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adolf hitler
A Message to the Undecided Voter: Don't Elect the Dictator
This is the moment we all get on the right side of history. If we choose the wrong path, it will not end well for people, this nation, or this world.
Nov 04, 2024
When I learned, as an adolescent, that Hitler had been an elected head of state, I was incredulous.
I don't know how I learned this. Not from my parents and not from the nuns who taught me for 12 years of school. I was utterly ignorant about pre- and post-World War II Germany. My father had served in the Pacific. In my neighborhood, as a child, our teams were divided, for far-ranging games of war, between the Americans and the Nazis. Having never heard the word before, let alone seen it written, I imagined the bad guys as K-N-O-T-S-I-E-S, pathetic little balls of snarled string.
In college, with better information than my hometown rah-rah newspaper's, I became an anti-war activist. Ever since the Vietnam War era, I've been challenged with the question, "Would you oppose all wars/ What would you have done about Hitler?" To which my answer became, "Hitler was elected. There were plenty of chances to stop Hitler before six million Jews died and he started that war."
And now I wonder where those chances were, and what I would have done. Because I have learned how Hitler was loved by his people. And I have seen something like it in my country now.
Germany's infatuation with Hitler ended badly for everyone.
Hitler was seen by many Germans as a savior. They credited him with restoring the German economy after the Great Depression, and restoring German pride—and its army—after their humiliating defeat in World War I. They loved how he wanted to preserve the purity of German language and culture, and Christian religion. They loved how he hated the people they hated—an elite that they felt looked down on them. Professors, doctors, lawyers and businessmen were suspect. Many of them were Jewish, and Hitler easily convinced his supporters that Jews were "poisoning" German blood.
The oaths of the military and civil service were changed from loyalty sworn to Germany to loyalty sworn to Hitler. Here is the oath of Hitler Youth:
"In the presence of this blood banner which represents our Fuhrer, I swear to devote all my energies and my strength to the savior of our country, Adolf Hitler. I am willing and ready to give up my life for him, so help me God."
Alfons Heck, a former member, wrote of how it caused an eruption "into a frenzy of nationalistic pride that bordered on hysteria... we shouted at the top of our lungs, with tears streaming down our faces: Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil' From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul."
People gathered outside Hitler's residence to catch a glimpse of him, and women shouted their love and that they wanted to have babies with him. He got thousands of love letters a year. German psychoanalyst and author Alice Miller spent her professional lifetime analyzing "good Germans" and writing about it. They were consumed with guilt, after the war, for having allowed the Holocaust, and shame, for having loved Hitler. The trauma was inherited by the next generation, and she wrote of how that affected Germany too.
The German dictator's rule ended in suicide, in a bunker, where the generals our current presidential candidate says he wished he had told their leader the truth they'd been afraid to until it was unavoidable: he had lost the war. Germany's infatuation with Hitler ended badly for everyone.
Our would-be dictator starred on American television for 14 years, longer than any American presidency lasts. As a television actress, I know the power of the medium, and the characters we play. Every week for 14 years, people saw Donald Trump in their living rooms, impeccably dressed and made up, judging others with authoritative discernment, separating the weak from the strong, the wheat from the chaff, in elimination rounds that climaxed the drama every week: You're Fired. He was sometimes tender, being cruel only to be kind, and the contestants hopeful for his approval, bristling with Hollywood clothes and make-up, accepted his word as final.
He was never that man. The character wasn't real. And today's version is far from it. The TV star controlled his performance. The candidate can't.
He assumes the mantle of peacemaker, criticizing war. He claims to have opposed the War in Iraq. So did I. He distrusts the "Deep state"—I have done so for years, doubting everything from our rationale for the war in Vietnam to the official story of the Kennedy assassination and the denial of involvement in Central America. But for me, the stance involves study and practice of nonviolence. Donald Trump, even as he preposterously lies that he's something like Martin Luther King, foments violence. Peace comes from within. A man whose family, businesses, administration, and relationships were—and remain—in violent turmoil cannot bring world peace. He knows only how to deal with problems by making them go away, as he did on TV: elimination rounds. Certain groups, departments, organizations, individuals—and, maybe, countries—must be eliminated for peace to come. You're Fired! It seems so simple: final solutions like you've never seen before!
In Hitler's day, a lawyer with the tragically ironic last name of Frank wrote, "I can say that the foundation of the National Socialist State is the National Socialist legal system[...] since we know how holy the foundations of our legal system are to the Führer, we and our people’s comrades can be sure: your life and your existence are secure in this National Socialist state of order, freedom, and justice."
