In early October, a little less than a month before the 2020 election, President Donald Trump returned to the White House from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where for three days he battled infection from Covid-19.
After the Marine One helicopter set down on the South Lawn, Trump emerged wearing a mask, and marched to the White House portico. He occasionally waved or gave thumbs up to news reporters who yelled questions about his health. At the portico, he climbed the stairs to the balcony, posed for the cameras, removed his mask, and jutted his chin.
Supporters viewed this as a sign of strength for a 74-year-old president treated – at one point on oxygen – for a disease that he had been telling Americans was no worse than the flu. However, some historians and journalist were reminded of the old news reels of Benito Mussolini.
Perhaps a more accurate comparison is of Adolf Hitler’s portrayal of himself at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg that German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl directed for the 1935 film, “Triumph of the Will.” Either case, Trump, like Hitler, uses the image-making medium effectively.
Nineteenth century American writer Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Today, history echoes off the walls once erected by Europe’s fascist dictators, Mussolini and Hitler.
From Belarus to Russia to the Philippines to Brazil, the strongman has risen—modern-day versions of the 1930s fascist dictators. Most rose to power in these (ostensibly) democracies partly because of economic instability, but largely because of weak structures within their systems of government that opened the way for anti-democrat minorities to block democratic majorities from maintaining the compromise and consensus necessary to keep democracy viable.
Despite how Donald Trump characterizes his position as president, he was elected in a democracy that requires an oath-sworn adherence to the Constitution and to the laws of the land. No one, regardless of their station (or whatever memo a Justice Department official writes), is above law.
In February 2016, as I followed the primary season and watched and listened as candidate Trump dispatch political friend and foe alike with vindictive barbs, character assassinations, and lies; as I listened to his divisive-fueled rhetoric that left no race or religion – except white supremacists – un-scorched at his campaign rallies, I became increasingly concerned by the national political apparatus’s failure or unwillingness to reign in Trump, who was urging incitement.
Around that same time, I traveled to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. as a chaperone for my son’s middle school class. The first part of the museum provides significant details to Hitler and the Nazi Party’s rise to power.
Until then, I had not connected Trump’s rhetoric or his campaign rallies, where his supporters cheered every divisive, provocative remark he made, with Hitler’s rise in Germany in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. Hitler analogies for politicians found distasteful was nonsensical and not comparative.
Yet, when I left the Holocaust Museum that day, I was alarmed. I returned home and wrote about my concerns in my blog. Hitler was a monster, and no one, particularly Americans, want to believe they could support and elect someone so horrible, but, in a recent re-read of that blog post, America did just that in 2016.
Trump’s lifetime of behaving monstrously toward his school mates, family, women (Hitler also had issues with his familyand women), employees, vendors, contractors and anyone else who approaches him is recorded in countless lawsuits the last 40 years, and more recently in books whose authors range from his former consigliere Michael Cohen to his niece Mary Trump, a psychologist.
However, not many voters apparently were informed or willing to be informed, about the man who presented himself – following eight years of a popular Black, conservative-leaning centrist president – as the savior of white America. They believed he would make the country great again.
Trump has spent his entire life selling himself, and most everyone who bought his sales pitch got burned in one way or another. Nearly 63 million voters bought his pitch four years ago; nearly 10 million more bought it in 2020. Trump lost the presidency, largely for his penchant for fascism, but Trumpism thrives amid 72 million Americans who voted for him.
During his 2016 campaign, and then his presidency, Trump, like Hitler, appealed mostly to the “low-educated” voter, those in the working class who know a hard day’s work, how it wears and tears the body and tires the mind, and for wages that are just enough to keep them living but never enough to get them ahead. They provided the base he needed to control the Republican Party.
Like Trump and his tax issues, Hitler had tax problems. He never paid them. Both men use/used the law and the courts to hide their cheating, particularly from their supporters.
Trump trademarked his name countless times; Hitler also copyrighted his name and image, which made him enormously wealthy. Hitler and Trump gained popular familiarity, or notoriety, with their bombastic media presence, in particular through their books; for Hitler, it was “Mein Kampf”; for Trump, “Art of the Deal.”
Trump and Hitler portray themselves not as politicians (though both are/were skilled), but as plain-spoken men who told their supporters they alone could solve the problems that the government so far had not: Hitler: “The Strong Man is Mightiest Alone.” Trump: “I alone can fix it.”
In the eyes of their supporters they are almost supermen. A look at the images supporters made of them is telling: Hitler as Teutonic Knight; Trump as Rambo.
What these comparisons illustrate is that both men capably filled a void created by weaknesses in the political and governmental systems. For Hitler, it was Germany’s failing Weimar Republic, where no single party controlled the Reichstag, that essentially allowed him to assume power without a majority of the vote. For Trump, who lost the popular vote to Hilary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, it was the archaic Electoral College that won him the presidency.
For many reasons, in particular the weakly written and poorly followed Weimar Constitution that Hitler managed to subvert by invoking Article 48, which allowed him to assume dictatorial powers, the German government was unable to stabilize the nation economically and socially. As a result, Hitler blamed democracy for the troubles and suggested that the Nazi Party was the only political party Germany needed. Just enough voters agreed.
In the United States, Trump’s candidacy arrived as a crisis in the old order of things had reached a crescendo, largely because the Republican Party had come to believe that power, not shared governance, was paramount to an agenda they could not sell to most Americans.
Through most of President Barack Obama’s two terms in office, congressional Republicans refused to work withDemocrats or the president. GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, unlike any of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat, vowed at the start of Obama’s first term to stop Obama’s agenda. When it came to Trump, who vanquished establishment Republicans in the primaries, GOP leaders lead by McConnell chose to support him for political gain—a packed federal judiciary of conservative judges including a U.S. Supreme Court.
Until that moment, our democracy embraced compromise to ensure that government effectively worked to provide needed services and legislation. Instead, from Democratic President Bill Clinton to Obama, America routinely experienced government shut downs because the GOP refused to work toward compromise; the Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential election because partisanship interfered with vote counting in Florida; and the endless Middle East wars.
Trump compares to Hitler only in that both men knew that media, through which they would easily capture the loyalty of a frustrated working class, was the path to power. Both used books and broadcasting to reach that goal in eras when the political structures were failing because voters no longer believed the experienced politicians could do the job.
Like Hitler, Trump relies on thuggery and parliamentary maneuvering to hold onto the presidency, which he views through an authoritarian lens as power. His call to the “Proud Boys” at this year’s first Presidential Debate was reminiscent of Hitler’s bullyboys, the violent Brown Shirts.
Trump refuses to accept that in a democracy the presidency is a powerful position from which to lead, not a leadership position from which to wield power. Trump does not disrupt democratic principles, he destroys them. His refusal to concede electoral defeat and lying about massive voter fraud that he never proved brought violence to the streets of Washington in a post-election rally.
While Trump expresses a deep and abiding admiration for dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, he is not a dictator—yet.
In a democracy, only the people allow a dictatorship. And then it’s no longer a democracy.
