The American people and the world know a great deal about Donald Trump. Even though he is an expert and compulsive liar, he is candid and transparent in his behavior and thinking in many ways. If he takes over in 2025 and becomes the country’s first dictator, the American people and their elites cannot say that they were surprised. When the authoritarian speaks always be sure to believe him or her. It is essential for your survival.
Donald Trump believes that he is some type of God or prophet, all-knowing, who is on a divine mission to take power. He has stated as much in his campaign videos, speeches, interviews, and other communications. Following the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, the belief has only strengthened.
Perhaps most troubling (and too little discussed by the mainstream news media and political class for reasons of denial and fear) is Donald Trump’s repeated channeling of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. Trump has almost literally quoted Adolf Hitler and Mein Kampf with his threats and promises to purify the blood of the country by removing the “human vermin” from within its borders. Like Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, Donald Trump repeatedly threatens to get revenge and retribution against his enemies. Trump has also threatened to censor if not outright ban freedom of the press and freedom of speech because he views the news media as “the enemy of the people.” The Nazis used the slur “lugenpresse.”
Donald Trump allegedly keeps a copy of Hitler’s speeches near his bed. He has praised and met with overt neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Retired United States Marine Corps general Mike Kelley, who served as Trump’s second White House chief of staff, has explained in interviews how the corrupt ex-president praised Adolf Hitler, saying that “he did good things.” Donald Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, alleges that he said that disabled people “should just die.” i.e. be “mercy killed.” The Nazis murdered disabled people as a way of “purifying” the “Aryan race” and emptying the hospital beds to make space for military casualties from the war.
If he returns to power in 2025, Donald Trump and his regime will immediately create a massive concentration camp system to deport millions of non-white undocumented residents, migrants, and refugees. Donald Trump is a racial authoritarian who will systematically take away the rights of black and brown Americans more generally.
A second Trump regime will also take away the civil and human rights of LGBTQ people as well. Women will also see their reproductive rights and freedoms further taken away. The Nazis also enacted such policies in Germany.
Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and other white supremacists played a leading role in the Jan. 6 coup attempt and terrorist attack on the Capitol. Trump has attempted to valorize these Jan. 6 terrorists as sacred heroes of the MAGA cause, a group he will release from prison when/if he takes power in 2025. Hate crimes and other forms of right-wing domestic terrorism and political violence (including mass shootings) greatly increased during Trump’s time in office.
Donald Trump has taken over the Republican Party and remade it in his image as a type of political personality cult and de facto political crime family and fascist front organization for his MAGA movement. There is now no meaningful distinction between MAGA and the Republican Party.
In all, Trump is not just a random or generic aspiring dictator or demagogue. He is of a specific type: Donald Trump is a textbook example of the Führer principle applied in 21st-century America. The Holocaust Encyclopedia offers this basic explanation of the Führer principle:
With the passage of the Enabling Law (March 23, 1933), the German parliament (Reichstag) transferred legislative power to Hitler’s cabinet and thus lost its reason for being. By mid-July, the Nazi Party was the only political party left in Germany. The other parties had been either outlawed by the government or had dissolved themselves under pressure. The Reichstag became a rubber stamp for Hitler’s dictatorship.
The Führer’s will became the foundation for all legislation. Indeed, with the establishment of Hitler’s dictatorship, the Führer principle (Führerprinzip) came to guide all facets of German life. According to this principle, authority—in government, the party, economy, family, and so on—flowed downward and was to be obeyed unquestioningly.
Upon Hindenburg’s death in August 1934, Hitler had himself designated as both Führer and Reich Chancellor. Armed forces personnel swore an oath of loyalty to him in this function. While as Reich Chancellor Hitler’s personal power remained limited by the laws of the German state, as Führer his personal power was unlimited and his will was equated with the destiny of the German nation.
With the recent decision by the right-wing extremist justices on the Supreme Court to give Donald Trump and his Republican-fascist successors near unlimited criminal immunity an American Führer principle has been codified into American law.
In a 2016 essay at the Washington Post, historian Peter Ross Range sounded an early alarm about Trump’s echoing of Adolf Hitler. Range’s warnings were eerily prophetic.
There. He came out and said it. “I alone,” averred Donald Trump in his speech Thursday night accepting the Republican nomination for president, can save America, save the world, save you.
Rarely in modern political memory has a candidate so personalized a candidacy. Certainly, no other U.S. political figure comes to mind who dared make such an exclusive claim on truth and light. A savior complex may have befallen some of them, but who was bold enough to voice it so plainly as Trump?
That does not mean there is no historical precedent for campaigning — and ruling — on a platform of messianic certainty, though. One man who did it was Adolf Hitler….
But to any serious student of Hitler’s frightening and unforeseen rise to power in Germany, the recurring echoes in Trump’s speeches, interviews and his underlying thinking have become too blatant to overlook….
Hitler was building the case for the “Führer principle” — a belief in the iron infallibility of the leader. It was an elaborate, historically wrought version of the “I alone” principle. With it, Hitler eventually won power in Germany and governed as an absolute despot.
