The Trump Presidency
Policy Implications

Is Donald Trump Hitler? The Facts are Terrifying

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

The Hallman Report About Michael Hallman Is Donald Trump Hitler? The Facts are Terrifying Godwin’s Law is a popular internet theory that basically states that the longer an internet conversation goes on, the more likely it is that someone will make reference to Hitler. It’s an indictment on the nastiness of so much internet discourse. In the months since June 2015, when Donald J. Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States, Godwin’s Law has gone into overdrive, as a comparison of Trump to Hitler is made, if I were to guess, no fewer than 3,200 times per second.

So what about that comparison? Is it really justified to compare Donald Trump to the most notorious mass murdering fascist dictator in several centuries? Short answer, yes. Short but slightly longer answer, yes but with a caveat or two.

I’ve made the comparison myself at times, and while I understood that it was a bit of hyperbole, I still felt strongly that if Donald Trump were ever to actually do some of the things he’s said he’d do, and if his cult-like following continued to follow his every word blindly, the comparison wouldn’t be so far off. What frightens me, however, is that as I’ve researched this topic for the purpose of this post, it’s become clear that it’s not nearly the hyperbole that I once thought it was. In fact, the similarities are terrifying. Yes, the caveats that I will address at the end certainly indicate an important difference or two, but how much of a consolation that actually is remains to be seen.

I’ve broken down my examination into four primary areas: statements that Trump has made against minority or other vulnerable or oppressed groups; policy positions that he has proposed (to the extent that Trump actually proposes policy rather than just spewing out word salad where bits of policy may be gleaned); authoritarian actions that he has suggested he would take; and an examination of his followers and what they might indicate about the person they follow.

What has Donald Trump Said?

Donald Trump’s mouth is about the only part of his body as famous as his tiny hands (and before anyone says his hair, that doesn’t count. A horse hair wig technically isn’t part of his body). Within weeks of his entering the race he had already made statements that were so vile and so offensive, it was considered a given that they would end his campaign. He denigrated the service of war hero John McCain, and in the process implied that all POWs are losers because “they got caught.” Aside from his POW comment, most of his most offensive statements have been directed against women or minorities. He falsely claimed that Mexican immigrants were largely rapists, murderers, and other felons, and were being sent here by the Mexican government. He has called women fat pigs, made derisive comments about flat-chested women, salacious comments to a woman that she would look better on her knees – so many such misogynistic comments, in fact, that an entire ad was made showing women just reading Trump’s many offensive statements. It is likely that he once said that “laziness is a trait in blacks,” though Trump disputes that he ever said this. Considering his many statements referring to “the blacks” in some way or other, it’s certainly believable. This is all in addition to his many other racist statements that he and his supporters will just say are his refusal to be “PC,” like telling a room full of Jews that they are all great negotiators (the cheap Jew stereotype), saying that if he were to ever choose, he would choose to be a “well educated black” because life is made easier for them, referring to Japanese as “the Japs,” and so on.

The point is that there is a consistent pattern of creating an otherness of vulnerable groups, in an attempt to exert power and control over them, to demonize them, and thus to create a sense of power for himself, the rich, white American.

Policy Positions

Of course, lots of people are racist in America, and that certainly doesn’t bring about comparisons to Hitler, nor should it. In order for the comparison to be authentic, there must be more. There must exist in that person a desire to rise to power, to systematically consolidate power, trample the rights of others, especially the rights of free speech and a free press, to use that power attained to persecute vulnerable groups, and engage in horrific acts of torture and murder of innocents on a large scale. Which, of course, obviously none of that can be attributable to Trump, can it? Let’s have a closer look.

It is well known that Hitler engaged in vicious acts of torture against his enemies, whether for revenge, intelligence, or maybe just out of boredom. The acts committed against the Valkyrie, those Germans who plotted to murder Hitler, are famously horrific. Hitler didn’t just kill his attempted murderers. He tortured them, even toyed with them. He had them hanged, then just before they approached death he had them resuscitated, then hanged again, a process that he repeated over and over and over again, until their ultimate death. It was brutal.

