Four-star Army General Mark Milley was appointed by then President Donald Trump as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The general worked alongside the then-president for more than a year. In 2023, Milley retired following more than four decades of military service to the United States. In his retirement speech, his remarks included language that raised a few eyebrows when he said:
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, to a tyrant or dictator — or wannabe dictator.”
General Milley’s remarks were an obvious reference to Donald Trump, but the four-star Army general did not elaborate any further.
General Milley was interviewed by award winning journalist and author Bob Woodward for his new book entitled WAR. In the published book, Milley gives a blunt assessment of former President Donald Trump. In the Woodward book, retired General Milley warns that former president Donald Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” voicing his mounting alarm at the prospect of the Republican nominee’s election to another term. General Milley is quoted as telling Woodward this:
“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump. … Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”
The link to the quoted and relied upon news source is here:
TRUMP VERY DEFINITION OF FASCIST AS HE CLAIMS ADOLF HITLER “DID SOME GOOD THINGS”
Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff John Kelly is warning that former President Donald Trump meets the very definition of a fascist and that while in office, Trump suggested that Natzi leader Adolf Hitler “did some good things.” John Kelly is a retired Marine general who worked for Trump in the White House from 2017 to 2019. Kelly made the remarks in interviews with both The New York Times and The Atlantic.
Kelly said in his interview with The New York Times that Trump met the very definition of a fascist. After reading the definition aloud, including that fascism was “a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader,” Kelly concluded Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly has long been critical of Trump and previously accused him of calling veterans killed in combat “suckers” and “losers.” Kelly’s new warnings came just two weeks before Election Day, as Trump seeks a second term vowing to dramatically expand his use of the military at home and suggesting he would use force to go after Americans he considers “enemies from within.”
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too,’” Kelly recalled to The Times. Kelly said he would usually quash the conversation by saying “nothing [Hitler] did, you could argue, was good,” but that Trump would occasionally bring up the topic again.
Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice. Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, Trump has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him make the remarks.
In his interview with The Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing “German generals,” Kelly would ask if he meant “Bismarck’s generals,” referring to Otto von Bismarck, the former chancellor of the German Reich who oversaw the unification of Germany. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump to which the Trump responded, “Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
Kelly told The Times:
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government. … I think he’d love to be just like he was in business. He could tell people to do things and they would do it, and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot.”
Links to quoted or relied upon news sources are here:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/22/politics/trump-fascist-john-kelly/index.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/john-kelly-swinging-trump/story?id=115061457
TRUMP LASHES OUT AT KELLY
No at all surprising, Donald Trump lashed out at his former chief of staff John Kelly after he made damning claims about the Republican presidential candidate’s views of Adolf Hitler. The Trump campaign denied Kelly’s allegations and said the stories were “fabricated”. Trump then took to Truth Social to trash Kelly’s claims as mere “lies” and brand his former chief of staff “a total degenerate”, “LOWLIFE” – and “JELLO.”
TRUMP REFERES TO DEMOCRATS AS “THE ENEMY WITHIN”
On October 13, Donald Trump during the Fox network program “Sunday Morning Futures”, referred to Democrats as the “enemy from within.” On October 13, Trump told host Maria Bartiromo that California Rep. Adam Schiff and other Democrats were “lunatics” and a bigger threat to the U.S. than foreign adversaries like Russia or China. Trump said this:
“I always say, we have two enemies. …. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.”
He also suggested that the military could be called in to handle any unrest on Election Day from “radical left lunatics.”
Trump doubled down on his “enemy within” comments during a taped town hall of all-women voters in Cumming, Georgia, with Fox News’ Harris Faulkner calling Democrats “evil” and “dangerous.” Trump said this:
“They’re Marxists and communists and fascists, and they’re sick. … We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick and they’re so evil.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-democrats-enemies-within-rcna175628
Statements attributed to Adolph Hitler are:
- “I will get rid of the ‘communist’ ‘vermin’,”
- “I will take care of the ‘enemy within’,”
- “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood,” and
- “One people, one realm, one leader.”
Statements attributed to Trump on the campaign trail include:
- “I will get rid of the ‘communist’ ‘vermin’,
- “I will take care of the ‘threat from within’,”
- “Migrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country'”, and
- “One people, one family, one glorious nation.”
