When Adolph Hitler was handed the German chancellorship in 1933 after bullying a broken and dying Weimer Republic, he had won just 32 percent of the vote. Though his Nazi party was in political regression and nearly bankrupt, within a few months Hitler smashed the old order and built a monstrous dictatorship that would last 12 blood-drenched years.
With Trump 2.0, we too face the advent of an administration seeking to destroy the existing system and build its own scaffolding of a new order Trump and his most fervent MAGA strategists hope will rule for 50 years to come, as confidant Steve Bannon predicts. With most of the old guard Republicans who were reputed to provide guard rails during his first four years discarded, it is important to learn from means employed by other dictators.
From past tyrants like Mussolini, Pinochet, Franco, and Hitler to their descendants today who Trump admires, like Putin and Orban, there are common tactics that paved their way. Those steps to absolute power, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in Strongmen, include the use of political violence, scapegoating, vilification, and persecution of targeted groups, with ample use of racism, misogyny, xenophobia and other bigotry alongside the fabrication of domestic crises requiring emergency action.
Two strongmen strategies warrant particular focus. First, securing support of national political parties and elites and acceptance by most of the population, the latter partly achieved through control of information sources. Trump has made inroads in both realms.
After being gifted the chancellorship by a failing democracy and business class who mistakenly thought they could control him, Hitler’s immediate priority was to establish a national consensus
Trump has muscled unquestioned loyalty of the Republican Party, and weak resistance by a Democratic Party establishment that appears to detest the left more than it does the far right. As to the oligarchy, the 2024 election cycle’s top seven donors funded the Republican Party with gifts as high as $200 million. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has become a virtual co-president. The second wealthiest, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg just paid a post-election kiss the ring visit to Mar-a-Lago after recently passing now third on the list, Jeff Bezos, who notoriously blocked a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Wall Street is “already making big bets” as “investors have sent prices zooming for stocks of banks, fossil-fuel producers and other companies expected to benefit from Trump’s preference for lower tax rates and lighter regulation.” Despite Trump’s phony anti-Wall Street rhetoric, a very different message was sent by his pick of billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, described by Robert Reich as “the opposite of a bomb-thrower” for the key financial post of Treasury Secretary. And, the stock market closed November with its biggest monthly gains in a year.
Crafting a national convergence
After being gifted the chancellorship by a failing democracy and business class who mistakenly thought they could control him, Hitler’s immediate priority was to establish a national consensus writes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich, as described in a review by Christopher Browning.
The Nazis “benefited enormously from the yearning of millions of Germans for a ‘new start’ after years of crisis and deadlock,” writes Browning. “Transformation of the German mood” was fueled initially by a desire to end political violence, mostly driven by Hitler’s Brownshirt militia, and Hitler’s promise “to preserve law and order.” Though the U.S. hardly faces the same Depression era conditions, the deadlock, mostly produced by Republican obstructionism, and Trump’s demagogy about immigration “invasions” and lies about rising violent crime, are a parallel. “The framing of crisis is most particular to authoritarian rule,” notes Ben-Ghiat. “Crisis justifies states of emergency and the scapegoating of enemies who endanger the country from inside the nation or across the border.”
Hitler manufactured a “restored Volksgemeinschaft,” or people’s community, to produce “willing identification and consent from a significant majority of Germans” and “necessity of compliance,” wrote Fritzche. It is “now understood as defined by racial exclusion rather than political, social, and religious inclusion.” The goal was “ideological congruence” that led to the “great achievement of the Third Reich”—getting Germans “to see themselves as the Nazis did” with a “new lease on collective life… to make Germany great” again.
For Trump and his MAGA movement, the first signs of a similar goal are evident from an election in which Trump achieved electoral gains over his 2020 defeat. A mid-November CBS poll found that 52 percent of Americans believe “fundamental changes are needed in our political system,” 54 percent are “happy” or “satisfied” Trump won, 53 percent are “excited” or “optimistic” about “what Trump will do as president,” 37 percent want him to “have more presidential power” than he did in his first term, 42 percent think he will “protect your rights and freedoms,” 59 percent approve of how he is handling his transition, and 57 percent support his most prominent pledge for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. As Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer warned on Bluesky, “the imprimatur of significant public support is dangerous. It emboldens Trump and his allies and could zap the courage of Democrats.”
