President Biden reset the political chessboard when he decided to step aside as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee in the 2024 election and to pass the torch to his vice president, Kamala Harris. Democrats and their voters and donors are now energized. Bored of and hostile to President Biden, the mainstream news media has found a new shiny object and is generally effusive in its support of Harris’ potential as a rival for Donald Trump. The very early polls, which are likely to be significantly different once the honeymoon period passes, have swung back in favor of the Democrats. The race is now tied between Harris and Trump.
However, the celebration by the Democrats and other pro-democracy Americans is very premature. The battle against Donald Trump and the neofascist movement will not be easy; it will also last much longer than the 100 or so days to Election Day.
Trump is also something much worse than a generic aspiring dictator. He is actively channeling Adolf Hitler and Nazism, with his increasingly bold threats of revenge, retribution, imprisoning (and worse) his “enemies,” plans to purge the human “vermin” from the nation’s blood, take away many of the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and plans to create a concentration camp system to deport many millions of non-white refugees, migrants, and undocumented residents. Trump also believes himself to be some type of God. In total, Donald Trump appears to be mentally and emotionally unwell and is escalating his incitements (and threats) of violence and mayhem.
Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, is a Black South Asian woman and the country’s first woman to hold such a high office. She is also the first woman of color to be a major political party’s presidential nominee. To be so many firsts and such a trailblazer makes Harris simultaneously both uniquely vulnerable and potentially quite strong in her quest to win the presidency.
Vice President Harris could be a perfect opportunity for Donald Trump to apply his preferred style of political attack(s) and general vileness. Alternatively, Harris could potentially reverse Trump and his surrogates' likely obvious avenues of attack to great effect. Ultimately, America’s political future is very uncertain.
This is the third part of a three-part conversation with Historian Timothy Ryback, the author of several books including "Hitler’s Private Library," "Hitler’s First Victims," and "The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau." His new book is "Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power." Ryback is the cofounder and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation at The Hague.
"Looking at the response to Kamala Harris, it’s clear that a large number of Americans (not just traditional Democrats) were waiting for a capable leader who could take on Trump and defeat the horror of everything he stands for."
Ryback warns that Trump is making similar threats as Adolf Hitler and given the corrupt Supreme Court’s recent decision enshrining “presidential immunity”, i.e. making Trump and his Republican-fascist successors into de facto kings, the existential danger to the United States and its people (and the world) has only increased greatly. Ryback also warns that Trump and his propagandists, as Hitler did, will use the recent assassination attempt in Pennsylvania as a tool for suppressing dissent and fueling the fiction that he is a tool of God and destiny.
At the end of this conversation, Ryback offers some hope as he reflects on how Vice President Kamala Harris offers the American people an opportunity to save their democracy (and themselves) from Trump and the neofascist movement that the German people in the 1930s did not have.
Trump and his propagandists are valorizing the Jan. 6 MAGA insurrectionists and have empowered right-wing militias and other thugs and enforcers. Hitler made similar moves.
I share the concern over the valorization of political violence not just on January 6, but also going back to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville when a young woman was killed when a white supremacist drove his vehicle into a crowd in a brazen act of political violence.
Trump’s insistence that there were “good people” among the right-wing fanatics in Charlottesville reminded me of Hitler’s public support for six right-wing fanatics who were tried and sentenced to death for bludgeoning to death a foreign worker in the summer of 1932. Hitler insisted that if he were chancellor no foreign life would ever be put above that of a blood German.
Perhaps more troubling still is Trump’s embrace of some of Hitler’s most vile public rhetoric. When the former president said his political opponents were “vermin” and accused illegal immigrants of “poisoning the blood”, he echoes Hitler’s own ravings against Germany’s Jewish population as “parasites” possessing “infectious political and physical diseases.” Hitler was said to have made anti-Semitism “salonfähig,” fomenting hatred of Jews in polite company by his ceaseless and hate-filled tirades against Germany’s Jewish population. We know where that led.
Was Trump’s coup attempt on Jan. 6 an American Reichstag Fire moment?
Like everyone, I was riveted and horrified while watching the live coverage from the Capitol on January 6, and absolutely felt like this was America’s Reichstag moment. But my sense then was that this was also the moment when American strength would prevail, especially when the House Republicans joined their Democrat colleagues in condemning this act of unprecedented violence against our country’s democratic structures and processes. And then we watched this collective response dissipate into partisanship politics. Then it truly felt like our Reichstag moment.
Unfortunately, with the recent Supreme Court decision on immunity, Trump has no need for a second Reichstag fire moment. Trump will enter office with more power than Hitler could ever have dreamed of having on his first day as chancellor back in January 1933.
The Supreme Court basically made Trump and his Republican fascist successors into kings. I am surprised we have not seen the elite agenda-setting media comparing this landmark decision to the Enabling Act that gave Adolf Hitler and the Nazis dictatorial power.
I would hesitate to speak of “fascist successors,” but I too am deeply unsettled by the recent Supreme Court decision on immunity, and I do think your invocation of the “Emergency Decrees” (Reichstagsbrandverordnung) that followed the Reichstag fire in February 1933, and the subsequent passing of the “Enabling Act” (Ermächtingungsgesetz) a month later, is as appropriate as it is worrying for the democracy in our country.
