By Michael Randall
The United States faces the danger of modern history possibly repeating itself, given the parallels between Adolph Hitler in Germany and Donald Trump in the USA. Because Americans don’t have the experience of living under a dictatorship, millions of voters may elect Trump in November, a man who has tyrannical plans similar to those of Hitler, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un and about 30 to 40 other countries’ autocratic “great leaders.”
Trump is backed by “Project 2025,” (call it “P-25”) over 900 pages of detailed plans created by the Heritage Foundation, which would radically change the nature of the US government and the lives of US citizens. In a recent interview, Russell Vought, former Trump administration official and one of the leaders of P-25, said Trump will form “shadow agencies” to control the policies and work of the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, and the White House office of Legal Counsel. They would work to the benefit of P-25’s plans and be under the control of its creators. While P-25 merely pretends to take the nation in a more conservative direction, that is a deception, like putting makeup on a den of rattlesnakes and calling them gorgeous.
Laughably, Trump has claimed he is unaware of P-25. Many of its authors served in his administration and support his election bid, and many of them are deeply devoted to him. However, many others merely see him as a useful fool to advance their more autocratic plans. Recently, convicted MAGA martyr and “War Room” motor mouth, Steve Bannon, told an interviewer, “The MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than Donald Trump. They (leftists) will look back fondly at Donald Trump. They’ll ask: where’s Trump when we need him?”
Adolph Hitler became leader of Germany’s Nazi Party in 1921 as the party started to grow in power. Germany was the most highly educated, industrialized nation in Europe. But millions of its citizens were sucked in by Hitler’s angry, inflamed speeches about Aryan racial purity, and his rants against Jews, disabled people, communists, gays, blacks, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others. By the end of the war in 1945, over 8 million Germans had become Nazi Party members.
People who are against Trump in the coming election do not understand how other folks can follow such a man who screams about immigrants (“criminals and rapists”), the federal civil service (swamp dwellers), and the Justice Department (“unfairly” prosecuting him for various crimes). They do not understand how so many Republican elected officials have reluctantly embraced him and yielded to his hateful ideas.
They are dismayed at key Republican leaders like William Barr and Nikki Haley, who once were adamantly opposed to Trump, but now have fallen in line with others and say they support him and will vote for him in November. All these folks are terrified of their home district constituents’ avid support for Trump, and terrified of losing their elected offices and their future career advancement in the Trumpian Party. They are making a deal with the devil.
Trump has urged Christians to vote for him in November, telling them they will only have to vote for him once. (Really? No more elections?) Throughout history, these are classic patterns followed by dictators everywhere. They destroy existing democratic rules and long-used processes for sharing power in society. They crush their opponents, then draw all power unto themselves.
When he was President, Trump considered employing the “Insurrection Act” to use US armed forces as police to suppress Black Lives Matter protesters. After his defeat in the 2020 election, he considered using the same emergency powers act to deny the election results and stay in power. Instead, he created the invasion of Congress and the violent chaos of January 6, 2021.
If elected this coming November, he likely will use the Insurrection Act to undertake the mass deportation of as many as 10,000,000 undocumented immigrants. He will gut the federal civil service and replace its employees with his own loyalists, then use the Justice Department as an instrument to prosecute his enemies. Hitler pursued a parallel path in Nazi Germany.
Early in 1933, Hitler became Germany’s Chancellor and the country’s parliament granted him “temporary” emergency powers for four years. Shortly after becoming Chancellor, Hitler abolished the powers of Germany’s states and made non-Nazi political parties illegal. He made sure that those “temporary” powers remained in effect for twelve years until Germany was defeated by the Allies in 1945.
When Hitler became Chancellor, the Nazi Party opened its first concentration camp at Dachau, and the party started to send its political enemies there. Eventually, the Nazis opened over 44,000 incarceration sites (including urban ghettos). Historically, in many places, once such facilities are created, they evolve and grow. Like a guy with a hammer who always looks for a nail, Hitler’s camps eventually gathered and murdered over 6,000,000 Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals, Poles, Russian civilians, Soviet POWs, Serbs, disabled people, Roma (gypsies), and others.
As Trump has said, if elected he will construct massive deportation camps along the US southern border. Like Hitler’s camps, what will Trump’s deportation camps evolve into? Millions of normal Americans support this man’s election in November. Do they really want him to do what he says he will do? If so, for one reason or another, many of these same Trump supporters (and other American citizens) will end up in his camps, as well as the illegal migrants he wants to target initially.
Historically, that is the normal process of creating a dictatorship: many of its early supporters are destroyed by it later. Maybe they complain too loudly about one of the “great leader’s” policies. Perhaps they blunder across some invisible line. Maybe they offend one of the dictator’s powerful officials in some way. Suddenly, they disappear.
During the Nazis’ rise, Hitler held secret meetings with major industrialists to get their financial support for various Nazi Party needs. Many of those people felt they could control him and “tame” the party, but soon found out they could not. Trump’s campaign has also collared many major business leaders in the US to support his campaign financially.
Venture capitalist Mike Moritz recently was interviewed on CNBC, and said that many business leaders think they can control Trump. Moritz says they are “Making the same mistake as all people who back authoritarians.” He asserts that those wealthy financiers delude themselves, thinking “That he will not do what he says or promises.”
In August 1934, Hitler assumed the additional office of President. Combining the two offices into one, his power became absolute and unchallengeable by any branch of German government. Hitler abolished opposing political parties, suspended Germans citizens’ civil rights, and in late June 1934 ordered the execution of many political opponents in a slaughter known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” He freed Nazi Party members from prison, some of whom had been convicted of murdering his opponents.
Trump wrote on his social media platform in December 2022 about his loss in the 2020 election, claiming that “A massive fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” If elected, he will strive to terminate Americans’ civil liberties and undermine the rule of law through his promise to pardon convicted January 6 insurrectionists, and use the military against undocumented immigrants, protestors, and journalists. When he feels the need (as he already has said is justified), he will suspend the US Constitution to enforce his will and become unchallengeable, just as Hitler did.
Many of his disciples actually support that, although a huge number of them cannot be convinced he is serious about carrying out these acts. Many of us have seen TV reporters interview his supporters at Trump rallies. Those folks say, in effect, “Oh, he just talks that way. He wouldn’t really do those things.” How can they possibly believe he will not carry out the plans he has described, and not act on his expressed desires?
Recently, someone told me, “I think ‘Trumpers’ would take their kids’ food money and send it to him.” It is true that Trump has received millions of dollars from ordinary folks to pay his legal fees. He has convinced them that all the crimes he has been charged with are bogus, even though three citizen juries (one in a criminal case, and two in civil cases), heard the evidence from both sides and convicted him of business fraud, sexual assault, and defamation.
If he wins in November, Trump will have the Justice Department drop the various other pending charges against him. In such a situation as that, courts likely will become more afraid of his growing autocratic power, and perhaps set aside his current 34 felony convictions, and his civil liability for one sexual assault and defamation case. (Two dozen other women have accused him of similar sex crimes.)
It is hard to fathom how a man like Trump could attract such a large following, seemingly based only on his appeals to people’s fear of foreigners and strangers, and resentment of the government. But his disciples will pay a high price for the pleasant experience of “making liberals cry,” because they have no idea what cruelties and violence Trump and his “P-25” followers will unleash if he is given Presidential powers again.
In this November’s election we will find out what kind of people we are, and clarify the kind of country in which we want to live.
