JD Vance, American Racism, and German Fascism

Vice President J.D. Vance’s embrace of Germany’s neo-Nazi party in a high profile Munich visit this past week sparked outrage and alarm across Europe. It was the latest example of a long history of U.S.-Nazi racism and dictatorship ties that should be a stark warning of what it portends for the U.S. as well.

Vance’s refusal to meet with German Chancellor Olof Scholz, instead holding a private meeting with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader, followed Elon Musk’s video appearance at a campaign kickoff for the AfD ahead of next Sunday’s German elections. It also coincided with escalation of the Musk-Trump administration’s gutting of federal programs and firing of workers, a key step for establishing authoritarian rule at home.

The rise of the AfD and President Donald Trump’s election were both animated by vitriolic, racist practices and ideology, a stark reminder of how the U.S. legacy of racist behavior and laws were a prime model for the ascent of Hitler and Nazi fascism. And how Hitler’s success inspired U.S. acolytes of Hitler like Charles Lindberg, Father Coughlin, and Henry Ford.

Just as Hitler utilized antisemitism, along with vilification of the left and traditional party elites to propel his dictatorial dreams, Trump has long employed speech and actions to animate his thirst for unchecked power. For Trump it went from launching his first campaign by branding Mexican immigrants as “rapists and murders,” to today’s demonization of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as a vehicle to rally support for his autocratic goals.

Unleashing Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) on public agencies and staff accelerated the longtime far right libertarian goal and Project 2025 plan to privatize, deregulate and shrink federal government to nothing more than handouts to corporations and the super-rich and expanding military, policing and border control. Augmenting it with a DEI shroud enabled them to further a white surpremacist vision of purging workers of color from public service.

Trump and Musk seem intent on reversing every political, economic, multi-cultural democratic advance envisioned by the post-Civil War Reconstruction reforms that also were the foundation of subsequent legislative and cultural gains of the 1960s and ‘70s for racial, ethnic, gender and LBGTQ+, and disability rights.

‘It’s a coup’

That plan is just getting started, as illuminated by the Washington Post in a preview of the next phase, escalating evisceration of critical public health, safety net and environmental and consumer protection programs already underway. On February 11, Trump signed an updated executive order directing federal agency heads to prepare wholesale “reorganization plans,” commencing a “critical transformation” of “our system of Government itself.”

Even two veteran Republican budget experts, told Reuters the plan is “driven more by an ideological assault on federal agencies long hated by conservatives than a good-faith effort to save taxpayer dollars.” The goal, says Our Revolution more pointedly, is to “consolidate billionaire power and dismantle democracy as we know it. This is not efficiency—it's a coup."

The DEI demagogy, a focus of Trump’s 2024 campaign, drives Trump 2.0. Following the Potomac plane crash, White House press secretary made it explicit, “when you are flying on an airplane with your loved ones, do you pray that your plane lands safely, or do you pray that your pilot has a certain skin color?”

Building authoritarian power through fanning bigotry has a long backstory in the U.S., from the slave states’ power over the federal government and post-Civil War in the former Confederate states following the counter revolution against Reconstruction. It was also the cudgel used by Hitler, along with political violence, to attain power following his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch coup and then to secure his regime.

The U.S. blueprint for Hitler

As James Whitman writes in his book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Hitler praised the U.S. as “the one state” that had made progress for a racial order that has allowed it “to become the master of the American continent and … remain the master as long as he does not fall victim to racial pollution.” Hitler used antisemitic demagogy blaming Jews, especially, for Germany’s defeat of in World War I and its economic crisis, as a key lever to gain votes, leading to being handed the Chancellorship in 1933.

Nazi demagogy admired how Americans felt the need to exclude the “foreign body” of “strangers to the blood” of the ruling race, Whitman observes, an eerie prelude to Trump’s depiction of immigrants from South America, Asia and Africa “poisoning the blood of our country” that built upon year of similar racist rants.

Echoing Mein Kampf in the 1930s segregationist Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo asserted “one drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and palsies his creative faculty,” a racist trope Trump nearly a century later paraphrased to disparage the intellect of numerous Black leaders, including Vice President Kamala Harris.

Shortly after Hitler’s reign began, Germany adopted a law on the Revocation of Naturalization and the Withdrawal of German Citizenship for the “denaturalization and expulsion of Eastern European Jews who arrived after the First World War,” Whitman observes.

Nazi lawyer Otto Koellreutter called it, “a further necessary measure for maintaining the healthy racial cohesion of the Volk (German people),” another step influenced by U.S. as well as British Dominion laws that parallels Trump’s racist immigration goals and his effort to overturn the 14th Amendment right of birthright citizenship.

By 1934, as the Nazis were well on their way to sustaining their dictatorship they moved to codify persecution of German Jews. Leading Nazi lawyers began crafting the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws to prevent “any further penetration of Jewish blood into the body of the German Volk.” It banned intermarriages and sexual relations between Jews and other Germans. They cited anti-miscegenation laws ultimately adopted in 30 U.S. states, and not finally expunged until the 1967 Supreme Court Loving v Virginia ruling.

Jews were also barred from a broad swath of employment in governing, academia, and the legal world. “What they were worried about,” Whitman explained to journalist Bill Moyers, “was that Jews might take over Germany, so the Jews had to be kept out of government, out of the legal profession, and out of any other situation in which they might exercise what the Nazis always called influence.” It looks like a harbinger of Trump and Musk’s DEI goals.

The U.S. assumed the mantle of “the leadership of the white peoples” after World War I, wrote far-right German professor Wahrhold Drascher in The Supremacy of the White Race, in 1936, adding without the leadership of the U.S. “a conscious unity of the white race would never have emerged.” He termed the founding of the U.S. “the turning point” for the theory of the white supremacy.

What especially appealed to Nazi legal experts, Whitman concludes, was how readily traditional legal norms were overridden in the United States. “What commanded the respect of the Nazi lawyers," he said, "was an America where politics was comparatively unencumbered by law,” which the Nazis quickly replicated.

“While it is true that ordinary citizens were to be blindly obedient, Nazi officials were expected to take a different attitude,” writes Whitman. “Political leaders were enjoined to be loyal to the spirit of Hitler. Whatever you do, always ask: How would the Fuhrer act, in accordance with the image you have of him.”

Whitman could have envisioned how Vance, Musk, and Trump would endorse defying multiple adverse court rulings on DOGE “reorganization,” illegal firings and executive orders, best evidenced in Trump’s post quoting Napoleon: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

What will actually “save the country” is spirited fight and resistance to the coup.

German Chancellor Scholz responded to Vance noting the U.S. helped overthrow Nazism. “‘Never again’ is the historical mission that Germany, as a free democracy, must and wants to continue to live up to day after day,” he said. “Never again fascism, never again racism, never again war of aggression.”