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS CONDEMNS TRUMP
On October 23, Vice President Kamala Harris reacting to John Kelly’s interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic that former President Trump fits the definition of being a “fascist” argued Trump has become more unstable and wants unchecked power. Harris said this from her residence in Washington. DC:
“It is clear from John Kelly’s words that Donald Trump is someone — who I quote — certainly falls in ‘the general definition of fascist.’ Who has in fact vowed to be a dictator on day one and vowed to use the military as his personal militia to carry out his personal and political vendettas. … Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions. The bottom line is this, we know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be, what do the American people want?”
“This is a window into who Donald Trump really is. From the people who know him best. From the people who work with him side by side in the Oval Office and in the Situation Room. [Trump wants a military] that is loyal to him and not to the Constitution troops who will obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States.”
“It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler, the man who is responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. … “In just the past week, Donald Trump has repeatedly called his fellow Americans the enemy from within and even said that he would use the United States military to go after American citizens.”
The vice president also noted that Trump considers those who refuse “to bend a knee or dares to criticism him would qualify” as the enemy from within, warning that he would consider judges, journalists, nonpartisan election officials in that category.
The link to relied upon and quoted news source material is here:
RECALLING AMERICA’S HITLER BEING ACCUSED OF BEING A FASCIST
In 2016, Donald Trump’s now Vice Presidential pick Ohio Sen. JD Vance was once a fervent critic of the former president. In private messages, he wondered ahead of Trump’s 2016 election whether he was “America’s Hitler” and in 2017 said the then-president was a “moral disaster.” In public, he agreed Trump was a “total fraud” who didn’t care about regular people and called him “reprehensible.”
Vance wrote in a message to a friend in 2016:
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad, and might even prove useful, or that he’s America’s Hitler. … How’s that for discouraging?”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/15/politics/kfile-jd-vance-comments-trump/index.html
On Monday, May 20, 2024, former President Donald Trump posted a video showing images of a fake newspaper article that references a “unified Reich” if he’s reelected in 2024. The video details “what happens after Donald Trump wins” with a narrator reading hypothetical headlines such as “Economy Booms!” and “Border is closed,” styled as World War I-era newspaper clippings.
One headline that reads “What’s next for America?” is a reference to the “creation of a unified Reich.” Another headline in the video states “15 Million Illegal Aliens Deported” next to the start and end days of World War I.
The term “reich” is associated Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, who designated Germany a “Third Reich” from 1933 to 1945.
The video was removed from Trump’s Truth Social account. Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement that the video was not created by the campaign and was “reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court.”
Democrats swiftly and emphatically condemned Trump over the video, with the White House denouncing what it said was flagrant antisemitism. “This is the same guy that uses Hitler’s language, not America’s. … Trump says if he loses again in November there [will] be a blood bath” Biden told donors in Boston on Tuesday May 21, according to reporters traveling with the president.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/21/politics/trump-unified-reich-video/index.html
On November 12, 2023 in a speech commemorating Veterans Day and on his Truth Social media platform, former President Donald Trump pledged to eliminate political extremist groups that “lie, steal and cheat on elections,” calling them “vermin” echoing a term Nazis often used in antisemitic propaganda to dehumanize Jews, equating them to parasites who spread disease.
On December 16, 2023 at his rally in New Hampshire and in a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump declared illegal immigration is “poisoning the blood” of the country, defiantly repeating a line widely criticized as echoing Hitler when he first deployed as his rhetoric increasingly draws comparisons to dictators and fascists. The phrase closely mirrors one used several times in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to describe the “influx of foreign blood” as “poison.”
During the New Hampshire rally, Trump also quoted Russian President Vladimir Putin and praised dictators Hungarian President Viktor Orban and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Trump said “even Vladimir Putin says that President Joe Biden has led ‘politically motivated prosecution of his political rival.’ ”
Ammar Moussa, then a Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson, said in response to Trump’s remarks:
“Tonight Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy.”
20 LESSONS LEARNED BY TRUMP FROM HITLER
Trump has reportedly studied Adolph Hitler and expressed admiration toward the Nazi dictator to people close to him. His first wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, according to a 1990 Vanity Fair piece published amid their divorce. According to divorce filings, Trump kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches and kept the Hitler writings in a locked bedside cabinet. Trump learned his lessons well studying the rise to power and studying the writings from Adolf Hitler. The ugly truth is he adopted Hitler’s approach to become President and now he is using the same dangerous fascist rhetoric as he runs again.