We don’t know exactly what Trump would do, but what we know for certain is that he has strongly advocated for the use of torture. It began with the question of waterboarding, which is certainly a form of torture, though for a time we only referred to it as “enhanced interrogation. Trump said he “absolutely” would bring that back. But waterboarding was not enough for Trump. He went on to argue that in war, he would use tactics “far worse” than waterboarding. Not just a little tougher than regular torture. Far worse. Donald Trump, unabashedly, supports the use of horrific forms of torture against our enemies.

What about mass murder of innocent people? He advocates for that, as well. Discussing some things he would do to fight terrorism, Donald Trump argued that he would not only go after the terrorists themselves, but that he would order the murder of their families, as well – wives, children, loved ones, no matter. Hit ‘em where it hurts. His exact words:

“The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” Trump said on Fox News earlier this month. “They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.”

I cannot think of a single leader in the civilized world who would explicitly and openly call for such a barbaric act, an unthinkable act – so unthinkable that, just like his advocacy for forms of torture “far worse” than waterboarding, are war crimes that would have him before The Hague in a second. While no modern civilized leader would call for such actions, guess who did engage in the murder of innocent family members of perceived of enemies? Yep, one Adolf Hitler. Sippenhaft was the official policy under Hitler to make the entire family liable for the crimes of an enemy. It was a means of bringing about a reign of terror, to murder innocent lives, brutally, so as to put fear upon anyone who might consider rebelling against Nazi Germany. And Sippenhaft is exactly the policy that Donald Trump has called for in the war against terror.

Perhaps after the last two Trump horrors the next won’t sound nearly as shocking, but is certainly part of an increasingly obvious pattern of totalitarian instincts that should terrify us all. Again in response to the war on terror (rather, using the war as an excuse to impose his nationalist ideology, which we’ll get to presently), Donald Trump has called for the extremely unconstitutional ban on all Muslims entering the United States. Despite the freedom of religion and the proscription of the government making any laws that discriminate based on religion enshrined in our Constitution, Donald Trump wants to impose laws that bar an entire religion from entering the United States – even if they are already citizens.

Trump didn’t stop there, however. In defending his ban on all Muslims, while he didn’t exactly call for rounding up the ones who live here, he certainly went far in praising FDR for rounding up the Japanese during World War II and transferring them to internment camps. This is Trump’s idea of good policy, good defense – rounding people up who simply bear a similar ethnic or religious characteristic of an enemy, while also barring an entire group of people from entering the United States based on religion alone. Again, examine the anti-Jewish legislation passed by Hitler, a total of 2,000 decrees issued between 1933 and 1945. Once again, this isn’t just a passing resemblance between Trump and Hitler. This is Trump going directly to Hitler’s playbook.

Authoritarian Actions

That Trump would lean in the direction of totalitarianism should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen a protest break out at a Trump rally (of course, why would anyone have cause to protest Donald Trump, right?). In fact, Trump’s response to protestors is just one of several authoritarian, fascist tendencies. For one thing, he has explicitly called for violence against protestors, telling his supporters to rough them up, and then even offering to pay the legal bills for any supporter who is arrested for violence against a protestor. Once again, these actions are right out of the Hitler playbook, as he too violently repressed protests. We are so used to thinking of a Nazi Germany under the spell of their evil dictator, but the fact is in his early years of his rule there was significant resistance to him. He shut that resistance down, and then forcefully changed the state Constitution to grant him authoritarian power. Are you shivering yet?

It’s not only free speech expressed against him personally that Donald Trump seeks to violently repress. He seems to be prepared to shut down any protest against the government, at least protests that he disagrees with. In fact, he openly praised the Chinese government for their infamous violence against protestors in Tiananmen Square, referring to the protestors as a bunch of rioters.

