Following last month’s assassination attempt, Donald Trump briefly postured as a changed man who would strike a new tone and seek to unify the country. Of course that was a lie. At a recent rally in Minnesota, Trump told a crowd of cheering followers, “I want to be nice. They all say, ‘I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him. No, I haven’t changed. Maybe I’ve gotten worse. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day.”
In various ways, Trump continues to channel the dark history of Adolf Hitler’s rise. This is not simply an interpretation of his metaphors or vague dog-whistle statements. Trump has literally said he wants to purify the blood of the nation by eliminating “vermin,” a term he has applied on several occasions to nonwhite immigrants. In a throwback to early 20th-century eugenics and “race science,” Trump has expressed pride in his “good German genes” and racial background. Trump and his allies have floated plans for a system of concentration camps aimed at collecting and deporting migrants, refugees and undocumented immigrants. Hitler proposed strikingly similar plans before he enacted eliminationist and genocidal policies aimed at achieving them.
Trump has also reportedly praised Hitler at times, and certainly continues to admire modern-day tyrants such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Some of Trump’s most loyal allies are found among neo-Nazis and white supremacists, groups he infamously praised as including “very fine people.” He has dined with white supremacists and antisemites at Mar-a-Lago. Antisemitic hate crimes, along with violence directed at Muslims, Black people and immigrants, have greatly increased since he began to dominate the political scene.
Channeling Hitler almost verbatim, Trump is threatening a campaign of revenge and retribution against journalists and political enemies, as part of the MAGA movement’s revolutionary project to remake American society. Trump continues to amplify the Big Lie that he did not lose the 2020 election, and has repeatedly said he will not respect any election he does not win.
Donald Trump continues to suggest that democratic elections will no longer be necessary after he regains power in 2025. He made headlines last week at the Turning Point Action Believers’ Summit by urging evangelical Christians to “get out and vote, just this time.” He continued, “You won’t have to do it anymore. … It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. … In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”
That statement was purposefully ambiguous: Will Trump’s Christian followers no longer need to vote because he has taken dictatorial power, or because those who would oppose him have been crushed, exiled or imprisoned? (His supporters, to be sure, have offered other apologetics.) He has repeatedly described the news media as the “enemy of the people,” another echo of the Nazi era, and has expressed contempt for the free speech protections embedded in the U.S. Constitution. There are almost too many other examples to list.
This is the second part of my recent interview with historian Timothy Ryback, director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague and the author, most recently, of “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power.” (Read the first part here.) His earlier books on the Third Reich include “Hitler’s First Victims,” “Hitler’s Private Library” and “The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau.” Ryback’s writing has also been featured in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere.
In this portion of our conversation, Ryback goes deeper into the disturbing similarities between the Nazi Party’s rise to power in 1930s Germany and the Trump-MAGA movement today, focusing specifically on their similar rhetorical styles, their promises of national renewal and economic security, and their use of the legal and judicial system to undermine democracy and corrupt civil society. Ryback also highlights important differences between Hitler and Trump, and urges the American media to learn the lessons of history in order to avoid being manipulated by Trump’s neofascist movement.
If you were to compare and contrast the rise of the MAGA movement to that of Hitler and the Nazis, what would be the greatest similarities and overlaps?
Hitler began his political career with seven men sitting around a table in the back room of a Munich beerhall back in the autumn of 1919. Trump entered politics descending the escalator of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to a media blitz. Hitler was a former frontline soldier, twice wounded and decorated for valor. Trump is a draft-dodging “billionaire.” Both were convicted of felonies. And both were political outsiders who promised an alternative to the established political order and appealed to the basest nationalist instincts of the people.
Let me cite several alignments I see between the rise of the National Socialist and the MAGA movements, especially in regard to their leaders. First, taking the message to the people with the promise of economic security and securing national dignity. Hitler literally promised to make Germany great again.
Next, preaching to the base. Hitler once claimed that 37% represented 75% of 51%, i.e., that he had the relative majority of the absolute majority, and leveraged that to great effect, cooperating, sidelining or crushing right-wing challengers. Ditto Trump.
Then there’s the imperviousness to public disgrace, disdain, degradation or humiliation. “I have endured so much persecution and political attacks during the 13 years of my political struggle for Germany,” Hitler wrote to one political opponent, “that I have learned to put the great cause I serve above myself.” What did fill him with bitterness, Hitler continued, was watching the “hope, belief and trust” of the people squandered by the government. It reads like a Trump screed on Truth Social.
“’I have endured so much persecution and political attacks during the 13 years of my political struggle,” Hitler wrote, ‘that I have learned to put the great cause I serve above myself.’ It reads like Trump on Truth Social.”
There is a fierce determination and self-imposed blindness to any setback or defeat. Both men practiced what Calvin Coolidge preached — that persistence and determination are omnipotent. I could go on, but to my mind one of the most striking similarities was brought home to me by a recent Politico article about Trump’s appeal to his MAGA minions. “It’s the laughter,” Michael Kruse wrote, describing Trump’s “stubborn and undeniable appeal” to his MAGA minions, “from repeated ridicule of his rivals to more impromptu and innocuous asides to physical pantomimes — the resulting laughter a consistent and key piece of their cadence and pull.” Kruse could just as well have been describing a Hitler rally.