Trump’s analog is: “Trust me.” Leading up to his “I alone” moment at last week’s convention was a long string of assertions by Trump that we just have to trust him — trust him to solve problems and implement even implausibly ambitious programs like rounding up 11 million undocumented immigrants. When challenged during the primaries for programs or plans on how he would carry out his extreme policy proposals, he habitually fell back on “trust me” or variations such as his “unbelievable ability” to “get things done.”
Historian Richard Frankel, author of “States of Exclusion: A New Wave of Fascism,” shared his concerns with me via email about Donald Trump, the Führer principle, and America’s worsening democracy crisis:
Trump’s been employing the language and imagery of Hitler to one degree or another since he took that trip down his golden escalator back in 2015 and described Mexicans in horribly racist terms. His endorsement of the George Soros/International Jew conspiracy theory inspired the deadliest mass killing of Jews in American history at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg in 2018 and a string of attempted pipe bombings of Soros and other “enemies.” His recent assertions that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America is pure racism that was common among radical nationalists, racists, and antisemites in both Germany and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.
As with Hitler, these ideas are not in any way new. But what we’re seeing with Trump is that he is repeating them more and more frequently and the expressions are becoming more and more radical with each passing day. With more than half a year to go until the election—and considering the fact that his natural tendency is always and only in the direction of more extreme, more radical expressions—his resemblance to Hitler is only going to grow the closer we get. And that process is being helped along because of the way he reacts when the press brings up his most radical statements (to the limited extent that they actually do that). He doesn’t simply repeat his statements. He doubles (and even triples) down on them.
John Roth, who is a leading scholar on antisemitism and the Holocaust, is also deeply concerned about Donald Trump and his amplification of Hitlerism. Via email, Roth focuses in on the controversial “God Made Trump” campaign video and its connection to the Führer principle:
In 1934, Adolf Hitler’s acolyte Hermann Goering said, “We love Adolf Hitler because we believe, deeply and steadfastly, that he was sent to us by God to save Germany.” Such sentiments reverberated ninety years later, when “God Made Trump,” a three-minute MAGA Republican video-accolade went viral.
“And on June 14, 1946,” the script begins by invoking Donald Trump’s birthday, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’ So, God gave us Trump.” From there, the narrative proceeds to depict Trump as an I-alone-can-do-it savior who will work tirelessly, day and night, to “fix this country.” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, would have loved the video and wished he could have made the prequel “God Made Hitler.”
Goebbels’s prequel would have emphasized that “God Made Hitler” to be the Führer (leader) of the German people. Accompanying that title, which officially became Hitler’s in August 1934, the Führerprinzip (leadership principle) underscored Hitler’s absolute authority and the duty of Germans to be unswervingly loyal and obedient to him. More than ready to join this cult of personality, Hitler’s followers enabled him to kill millions in World War II in Europe and to commit genocide against the Jewish people.
Roth adds:
“God Made Trump” does not say that Trump admires Hitler. It does not say that he wants to be the American Führer. But Trump does say that Hitler did “good things.” He does imply that his version of the Führerprinzip will “make American great again.” The cult of personality that surrounds him stands ready to advance those aims. Its devotion and obedience to the twice-impeached and criminally-indicted ex-president could destroy American democracy.
The MAGA video does not say that “God Made Trump” so that he can “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Nor does the video say that “God Made Trump” to stop immigrants from “poisoning the blood of our country.” It didn’t have to. Trump mouths those Hitlerian tropes all the time. They define how cruel and violent this aspiring American Führer will be if he gets to put his Führerprinzip into practice.
Wednesday night, President Biden spoke to the nation and explained his decision to withdraw his nomination and to pass the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris because he believes that she has a better chance of defeating Donald Trump and the MAGA neofascist movement.
President Biden’s words here are particularly powerful and ominous, where he warns about Trumpism without needing to specifically mention the aspiring dictator’s name:
I ran for president four years ago because I believed, and still do, that the soul of America was at stake. The very nature of who we are was a stake, and that’s still the case.
America is an idea. An idea is stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant….
I’ve been blessed a million times in return with the love and support of the American people. I hope you have some idea how grateful I am to all of you.
The great thing about America is here, kings and dictators do not rule. The people do.
History is in your hands. The power is in your hands. The idea of America lies in your hands. You just have to keep faith. Keep the faith and remember who we are. We’re the United States of America. And there is simply nothing, nothing beyond our capacity when we do it together.
So let’s act together, preserve our democracy. God bless you all. And may God protect our troops. Thank you.
President Biden is correct in his (repeated) warnings about the existential nature of the 2024 election and how it will determine if America remains a democracy, albeit a flawed one, or instead collapses into a state of competitive authoritarianism or some other form of autocracy.
Donald Trump’s dictator’s playbook is public and available for all to see. History is warning us. An American Reich will not be glorious. It will be destruction, not just for those who are targeted as the enemy Other but for its own MAGA and other supporters as well. History does not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme—and its rhymes in America in this moment of great uncertainty and worsening democracy crisis are sickening, disorienting, and almost debilitating. The American people only have about three months left to reorient themselves and to rise to the demands of history on Election Day by defeating Donald Trump and the MAGAfied Republican Party.
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