A remarkable book outlines the stunning similarities between Trump and Hitler. The book powerfully describes how America’s constitutional checks and balances were pushed to the brink by President Donald Trump who consciously followed Adolf Hitler’s extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s when the Nazis took power in Germany.
Burt Neuborne is an author and one of the nation’s foremost civil liberties lawyers. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU’s national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.
In July, 2019, Burt Neuborne’s book entitled “When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic” was published. On August 09, 2019 a book review written by Steven Rosenfeld was published by Common Dreams, a U.S. based progressive news website that publishes breaking news stories, editorials and commentary. A link to the complete book review is here:
Neuborne writes in his book:
“Ugly and appalling as they are, [Hitler’s] speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation. … Give Trump credit. He did his homework well and became the twenty-first-century master of divisive rhetoric. We’re used to thinking of Hitler’s Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn’t take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump’s bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. … The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic. It fell into their hands as the fruit of Hitler’s satanic ability to mesmerize enough Germans to trade their birthright for a pottage of scapegoating, short-term economic gain, xenophobia, and racism.”
SHARED VALUES OF TWO DEMAGOGUES
The book lists 20 very alarming points of comparison between Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump:
- NEITHER WAS ELECTED BY A MAJORITY.
“Trump lost the popular vote by 2.9 million votes, receiving votes by 25.3 percent of all eligible American voters. “That’s just a little less than the percentage of the German electorate that turned to the Nazi Party in 1932–33,” Neuborne writes. “Unlike the low turnouts in the United States, turnout in Weimar Germany averaged just over 80 percent of eligible voters.” He continues, “Once installed as a minority chancellor in January 1933, Hitler set about demonizing his political opponents, and no one—not the vaunted, intellectually brilliant German judiciary; not the respected, well-trained German police; not the revered, aristocratic German military; not the widely admired, efficient German government bureaucracy; not the wealthy, immensely powerful leaders of German industry; and not the powerful center-right political leaders of the Reichstag—mounted a serious effort to stop him.”
- BOTH FOUND DIRECT COMMUNICATION CHANNELS TO THEIR BASE.
“By 1936’s Olympics, Nazi narratives dominated German cultural and political life. “How on earth did Hitler pull it off? What satanic magic did Trump find in Hitler’s speeches?” Neuborne asks. He addresses Hitler’s extreme rhetoric soon enough, but notes that Hitler found a direct communication pathway—the Nazi Party gave out radios with only one channel, tuned to Hitler’s voice, bypassing Germany’s news media. Trump has an online equivalent.
“Donald Trump’s tweets, often delivered between midnight and dawn, are the twenty-first century’s technological embodiment of Hitler’s free plastic radios,” Neuborne says. “Trump’s Twitter account, like Hitler’s radios, enables a charismatic leader to establish and maintain a personal, unfiltered line of communication with an adoring political base of about 30–40 percent of the population, many (but not all) of whom are only too willing, even anxious, to swallow Trump’s witches’ brew of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never ending-search for scapegoats.”
- BOTH BLAME OTHERS AND DIVIDE ON RACIAL LINES.
As Neuborne notes, “Hitler used his single-frequency radios to wax hysterical to his adoring base about his pathological racial and religious fantasies glorifying Aryans and demonizing Jews, blaming Jews (among other racial and religious scapegoats) for German society’s ills.” That is comparable to “Trump’s tweets and public statements, whether dealing with black-led demonstrations against police violence, white-led racist mob violence, threats posed by undocumented aliens, immigration policy generally, protests by black and white professional athletes, college admission policies, hate speech, even response to hurricane damage in Puerto Rico,” he says. Again and again, Trump uses “racially tinged messages calculated to divide whites from people of color.”
- BOTH RELENTLESSLY DEMONIZE OPPONENTS.
“Hitler’s radio harangues demonized his domestic political opponents, calling them parasites, criminals, cockroaches, and various categories of leftist scum,” Neuborne notes. “Trump’s tweets and speeches similarly demonize his political opponents. Trump talks about the country being ‘infested’ with dangerous aliens of color. He fantasizes about jailing Hillary Clinton, calls Mexicans rapists, refers to ‘shithole countries,’ degrades anyone who disagrees with him, and dreams of uprooting thousands of allegedly disloyal bureaucrats in the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, who he calls ‘the deep state’ and who, he claims, are sabotaging American greatness.”
- THEY UNCEASINGLY ATTACK OBJECTIVE TRUTH.