Albert Speer, author of Inside the Third Reich, wrote that, as German morale dropped, Hitler's crowds had to be organized. Spontaneity no longer drew them. Hitler also became "angry and impatient...when, as still occasionally happened, a crowd began clamoring for him to appear." This echoes ominously with the current Trump rallies, which are shrinking, where the crowd sometimes waits for hours before he appears—and then he comes bearing insults.
This is the moment, for those of you who are still undecided, when we can stop the dictator. Don't elect him.
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Why Is This Election Even Close?
Win or lose in November, more than 70 million Americans will likely cast their ballots for Trump. Most of them know who Trump is. They hear his vile words and heinous promises—and they like what they hear. They are the reason the election will be close.
Oct 29, 2024
The morning before Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, Brendan Buck, a former communications aide to Speakers of the House John Boehner and Paul Ryan, appeared on MSNBC. Buck said that comparing Trump’s event with the infamous pro-Nazi gathering at the Garden in 1939 was “silly” and “completely obnoxious.”
“It is an arena,” a visibly angry Buck insisted. “I don’t think setting foot in Madison Square Garden makes anybody who goes there a Nazi.”
Professing to be a Trump critic, Buck said that comparing Trump to Hitler—and his views to Naziism—alienated undecided voters who might vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“That’s the kind of rhetoric that just tells people like ‘it doesn’t matter.’ They’re going to say anything they want.’” Buck continued. “I can’t tell you how much that upsets those people who are on the fence on Donald Trump, and they say, ‘They’re just out to get him. They’re going to say anything.’”
Now that Buck has seen the rally, I wonder if he is still offended at the Trump/Hitler comparison.
Trump’s Rally v. Hitler’s Reich
If Trump regains the presidency, he has told everyone what he’ll do with it. Take him at his word.
Lies at the Heart of Trump’s Sales Pitch
TRUMP: Rode to the White House on the wings of his “birther” lie about President Barack Obama. His lies at the Madison Square Garden rally flowed so quickly that fact checkers couldn’t keep up. And his media echo chambers are repeating those lies over and over again until they stick.
As Jonathan Swift observed, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”
HITLER: “[A]t a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down… This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty…” (Shirer quoting Hitler, p. 22-23)
Immigrants Are Trump’s Centerpiece Lie
TRUMP: Trump and his vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, portray immigrants as subhuman. In their fantasy world, immigrants are responsible for everything that ails American voters: inflation, high prices, exorbitant rents, housing shortages, crime, everything. They lie to feed that narrative.
Vance’s admitted that he made up his claim that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing household pets and eating them. But Trump still repeated and amplified the lie, turning the community inside out.
Trump claims that he’ll “liberate” Aurora, Colorado, from non-existent immigrant gangs he claimed run the city.
He calls America a “garbage can” of the world’s worst people—another lie..
He refers to immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. He says, falsely, that millions of them are criminals from “prisons,” “mental institutions,” and “insane asylums.”
HITLER: Wrote in Mein Kampf that he “was repelled by the conglomeration of races…repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere the eternal mushroom of humanity – Jews and more Jews… [His] hatred grew for the foreign mixture of peoples….” (W. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 27) And, similar to Vance’s views on the need to increase birth rates, he spoke repeatedly about the need to “increase and preserve the species and the race.” (Shirer, p. 86)
“The Enemy From Within” Comprises Trump’s Retribution Agenda
TRUMP: “We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala, and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat party,” Trump told the Madison Square Garden crowd, singling out Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “They’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.”
In fact, their only crime was to disagree with and criticize Trump publicly.
Pledging that he will be “dictator for a day,” Trump has said that he will use the military against his foes and tell the Justice Department to target his adversaries. He has vowed publicly to “root out” his political opponents and imprison them.
And he promises to stack the federal government with loyalists who will never disagree with him.
HITLER: “I will know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals [who, he falsely claimed, had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ with the onerous Versailles Treaty of 1918] had been overthrown.” (Schirer quoting Hitler, p. 70) He banished or executed those who crossed him and surrounded himself with sycophants.
TRUMP: During his first term, Trump stacked the courts, including a federal judge in Florida who dismissed a criminal case against him. Like many of his appointees, she is manifestly unqualified for her position. But now she is reportedly on a list of candidates to be Trump’s next attorney general.
HITLER: Co-opted the judiciary and then established his own special courts. Shredding Germany’s constitution, he alone became the law. (Shirer, 268-274)
Phony Populism
TRUMP: Promising to pursue corporate-friendly policies in return for financial support of his campaign, Trump has pre-sold the presidency. Examples abound: He promised to reverse climate initiatives affecting the major oil companies in return for $1 billion in contributions to his campaign; he now supports cryptocurrency (which he called a “scam” until recently); he adopted a new position favoring the legalization of marijuana; and he vowed to put Elon Musk, who is pouring tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, in charge of slashing government regulation—which would create stunning conflicts of interest between Musk’s sprawling commercial interests and his government contracts.