Dominating information sources
Information control is crucial to building wide national acceptance that all tyrants seek. “Propagandistic manipulation of public opinion replaced debate about complicated ideas,” pointed out Robert Paxton in his book The Anatomy of Fascism. “Fascism offered defenders of a cultural canon new propaganda skills along with a new shamelessness about using them.”
Ben-Ghiat describes how in 1933, Germany had more newspapers than Britain, France, and Italy combined. Hitler rapidly closed newspapers, fired and imprisoned thousands of journalists, and made editors and publishers police their own publications. Putin “early in his presidency presided over hostile takeovers of TV networks to gain control of news and political broadcasting and put resources into his preferred network.”
Former White House Counsel Ian Bassin emphasizes that “a key Orbán tactic” in Hungary to dismantle their democracy was “that his allies bought media outlets that were critical of the regime and turned them into loyal cheerleaders for the regime.”
Trump has long branded major U.S. media as an “enemy of the people,” and not subtly encouraged violence by his most rabid supporters against media outlets and journalists.
The increasingly autocratic Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another Trump ally, has censored Israeli media to block internal coverage of the horror of his war crimes in Gaza, and “raided and shut down Al Jazeera offices in Israel and the West Bank.” On November 24, the Israeli Cabinet that Netanyahu controls sanctioned the leading independent news outlet Haaretz by cutting government advertising and subscriptions for employees of state owned companies, and barred communication with Haaretz by government-funded entities.
“The decision to boycott Haaretz …is not a stand-alone event. It is part of a well-crafted master plan to weaken and then destroy the free press and independent media in Israel… and to shut down any news outlet that doesn't totally align with the government,” said Israeli journalist Anat Saragusti on Pod Save the World.
Trump has long branded major U.S. media as an “enemy of the people,” and not subtly encouraged violence by his most rabid supporters against media outlets and journalists. During the 2024 campaign he mostly boycotted mainstream media, focusing instead on rightwing broadcast, social media and podcasts for communicating with voters. Exit polls found a high percentage of Trump voters obtained most of their news from those sources. Fox News further cemented its hold as the overwhelmingly dominant cable TV news channel by as much as 73 percent of watchers, notes streamer Hasan Piker.
Robust civil society responses are the essential ingredient to assaults on information sources, and the efforts to build public complicity with Trumpism.
Looking ahead, former Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, observes, “you intimidate media, you try to force them (to) bend them to your will, you use state funds, state sanctions.” Trump is “following the playbook of Orban. How far will Trump go?”
Interviewed on The Daily Blast podcast, former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan warned that Trump can “threaten to yank broadcast licenses” (as Trump has already threatened CBS and others). He can “pull back funding or leadership of organizations that come under control of the federal government.”
He “could go after journalists that have used information from a source that is classified making an example of them,” Sullivan says. Trump could also invoke the infamous 1917 Espionage Act “which has in the past been used to punish government officials who have taken classified information and given it to the press,” most notably against former National Security Advisor translator Reality Winner for leaking classified information reports about Russian interference in the 2016 election, but not yet against journalists themselves.
“I would expect to see Trump and his people looking for good examples that can be made of someone to do just that to, and therefor throw journalists in jail under the aegis of the Espionage Act.” One clear danger, she observes is “self-censorship on the part of journalists and news organizations because they are afraid of this kind of retribution.”
Robust civil society responses are the essential ingredient to assaults on information sources, and the efforts to build public complicity with Trumpism. To balance media complicity with Trump, Sullivan cites the 250,000 people who canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post in anger at Bezos, and how MSNBC’s Morning Joe program saw its ratings plummet in its “coveted demographic by as much as 40 percent” after its hosts paid their fealty visit to Mar-a-Lago. “That has to send a message, and it sends a message where it can be heard… most when it cuts into profits or the possibility of profits.”
That, and so much more, will be the test for us all.