“Both Trump and Hitler maintained a relentless assault on the very idea of objective truth,” he continues. “Each began the assault by seeking to delegitimize the mainstream press. Hitler quickly coined the epithet Lügenpresse (literally ‘lying press’) to denigrate the mainstream press. Trump uses a paraphrase of Hitler’s lying press epithet—‘fake news’—cribbed, no doubt, from one of Hitler’s speeches. For Trump, the mainstream press is a ‘lying press’ that publishes ‘fake news.’” Hitler attacked his opponents as spreading false information to undermine his positions, Neuborne says, just as Trump has attacked “elites” for disseminating false news, “especially his possible links to the Kremlin.”
- THEY RELENTLESSLY ATTACK MAINSTREAM MEDIA.
“Trump’s assaults on the media echo Hitler’s, Neuborne says, noting that he “repeatedly attacks the ‘failing New York Times,’ leads crowds in chanting ‘CNN sucks,’ [and] is personally hostile to most reporters.” He cites the White House’s refusal to fly the flag at half-mast after the murder of five journalists in Annapolis in June 2018, Trump’s efforts to punish CNN by blocking a merger of its corporate parent, and trying to revoke federal Postal Service contracts held by Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.”
- THEIR ATTACKS ON TRUTH INCLUDE SCIENCE.
Neuborne writes “Both Trump and Hitler intensified their assault on objective truth by deriding scientific experts, especially academics who question Hitler’s views on race or Trump’s views on climate change, immigration, or economics. For both Trump and Hitler, the goal is (and was) to eviscerate the very idea of objective truth, turning everything into grist for a populist jury subject to manipulation by a master puppeteer. In both Trump’s and Hitler’s worlds, public opinion ultimately defines what is true and what is false.”
- THEIR LIES BLUR REALITY—AND SUPPORTERS SPREAD THEM.
“Trump’s pathological penchant for repeatedly lying about his behavior can only succeed in a world where his supporters feel free to embrace Trump’s ‘alternative facts’ and treat his hyperbolic exaggerations as the gospel truth,” Neuborne says. “Once Hitler had delegitimized the mainstream media by a series of systematic attacks on its integrity, he constructed a fawning alternative mass media designed to reinforce his direct radio messages and enhance his personal power. Trump is following the same path, simultaneously launching bitter attacks on the mainstream press while embracing the so-called alt-right media, co-opting both Sinclair Broadcasting and the Rupert Murdoch–owned Fox Broadcasting Company as, essentially, a Trump Broadcasting Network.”
- BOTH ORCHESTRATED MASS RALLIES TO SHOW STATUS.
“Once Hitler had cemented his personal communications link with his base via free radios and a fawning media and had badly eroded the idea of objective truth, he reinforced his emotional bond with his base by holding a series of carefully orchestrated mass meetings dedicated to cementing his status as a charismatic leader, or Führer,” Neuborne writes. “The powerful personal bonds nurtured by Trump’s tweets and Fox’s fawning are also systematically reinforced by periodic, carefully orchestrated mass rallies (even going so far as to co-opt a Boy Scout Jamboree in 2017), reinforcing Trump’s insatiable narcissism and his status as a charismatic leader.”
- THEY EMBRACE EXTREME NATIONALISM.
“Hitler’s strident appeals to the base invoked an extreme version of German nationalism, extolling a brilliant German past and promising to restore Germany to its rightful place as a preeminent nation,” Neuborne says. “Trump echoes Hitler’s jingoistic appeal to ultranationalist fervor, extolling American exceptionalism right down to the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ a paraphrase of Hitler’s promise to restore German greatness.”
- BOTH MADE CLOSING BORDERS A CENTERPIECE.
“Hitler all but closed Germany’s borders, freezing non-Aryan migration into the country and rendering it impossible for Germans to escape without official permission. Like Hitler, Trump has also made closed borders a centerpiece of his administration,” Neuborne continues. “Hitler barred Jews. Trump bars Muslims and seekers of sanctuary from Central America. When the lower courts blocked Trump’s Muslim travel ban, he unilaterally issued executive orders replacing it with a thinly disguised substitute that ultimately narrowly won Supreme Court approval under a theory of extreme deference to the president.”
- THEY EMBRACED MASS DETENTION AND DEPORTATIONS.