It is essential that we recognize here that shutting down free speech is essential to any dictator’s rise, and for Trump it hardly ends there. Again, using the ruse of the war on terror, and the fact that the San Bernardino killers used the internet to radicalize, Donald Trump has gone so far as calling for shutting down the internet entirely. Knowledge is the greatest weapon a free people has to keep their government in check. The internet is one of the greatest sources of knowledge available today, so it should come as no surprise that a would-be dictator would want to shut it down, or at least strictly censor it. It is precisely the action taken today by some of the worst totalitarian states in the world, including communist China and communist North Korea. Shutting down the flow of knowledge makes it easier for the state to put forward its propaganda machine.

Speaking of propaganda, the greatest defense a society has against government propaganda is a vibrant, free press. So it should come as no surprise that Trump has already called for infringing upon the freedom of the press, bullying them into silence, which he did when he threatened that he would seek to open up libel laws to sue the media for stories he found unflattering. One could make a strong argument, given the wall to wall coverage Trump has received, disproportionately more than any other candidate by many factors, that the media is already becoming his propaganda machine. But the idea that he would seek legal recourse to bully the press into silence is a truly grave threat to our democracy, to our freedom. Propaganda is so effective because it can convince a people that the government is doing good, that the actions the government takes are in the people’s best interests, and if only positive press is published, the people can be lulled into a false sense of trust of the government. This then makes it easier for the leader of the government to gain the people’s trust and get their support to things like changes to the Constitution that allow him to consolidate power. Could this ever happen in America? Of course not…right? I bet the Germans in 1932 felt the same, though.

A good dictator also needs a solid and brutal communications man to help him with this propaganda machine. Hearing the story of Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski rough up Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields, and then convince Breitbart to retract its story confirming the events to then say it never happened, it is easy to see Lewandowski stepping into this role. He succesfully convinced elements of the media to participate in an attempted assassination of Fields’ character so severe that not only Fields, but indeed one of Breitbart’s most popular and talented journalists, Ben Shapiro resigned in protest. It is not difficult to see how Lewandowski could become Trump’s Joseph Goebbels, who engaged in a systematic terrorization of the media and a highly organized state propaganda machine that allowed Hitler and the Nazis complete control over all media communications.

The Following

Some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters bear a scary resemblance to the most enthusiastic supporters of Hitler’s Nazi party. This base of supporters is comprised of three primary groups, each distinct but related: white supremacists, nationalists, and nativists – all of which are frequently lumped together in what is known as the “alt right” movement (Google that movement if you want to get sick). Nationalists (of which white nationalists are a white supremacist outgrowth) find appealing Donald Trump’s desire not just to “Make America Great Again,” but to do so in a way that tears down other countries. It’s not just an appeal to American Exceptionalism, a la Ronald Reagan, but rather to the belief that we need to protect our economy with isolating policies like tariffs, trade wars, opposition to free trade, and so forth. White nationalists, a far scarier and more offensive version of nationalism, and who are also drawn to Donald Trump in large numbers, believe that making America great again means making America white again. It is not just a protectionism against the dirty foreigners (achieved through the aforementioned protectionist policies as well as strict anti-immigration policies), but also a violent extermination of all non-white citizens right here in the United States (if not extermination, at the very least degradation and minimization). White nationalists are the realm of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. They see in Donald Trump the greatest hope for saving white America. These are the groups who will frequently make reference to a perceived “white genocide,” the belief that the white race is being slowly destroyed here in America, that whites are becoming minorities, that whites are going to be enslaved by the black man and the Mexican if something isn’t done to turn the tide. And Donald Trump is just the man to turn the tide and make America white again. What perhaps is so frightening is how emboldened the white nationalists have become under Donald Trump, now engaging in racist violence and open racial warfare, because they know that Donald J. Trump has their back.