Let me add another Nazi concept here: Here I might add Gleichschaltung, the concept by which the Nazis systematically compromised and controlled every aspect of government. Gleichschaltung is generally rendered in English as “Coordination,” but this translation lacks, to my mind, the ominous overtones of a systematic technical autocratic takeover of power. The word “gleich”, or “same,” and “Schaltung,” or switch, derives from electrical circuitry terminology, suggesting literally the switching of everything onto the same circuit, a latter-day version of which appears to be outlined in the presidential transition projects, drafted by Trump acolytes, under the euphemistic title “Project 2025.”
Why do you think that the mainstream news media has quickly moved on from Donald Trump’s comments about human vermin and blood pollution, mass deportation and concentration camps, praise of Hitler and Nazis, threats of “revenge and retribution”, plans to put his enemies in prison and worse? Trump is literally channeling Hitlerism, and often almost quoting Hitler directly. This should be a national emergency.
To my mind there are a myriad number of factors, but mainly three; First, there is not one media—there are multitudes all competing for the public’s attention. News is reported not just daily but hourly, minute by minute. It moves so fast that all the excesses, all the outrages seem to be par for the course. Second, people dismiss or accept outrageous, horrific statements not based on rational thought but on emotion. And third, it seems to me that we have simply become inured to Trump’s excesses and outrages. We stop tallying or even registering the lies. The shock value dissipates. The bar on offensive public rhetoric is lowered into the gutter.
How will Trump and his agents use the recent assassination attempt as a tool for their agenda? What does history teach us?
It was a horrific event and anathema to everything our country represents, and also a worrying sign of the dangers of political polarization combined with the proliferation of firearms in our country. I cannot comment in an informed way on how Trump and his agents might use this attempted assassination for political ends, but I suspect it will imbue Trump, at least within his hardcore base, a sense of messianic almost divine invincibility.
Here I might mention that Hitler escaped or survived more than two dozen assassination attempts during his political career, which helped convince him that, as it did his most devoted and fanatic followers, he was destined by higher powers as the leader of the German people.
It is perhaps no surprise that Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” comes to mind given the Republican Convention in Wisconsin. It was, without doubt, a triumph of Donald Trump’s will to power, and frankly, a stunning example of the exercise of the Führerprinzip in 21st-century America. Hitler developed the concept in the early 1920s when he was seeking to assert control over the Nazi movement. He systematically sidelined, co-opted or crushed all competitors and opponents within the movement and came to rule with absolute authority.
With his near-miraculous survival of the attempted assassination in Pennsylvania and his unchallenged nomination as the Republican party candidate for the presidential election in Wisconsin, Trump has emerged as a political figure of near Hitlerian dimension, a man who commands absolute authority over his political movement accompanied by apparent divine protection, not unlike Hitler’s survival of repeated assassination attempts. "I regard this as a confirmation of the task imposed on me by Providence to continue on the road of my life as I have done hitherto,” Hitler said in a radio address after surviving the July 1944 bomb. Trump echoed a similar sentiment following his own July 2024 assassination attempt, as he wrote on Truth Social, it was "God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening." Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who is currently serving a prison sentence for contempt of Congress, claimed, "Trump wears the Armor of God."
Looking forward, what causes you the most worry? What if anything has given you hope?
The common wisdom among the German political elites was that Hitler’s rhetoric and conduct would cool once he was in office. The operative phrase: “Soup is always cooked hotter than it is eaten.” The politicians who facilitated Hitler’s appointment as chancellor argued that Hitler would be boxed in so tight that he would “squeak.” I don’t think there is any such illusion about a second term Trump presidency.
I worry about the weakening of the guardrails, especially the Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity. I worry about an election that delivers a Trump victory and hands the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House to the Republicans. I worry about America withdrawing from the international stage, rescinding its commitments abroad, especially Ukraine, and the signal that sends to the rest of the world, especially to authoritarian leaders. I worry that Joseph Goebbels was right about democracy handing its enemies the tools for its own destruction.
As for hope? As of July 21, that's easy. Biden's decision to withdraw from the election and the unprecedented $100 million in support to Harris’s campaign. The pitting of the 59-year-old former prosecutor against the 79-year-old convicted felon. Let's hope for a landslide in November both for Democrats as well as for democracy.
Are we past the point of no return in stopping Donald Trump and the American neofascist movement? Has a type of path dependency set in?
If I learned anything in researching and writing “Takeover”, it was that the final outcome of any event is ultimately determined by political contingencies. Consider just the past two weeks. Looking at the response to Kamala Harris, it’s clear that a large number of Americans (not just traditional Democrats) were waiting for a capable leader who could take on Trump and defeat the horror of everything he stands for. An amazing burst of energy and enthusiasm has been unleashed that I think can bring people across generations and backgrounds together in a way that I haven’t seen since Obama’s campaign in 2008. This tells me that when people are no longer resigned to the inevitable, when they are given a voice and a choice they feel is credible and articulate, then they will not remain silent and passive. They will be motivated to vote in significant numbers and will rally to the cause of democracy. If only Germans had had such an alternative in 1933.
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