“Hitler promised to make Germany free from Jews and Slavs. Trump promises to slow, stop, and even reverse the flow of non-white immigrants, substituting Muslims, Africans, Mexicans, and Central Americans of color for Jews and Slavs as scapegoats for the nation’s ills. Trump’s efforts to cast dragnets to arrest undocumented aliens where they work, live, and worship, followed by mass deportation… echo Hitler’s promise to defend Germany’s racial identity,” he writes, also noting that Trump has “stooped to tearing children from their parents [as Nazis in World War II would do] to punish desperate efforts by migrants to find a better life.”
- BOTH USED BORDERS TO PROTECT SELECTED INDUSTRIES.
“Like Hitler, Trump seeks to use national borders to protect his favored national interests, threatening to ignite protectionist trade wars with Europe, China, and Japan similar to the trade wars that, in earlier incarnations, helped to ignite World War I and World War II,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump aggressively uses our nation’s political and economic power to favor selected American corporate interests at the expense of foreign competitors and the environment, even at the price of international conflict, massive inefficiency, and irreversible pollution [climate change].”
- THEY CEMENTED THEIR RULE BY ENRICHING ELITES.
“Hitler’s version of fascism shifted immense power—both political and financial—to the leaders of German industry. In fact, Hitler governed Germany largely through corporate executives,” he continues. “Trump has also presided over a massive empowerment—and enrichment—of corporate America. Under Trump, large corporations exercise immense political power while receiving huge economic windfalls and freedom from regulations designed to protect consumers and the labor force.
“Hitler despised the German labor movement, eventually destroying it and imprisoning its leaders. Trump also detests strong unions, seeking to undermine any effort to interfere with the prerogatives of management.”
- BOTH REJECTED INTERNATIONAL NORMS.
“Hitler’s foreign policy rejected international cooperation in favor of military and economic coercion, culminating in the annexation of the Sudetenland, the phony Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the horrors of global war,” Neuborne notes. “Like Hitler, Trump is deeply hostile to multinational cooperation, withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris Agreement on climate change, and the nuclear agreement with Iran, threatening to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement, abandoning our Kurdish allies in Syria, and even going so far as to question the value of NATO, our post-World War II military alliance with European democracies against Soviet expansionism.”
- THEY ATTACK DOMESTIC DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES.
“Hitler attacked the legitimacy of democracy itself, purging the voting rolls, challenging the integrity of the electoral process, and questioning the ability of democratic government to solve Germany’s problems,” Neuborne notes. Trump has also attacked the democratic process, declining to agree to be bound by the outcome of the 2016 elections when he thought he might lose, supporting the massive purge of the voting rolls allegedly designed to avoid (nonexistent) fraud, championing measures that make it harder to vote, tolerating—if not fomenting—massive Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, encouraging mob violence at rallies, darkly hinting at violence if Democrats hold power, and constantly casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections unless he wins.”
- BOTH ATTACK THE JUDICIARY AND RULE OF LAW.
“Hitler politicized and eventually destroyed the vaunted German justice system. Trump also seeks to turn the American justice system into his personal playground,” Neuborne writes. “Like Hitler, Trump threatens the judicially enforced rule of law, bitterly attacking American judges who rule against him, slyly praising Andrew Jackson for defying the Supreme Court, and abusing the pardon power by pardoning an Arizona sheriff found guilty of criminal contempt of court for disobeying federal court orders to cease violating the Constitution.”
- BOTH GLORIFY THE MILITARY AND DEMAND LOYALTY OATHS.
“Like Hitler, Trump glorifies the military, staffing his administration with layers of retired generals (who eventually were fired or resigned), relaxing control over the use of lethal force by the military and the police, and demanding a massive increase in military spending,” Neuborne writes. Just as Hitler “imposed an oath of personal loyalty on all German judges” and demanded courts defer to him, “Trump’s already gotten enough deference from five Republican [Supreme Court] justices to uphold a largely Muslim travel ban that is the epitome of racial and religious bigotry.”
Trump has also demanded loyalty oaths. “He fired James Comey, a Republican appointed in 2013 as FBI director by President Obama, for refusing to swear an oath of personal loyalty to the president; excoriated and then sacked Jeff Sessions, his handpicked attorney general, for failing to suppress the criminal investigation into… Trump’s possible collusion with Russia in influencing the 2016 elections; repeatedly threatened to dismiss Robert Mueller, the special counsel carrying out the investigation; and called again and again for the jailing of Hillary Clinton, his 2016 opponent, leading crowds in chants of ‘lock her up.’” A new chant, “send her back,” has since emerged at Trump rallies directed at non-white Democratic congresswomen.