Trump got surprising help from media owners Jeff Bezos, who killed a Washington Post editorial endorsing Harris, and Los Angeles Times ownerPatrick Soon-Shiong, who refused to let his paper endorse a candidate, which also would have been Harris. At a time requiring courage, they buckled.
HITLER: Cultivated industry leaders who thought they could control the dictator as they supported his rise to power—until it was too late to stop him. They reaped short-term profits, but Germany and the world suffered devastating long-run consequences. (Shirer, p. 143)
Fear, Anger and Terror Are His Favorite Tactics
TRUMP: After losing the election, he encouraged the January 6, 2021 insurrection to remain in power.
HITLER: “I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.” (Shirer, p. 23)
Trump’s Role Models
TRUMP: Trump praises authoritarian leaders of other countries, including Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping. His longest-serving chief of staff and retired four-star general John Kelly reported Trump’s statement to him that “Hitler did some good things” and that Trump wanted generals who gave the kind of deference that Hitler’s generals gave him.
According to Kelly, Trump meets the definition of a fascist: “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.”
Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said that Trump is “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to the country.” More than 100 other former top Trump advisers agree. Every day, the list grows.
HITLER: His professor described him as lacking “self-control and, to say the least, he was considered argumentative, autocratic, self-opinionated, and bad-tempered, and unable to submit to school discipline.” (Shirer, p. 13)
Here’s the Scariest Part
Whether Trump wins or loses in November, more than 70 million Americans will cast their ballots for him. Most of them know who Trump is. They hear his vile words and heinous promises to destroy democracy and the rule of law in America.
And they are the reason the election will be close. As Brendan Buck asserted, maybe they become upset at Trump/Hitler comparisons.
Or maybe it’s because they can’t handle the truth.
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Former Chief of Staff: Trump Said He Wanted 'Kind of Generals That Hitler Had'
The former president "never accepted the fact that he wasn't the most powerful man in the world—and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted," said former adviser John Kelly.
Oct 23, 2024
Two new reports out Tuesday detail numerous comments former President Donald Trump, now vying for a second term, made about his admiration of Adolf Hitler when he was in office, with former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly saying the remarks are part of what make it clear that Trump fits the definition of "a fascist."
At The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote that he asked Kelly about reports that Trump lamented that U.S. military officials were not more like "German generals" before and during World War II, who he said were "totally loyal" to Hitler.
"He told me that when Trump raised the subject of 'German generals,' Kelly responded by asking, "'Do you mean [Otto von] Bismarck' generals?'" wrote Goldberg. "He went on: 'I mean, I knew he didn't know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, 'Do you mean the kaiser's generals? Surely you can't mean Hitler's generals?' And he said, 'Yeah, yeah, Hitler's generals.'"
Two sources also told The Atlantic that Trump said in the White House, "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had... People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders."
A spokesperson for Trump told The Atlantic that the former president "never said this."
Kelly also spoke at length to The New York Times on Tuesday, saying he was driven to do so by Trump's recent comments about deploying the U.S. military against "the enemy from within"—including political opponents like U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who led the prosecution of Trump in his first impeachment trial.
The former chief of staff, who also served as homeland security secretary under Trump, said the then-president "commented more than once that, 'You know, Hitler did some good things, too.'"
Previously, Kelly toldCNN reporter Jim Sciutto that Trump said Hitler "did some good things." Kelly said he had asked, "'Well, what?' And he said, 'Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy.'
In a video posted to TikTok, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted that "part of how Hitler made the economy 'good' again was by confiscating the property of Jews and giving it over Germans, or gentiles rather."
"That definitely doesn't sound familiar, doesn't sound like anything Trump wants to do," Bouie said sardonically. As part of their plan to solve the housing crisis, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have said they would carry out mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.
The Times published audio of its interview with Kelly. Listen:
Trump "never accepted the fact that he wasn't the most powerful man in the world—and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted," Kelly said.
The interview was released the same day that Trump told Latino leaders at a roundtable discussion that he would use "extreme power" to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border and said President Joe Biden should do the same.
At a rally in Wisconsin after Goldberg's article was published, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said Trump's comments about Hitler and his generals made him "sick as hell, and it should make you sick, too."
If Trump wins the presidential election, he said, "folks, the guardrails are gone. Trump is descending into this madness. A former president of the United States and the candidate for president of the United States says he wants generals like Adolf Hitler had."
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