In fact, Donald Trump doesn’t just have the backs of these sorts of groups. He openly gives them a voice. Trump has nearly 7 million Twitter followers, a massive following by anyone’s standards. And yet it was recently discovered that of the accounts that he regularly retweets, the overwhelming majority are white supremacist accounts. People, including Trump himself, have sought to defend this by arguing that he can’t make the time to read all the tweets that he retweets, or look at the handles of the tweeters, and yet this problem has been brought to his attention over and over again, and he has never taken a single action to rectify it. He just continues to retweet racist tweet after racist tweet, white supremacist account after white supremacist account. Many of these accounts have obviously white supremacist handles, too, leaving no doubt as to their motives. It is becoming more and more widely known that has a strong following among white supremacists, that they passionately love him as their leader, and it is an adoration that he only encourages.

The final racist group enthusiastically supporting Donald Trump and his policies are the nativists, who are rallying around Donald Trump as their nativist savior. America has a long history with nativism (the church where I am getting married this May, St. Augustine’s in Old City Philadelphia, was burnt to the ground in 1854 during the Nativist riots, then a religious persecution against Catholics – a discrimination that was always more anti-immigrant than anti-religion), and the nativism of today has hardly evolved, only redirected its anger. Today that nativism takes the form of a harsh anti-immigration stance particularly against Mexicans, as well as other Latinos, whom they see as taking away American jobs and destroying American culture. Donald Trump, of course, has become famous in the political world first and foremost because of his harsh anti-immigration stance, and for this reason he is the nativist hero (an irony, given Donald Trump’s own immigrant history).

Some will argue that Donald Trump isn’t responsible for his supporters. To an extent that is true, though as I’ve said, he certainly gives them a loud voice, promotes their views to his massive Twitter following, and emboldens them at every step of the way. And frankly, if so many white supremacist groups and individuals see a savior in Donald Trump, that that might say something about the man is not a theory that is easily dismissed.

So is Donald Trump a Modern Hitler?

Based on all of the above, I argue that evidence is striking supporting the comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. What I’ve presented above is, I believe, chilling. It appears that that the shock of Hitler has largely worn off because he is invoked so frequently, as evidenced by the existence of Godwin’s Law, and so these comparisons may not have the effect that they should. And of course, there are differences. For one, I have greater confidence in the strength of the American Republic than I do in the state of pre-Nazi Germany, though perhaps I am just naive. For another, I don’t believe that Donald Trump is as purely idealistic as Adolf Hitler. Hitler truly and sincerely believed in the ideology he professed. He really believed in the extermination of the Jews. He really believed in the nationalism he murdered for. He felt justified in his horrific actions because he believed so strongly that his cause was right. I don’t get that sense from Trump. For one thing, he consistently walks back statements when he sees they are getting too much negative press. He changes views with alarming regularity. Adolf Hitler was a man of conviction – disturbing, murderous, horrific convictions, but conviction nonetheless. Donald Trump certainly is not.

That doesn’t mean he can’t be equally as dangerous, however. Any psychologist will tell you that Donald Trump is an extreme case of the classic narcissist: someone who feels deeply inadequate, and so makes up for it by playing the extreme alpha, by attempting to destroy others and lift themselves up. Trump’s narcissism reaches a deeply pathological level. Someone like that with the power he already has and the even greater power he now seeks, who somehow in spite of – or, an even more frightening proposition, because of all that has been laid out above, continues to grow his base of support, and who even seems to have the media eating out of his hand, can easily become a terrible force of destruction. This is a man to whom we are in danger of entrusting the greatest military in the world with the most powerful weapons man has ever seen. This is a deeply unstable man seeking power to influence a deeply unstable world. And yes, this is a man who appears ready and willing to do truly horrific things, Hitler-esque atrocities, all in the name of consolidating power and gaining the admiration of the people who now love him. That is a horror the American people simply cannot allow ourselves to be responsible for. Donald Trump must be stopped. We simply cannot inflict this monster on the world.