- THEY PROCLAIM UNCHECKED POWER.
“Like Hitler, Trump has intensified a disturbing trend that predated his administration of governing unilaterally, largely through executive orders or proclamations,” Neuborne says, citing the Muslim travel ban, trade tariffs, unraveling of health and environmental safety nets, ban on transgender military service, and efforts to end President Obama’s protection for Dreamers. “Like Hitler, Trump claims the power to overrule Congress and govern all by himself. In 1933, Hitler used the pretext of the Reichstag fire to declare a national emergency and seize the power to govern unilaterally. The German judiciary did nothing to stop him. German democracy never recovered.”
“When Congress refused to give Trump funds for his border wall even after he threw a tantrum and shut down the government, Trump, like Hitler, declared a phony national emergency and claimed the power to ignore Congress,” Neuborne continues. “Don’t count on the Supreme Court to stop him. Five justices gave the game away on the President’s unilateral travel ban. They just might do the same thing on the border wall.” It did in late July, ruling that Trump could divert congressionally appropriated funds from the Pentagon budget—undermining constitutional separation of powers.
- BOTH RELEGATE WOMEN TO SUBORDINATE ROLES.
“Finally,” writes Neuborne, “Hitler propounded a misogynistic, stereotypical view of women, valuing them exclusively as wives and mothers while excluding them from full participation in German political and economic life. Trump may be the most openly misogynist figure ever to hold high public office in the United States, crassly treating women as sexual objects, using nondisclosure agreements and violating campaign finance laws to shield his sexual misbehavior from public knowledge, attacking women who come forward to accuse men of abusive behavior, undermining reproductive freedom, and opposing efforts by women to achieve economic equality.”
WHITHERING CONSTITUTIONAL CHECKS AND BALANCES
Most of Neuborne’s book is not centered on Trump’s fealty to Hitler’s methods and early policies. He notes, as many commentators have, that Trump is following the well-known contours of authoritarian populists and dictators: “there’s always a charismatic leader, a disaffected mass, an adroit use of communications media, economic insecurity, racial or religious fault lines, xenophobia, a turn to violence, and a search for scapegoats.”
The bigger problem, and the subject of most of the book, is that the federal architecture intended to be a check and balance against tyrants, is not poised to act. Congressional representation is fundamentally anti-democratic.
In the Senate, politicians representing 18 percent of the national population—epicenters of Trump’s base—can cast 51 percent of the chamber’s votes. A Republican majority from rural states, representing barely 40 percent of the population, controls the chamber. It repeatedly thwarts legislation reflecting multicultural America’s values—and creates a brick wall for impeachment.
The House of Representatives is not much better. Until 2018, this decade’s GOP-majority House, a product of 2011’s extreme Republican gerrymanders, was also unrepresentative of the nation’s demographics. That bias still exists in the Electoral College, as the size of a state’s congressional delegation equals its allocation of votes. That formula is fair as far as House members go, but allocating votes based on two senators per state hurts urban America. Consider that California’s population is 65 times larger than Wyoming’s.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s majority remains in the hands of justices appointed by Republican presidents—and favors that party’s agenda. Most Americans are unaware that the court’s partisan majority has only changed twice since the Civil War—in 1937, when a Democratic-appointed majority took over, and in 1972, when a Republican-appointed majority took over. Senate Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s blocking of President Obama’s final nominee thwarted a twice-a-century change. Today’s hijacked Supreme Court majority has only just begun deferring to Trump’s agenda, [especially with its ruling giving Trump immunity from prosecution for official acts].
The link to the complete book review is here:
COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS
Der Führer Trump’s supporters and the Republican Party have stuck with him after he was impeached twice, incited a mob to storm the Capitol on January 6 with his inflammatory rhetoric, was found liable for sexual assault in a civil court and was indicted four times in a single calendar year.
With the landmark presidential immunity decision by the United States Supreme Court, the Trump 6 Supreme Court disciples of John G. Roberts, Jr., Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, Jr. Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett the United State Supreme Court have done whatever they could do to undermine our federal criminal justice system and attempt to ensure that former President Trump returns to power. The 6 do so at the expense of our democracy.
There is little doubt that if Der Führer Donald Trump is in fact elected President of the United States defeating Vice President Kamala Harris that the American people will have elected its first fascist and now convicted felon as President of the United States. His first order of business will be to prosecute all who have opposed him and gotten in his way, including politcal opponents and the courts.
The link to a related blog article is here: