Another day with me, that miserable old fart who never ceases, it seems to be a thorn in the side of those in search of someone who will tell them what they want to hear. I want you to know that as soon as a glimmer of light passes my way, I’ll report it with a passion the likes of which you have rarely seen. In the meantime, let's try to keep our feet on the ground and deal with each of the endless challenges thrown our way by Mad King Don.
I know yesterday’s piece, as expected, had some Democrats upset with me, but I would be doing them a disservice attempting to wrap a turd in glitter, I’m afraid. The challenges ahead are immense, and it’s important to recognise that Trump has a finely tuned machine that merges a top drawer propaganda operation with a team of off-the-books lawyers and intellectual constitutional terrorists, whose job it is to challenge every facet of legislation that impedes the installation of a theocratic autocracy. If you are in search of the biggest enemy of the people, it is encapsulated in one word: ‘Interpretation’. Weaponised, it is an implement of mass destruction that the Republican Party has developed and refined over decades to become its armament of choice in its quest to reimagine American society.
What you have to remember is that Project 2025 (‘Mandate for Leadership’) dates back to the days of Ronald Reagan. However, it was not until the advent of Trump in 2016 that the Heritage Foundation (which wrote the original document in 1981 to provide policy guidance for the incoming Reagan administration) saw their vision come to life, with the implementation of over 60% of their policy agenda in his first term. By the time of the 2020 election, they had tasted what could be achieved. The loss of the election was a body blow. Still, far from the Heritage Foundation becoming disillusioned, they embarked on a meticulous four-year plan to prepare for Trump's return to the White House.
As an example of how flat-footed Democrats were regarding the publicly available ‘Project 2025’, I had written about it on X almost eight months before the first Democratic legislator picked it up and claimed discovery for themselves. It was pretty amusing that they evangelised on their discovery of the plan, months after those who had spotted the evident danger. Now, call me old-fashioned, but how did a party with full-time political strategists and researchers allow it to slip under the radar for at least six months before they attacked it?
The key point here, besides the fact that it was missed, was the project itself. It represented a level of organisation and funding never seen in politics before. It was planned with military precision, with the sole intent of not wasting a day from the moment of inauguration. From DOGE to the installation of yes men throughout government to the ‘traumatising’ of the federal workforce, they had brazenly written it all down for people to see. There was no hiding it or saying the quiet part out loud. It was an in-your-face agenda that Democrats had absolutely no answer to, which is still the case to this day.
Allow me to reinterpret the words of HG Wells from War of the Worlds:
‘Yet across the gulf of [politics], minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this [democracy] with envious eyes, and slowly and surely they drew their plans against us”
It is no exaggeration to say that the level of meticulous planning is akin to the planning of Hitler’s ‘final solution’. While it may not have been about planning the extinction of an ethnic group. It was and is far bigger than that. It is about preparing for the extinction of democracy and the longstanding global rules-based order. That should terrify you much more than the holocaust, because it’s already been proven in Gaza that ethnic cleansing and war crimes have not been removed from the menu.
All too often, we hear victimhood cries from the right claiming they are being unjustifiably labelled as Nazis. People would do well to read about the rise of Adolf Hitler, because the likeness to the rise of Trump is uncanny, and many of the strategies adopted by Trump and his puppet masters are eerily similar to those adopted by those serving Hitler.
It is no secret that Trump has zero sympathy for the disabled and the vulnerable, and we are seeing right now with the gutting of funding across the board to support special needs children in school and others who are vulnerable in society. Social Darwinism seems to be a central tenet of the administration’s agenda. Of course, they won’t overtly advocate for euthanasia; the optics would be damaging, so the next best thing is to starve the targeted segment of society of funding and support. Let’s not forget, Trump is the guy who told his nephew he should let his disabled son die, then “move down to Florida”, because his son didn’t recognise him.
In Nazi Germany, severely mentally and physically disabled people, as well as those perceived to have disabilities, were targeted because of Nazi beliefs that disabled people were a burden both to society and to the state. There is absolutely no divergence of belief here; it’s just that the Germans documented it, while the Trump administration prefers Telegram chats to ensure no trace of their intent is left behind. Theirs is a T4 (Tiergartenstrasse 4) program in a new suit minus the euthanasia. They are not euthanising the disabled and the vulnerable; they are choosing instead to euthanise their funding. This is now Trump’s self-declared intention in his statement to cut funding from ‘Democratic programs’, which are primarily designed to assist the working poor and the vulnerable.
The blatant targeting of non-white groups, and sadly, women too, has become the calling card for this administration. The right’s readiness to believe in ‘white replacement theory’ and white exceptionalism is a hallmark of their agenda. They work on the assumption that the white majority will buy what they are selling despite their dark intent. All they have to do is demonise ‘the other’, from immigrants to the gay and trans communities, they believe there’s political capital and votes to be had from isolating and targeting them. Listening to Stephen Miller’s rhetoric, it is no stretch to see the similarities between his thinking and the German approach to eugenics, and it’s a truth we have to face head-on in this moment of darkness and despair for many in the US.