We tend to think of Hitler’s speeches, as presented and preserved in newsreels and documentaries, as spit-splattering rants, brimming with hatred and mendacity. In fact, Hitler’s early appeal was his toxic blend of hatred and humor. He called Alfred Hugenberg, a key political opponent, a “woof-woof,” and President Hindenburg a “gramophone record” who kept repeating himself. If God had intended the country to be ruled by elites, Hitler said at one rally, “we would all have been born with monocles.”
Hans Prinzhorn was a psychiatrist who attended a Hitler rally in spring 1930 and was struck by Hitler’s mesmerizing effect. Prinzhorn suggested that audiences responded to Hitler’s rhetorical devices — volume, rhythm, modulation, repetition — emotionally rather than rationally, which rendered him impervious to attack by political opponents. That may help explain the fierce loyalty of Trump’s MAGA base as well as his apparent imperviousness to personal scandal, criminal prosecution and political attack.
“They keep thinking they’ve hit on a crucial point when they say Hitler’s speeches are meaningless and empty,” Prinzhorn wrote. “But intellectual judgments of the Hitler experience — Hitler-Erlebnis — miss the point entirely.” With Hitler, as perhaps with Trump, the medium is the message.
So what about the differences between them. First of all, how do you see the American context in this historical moment?
That 37%. As mentioned above, that was the best Hitler ever achieved in a free and open national election. That was in the 1932 presidential election, which was the only time Hitler ran for public office. The Nazi Party also got 37% in the July 1932 Reichstag elections. The New York Times called that number Hitler’s “high water mark,” and the Times was right. Hitler vowed to secure 51% in the November Reichstag elections, but he lost two million votes and four percentage points.
What does that tell you about the German political landscape? What does it tell you about America when Trump’s polling numbers, depending on the source, are easily north of 50%? There is a deep strain of conservatism, never mind radical extremism, that runs through the American electorate, which is pretty scary.
Like Hitler and the Nazis, Donald Trump and the other neofascists in the Republican Party are using the courts to advance their anti-democracy movement.
When Hitler appeared before a judge in September 1930 and outlined his plans to destroy democracy through democratic processes, the judge asked, “So, through constitutional means only?” Hitler replied with a brisk “Jawohl.” As much as the Nazis hated democracy, they understood its structures and processes as well as anyone, and exploited both with apocalyptic effectiveness.
Those who said “‘Hitler’s speeches are meaningless and empty,’ wrote Hans Prinzhorn, ‘miss the point entirely.’ With Hitler, as perhaps with Trump, the medium is the message.”
Hitler discovered that courtrooms were the perfect platform for his political grandstanding. He ended the 1924 Beer Hall Putsch trial, in which he was convicted of treason and sentenced to five years in prison, with the ominous warning to the judge: “You can declare us guilty a thousand times, but the eternal court of history will tear up the indictment and conviction with a smile and will acquit us.”
Hitler’s lawyer, Hans Frank, calculated that he represented his star client in more than 140 cases, mostly for defamation, which ultimately turned to Hitler’s favor. Frank observed: “His opponents always ended up causing more harm to themselves, even though they thought they were damaging this ascending figure with their slander.”
Most consequentially, Hitler used his relative majority in the Reichstag to gridlock and paralyze the legislative processes, forcing Hindenburg to rule the country by emergency decrees, essentially transforming the Weimar Republic into a constitutional dictatorship. As a Reichstag delegate, Joseph Goebbels observed, “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.”
What similarities are there between Hitler’s attacks on the media and freedom of speech and how Trump and his propagandists are trying to silence dissent?
The press played a significant role in undermining and ultimately destroying the Weimar Republic. The “lying press,” or Lügenpresse, was everywhere, on the left, right and center. The unquestioned master of “fake news” was Alfred Hugenberg, the Rupert Murdoch of the day, a right-wing media magnate who controlled more than 1,400 newspapers.
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While Hitler battered the Weimar Republic from the right-wing fringe, Hugenberg sought to hollow out the political center, which he knew was vital to sustaining consensus in a democratic society. He was a master of the wedge issue and flooded the public space with fake news and incendiary stories with the intent of polarizing public opinion, hollowing out the political center and letting democracy collapse of its own accord. Hugenberg used the term Katastrophenpolitik.
One of Hugenberg’s most notable pieces of fake news, to my mind, was a report that the government was enslaving German teenagers and selling them to the World War I Allies in order to service German war debts imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Hugenberg also advanced a public referendum that called for the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and the public trial and execution of any government official who had signed or helped implement the treaty’s punitive provisions.
Hannah Arendt claimed that the purpose of the political lie was not necessarily to make people believe in the lie itself, but rather “to ensure that no one believes anything anymore.” Those who can “no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.” she wrote. “With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
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