegal voters in the 2016
presidential election]....No
major politician in more than a century had
questioned the integrity of the American
electoral process.”
Levitsky
and Ziblatt then write about the harm to
democracy if citizens start believing that
elections are unfair and add: “Exacerbating
this loss of faith is President Trump's
abandonment of basic norms of respect for the
media. An independent press is a bulwark of
democratic institutions; no democracy can live
without it.”
Another
problem that the authors identify which has
just gotten worse is this: “Trump's deviance
has been tolerated by the Republican Party,
which has helped make it acceptable to much of
the Republican electorate.”
A
little over a year ago,
Pulitzer-Prize-winning-author David
Leonhardt wrote
an article in
which he quoted co-author Levitsky about the
political situation in late 2022: “The
Republican Party . . . can only be described
as not committed to democracy.” And Levitsky
“was significantly more concerned about
American democracy” than when How
Democracies Die came
out in 2018.
Neither
Leonhardt nor the co-authors Levitsky and
Ziblatt believe that Donald Trump is the only
threat to our democracy. Other threats include
such factors as the discrepancy between the
popular vote and electoral college; the makeup
and power of the Supreme Court; the
gerrymandering of political districts; and the
fact that each state, regardless of size, gets
the same number of Senate seats--thus
(regarding the Senate) giving one voter in
Wyoming or North Dakota the same voting power
as 59 California voters.
Yet,
Trump and his loyalist voters are a major
threat and, as with Hitler, perhaps the
biggest one. For a variety of reasons, Trump
now dominates the Republican Party, and as
Leonhardt wrote many Republican officials and
2024 nominees for state positions who oversee
elections “are questioning a basic premise of
democracy: That the losers of an election are
willing to accept defeat.”
Although
Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party has
most recently been demonstrated by his nixing
of one candidate for Speaker of the House (Tom
Emmer of Minnesota) and approval of the
eventual winner, 2020-election-denier Mike
Johnson, a distinct minority of
Republicans and/or conservatives have long
opposed Trump. In 2018 Trump’s fellow
Republican and outgoing senator from Arizona,
Jeff Flake stated:
2017
was a year which saw the truth—objective,
empirical, evidence-based truth—more battered
and abused than any other in the history of
our country, at the hands of the most powerful
figure in our government. It was a year which
saw the White House enshrine “alternative
facts” into the American lexicon, as
justification for what used to be known simply
as good old-fashioned falsehoods. It was the
year in which an unrelenting daily assault on
the constitutionally protected free press was
launched by that same White House, an assault
that is as unprecedented as it is unwarranted.
“The enemy of the people,” was what the
president of the United States called the free
press in 2017.
In
2020 I pointed out on this site how “Conservative Pundits
Continue to Pummel Trump.” Most
of these pundits were conservative columnists
like David Brooks, who referred to Trump “as a
damaged narcissist who is unable to see the
true existence of other human beings except
insofar as they are good or bad for himself.”
Also
on this site, just a few months ago, I quoted a
conservative former judge who testified before
the House January 6 Committee that “Donald
Trump and his allies and supporters are a
clear and present danger to American
democracy.” In addition, McKay Coppins’ new
book on conservative Utah Senator Mitt
Romney, Romney:
A Reckoning,
quotes the senator as writing about Trump in
2016, “He is unquestionably mentally unstable,
and he is racist, bigoted, misogynistic,
xenophobic, vulgar and prone to violence. . .
. There is simply no rational argument that
could lead me to vote for someone with those
characteristics.”
Also
recently appearing was The
Conspiracy to End America by
Stuart Stephens, who ran Romney’s presidential
campaign in 2012. He wrote, “What happened
within the Republican Party in 2016 was a
repeat of the rise of national socialism [the
Nazis] in the 1920s and 1930s in Germany.” And
in an interview he
added, “I think the parallels are striking.
What happened in Germany was that the ruling
class . . . realized that they had lost touch
with the working class, and they thought that
they could control Hitler, that he would be
someone who could connect them to the working
class and take them into power. And it's
really exactly what happened with the
Republican Party. Mitch McConnell said that he
was confident that Trump would change, that
they would change Trump, that they were the
mainstream conservative[s] and Trump would
adapt to that.”
All
of these parallels don’t mean that
Trump
is another Hitler, or that his
followers
would kill Jews. Parallels and
comparisons
don’t mean two things (or
humans)
are exactly alike. As the
political
philosopher Isaiah Berlin
once reminded us,
“What matters is to
understand
a particular situation in its
full
uniqueness, the particular men and
events
and dangers, the particular hopes
and
fears which are actively at work in a
particular
place at a particular time.”
Nevertheless,
as I wrote in 2016, “A
Lesson from the Nazi
Era Is that We Must Be Wary.”