There is increasing right-wing chatter of ‘what represents an immigrant’ and their implied racial inferiority to American-born white people. This is why there is increasing talk of where to go after the illegals have been deported. Do we then move on to those who were naturalised less than ten years ago? And it goes on. They want an America where, if you are not born in the US to a US-born citizen, then you have less value to society depending on your lineage. This then leads you to be open to deportation if you are perceived to have broken laws that they can concoct at any time to cull the next targeted group.
It effectively likens naturalised citizens to the slaves of plantation owners whose value was measured under the Three-Fifths Compromise, which stated that three-fifths of the enslaved population would be counted for purposes of congressional representation. Having heard Miller’s rhetoric, I do not doubt that if he could get away with it, he would do it in an instant, and MAGA would cheer him on. It is really time to wake up to the reality of who these people are and who they are modelling themselves after. They play the victim card anytime someone dares to compare them with the Nazis, when in truth, it’s like looking in a mirror.
They are unquestionably wedded to a fascist ideology, and it oozes out of every pore of their agenda. I can tell you that I have absolutely no problem making this comparison, because history spells it out in big, flashing, neon red letters: this is an administration modelled on 1930s Germany. From the adoption of religion to the dehumanisation of the ‘other’. The disregard for the poor and the vulnerable, to the ambition of a white Christian nation. These are all the ingredients of the pie staring us in the face. As AOC said, ‘If it walks like a duck and it quacks, it’s probably a duck’.
Interestingly, Nazi legal scholars studied American segregation laws in detail, focusing on the Jim Crow laws, as a model for their own discriminatory policies. Hitler praised the United States for its racial policies in Mein Kampf, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were keen to adapt American precedents for use in the Third Reich.
You might want to take a look at a book by James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.
As noted by Princeton University Press:
‘…while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.’
It seems the US helped with the blueprint for Nazi Germany, so I suppose Trump thinks it's only fair that he should keep a copy of Mein Kampf in his bedside drawer for reference purposes.
Religion has always been the magic dust of tyrants. Trump has weaponised Christian nationalism in the US, just as Hitler did in 1930s Germany. In a paper published by the Australian National University called From the Death of God to the Rise of Hitler, written by Sascha O. Becker from Warwick University in the UK and Hans-Joachim Voth from the University of Zurich, there’s a great line in the Abstract. When looking at the rise of totalitarianism:
The Nazi Party set itself up as a political religion, emphasising redemption, sacrifice, rituals, and communal spirit. This had a major impact on its success:
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the church will not align with autocracy if it will ‘further the cause of God’ even though God would denounce them for it.
The theory goes that in a secular society, where religion is not prominent and driving societal values, it leaves a void for the bastardisation of faith that can be taken hostage and presented as a political religion. Welcome to Christian Nationalism, the cornerstone of MAGA ideology. The evangelical right is peddling a new religion built on the antithesis of Christian values. It’s an identical approach to that of Hitler. Trump’s devotees have declared the hate he spews as the ‘word of God’.
“Once religious faith ... had gone, people desperately searched for a new system of beliefs and general principles around which to regroup themselves... they thus created an endless number of new “churches”...”
Antonio Gramsci
The marginalisation of segments of society in 1930s Germany began long before the targeting of the Jews. Long before the extermination camps, the Nazi’s refined their approach to disappearing those they considered a drag on society.
As noted in a piece on the Holocaust Memorial Trust website, which would not seem out of place in RFK jr policy announcement:
‘In 1933 the ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ was passed, allowing for the forced sterilisation of those regarded as ‘unfit’. This included people with conditions such as epilepsy, schizophrenia and alcoholism. Prisons, nursing homes, asylums, care homes for the elderly and special schools were targeted to select people for sterilisation. It has been estimated that between 1933 and 1939, 360,000 individuals were subjected to forced sterilisation.
In 1939 the killing of disabled children and adults began. All children under the age of three who had illnesses or a disability, such as Down’s syndrome, or cerebral palsy were targeted under the T4 programme. A panel of medical experts were required to give their approval for the ‘euthanasia’, or supposed ‘mercy-killing’, of each child.’
In terms of later extermination, Hitler did a dummy run with the gays, the communists, and the disabled. But before they could embark on what was to become mass deportation, they created the narrative that those they wanted to dispose of were vermin and poisoning the blood of the nation. Sound familiar? It took time to refine the killing process to create an industrial murder complex. Is this Trump’s aim? Clearly not, but exclude the last step, which is murder, and this type of targeting is precisely who he is. As for forced sterilisation in ICE detention, take a look at this piece by the Brennan Center for Justice and the subsequent government report, in relation to Trump’s first term.
He’s creating a surveillance state where a state-operated militia has been tasked to effect a mass deportation program. He’s weaponised the DOJ and the Supreme Court to facilitate not just ethnic cleansing via deportation, but the targeting of his enemies with an option to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress public dissent as required. He has authorised the detention of the homeless and the mentally disabled and is embarking on a campaign to strip away vital support services for the most vulnerable in society.
The secret to understanding the connection between this regime and the Third Reich is just to strip out the overt murder. If you do that, everything else falls into place perfectly, from the rise to power to the mass expulsion agenda. It’s easy to turn around and say Trump can’t be compared to Hitler, until you exclude the final step. After you have done that, you can overlay the ideology perfectly. The alarming thing is that if you then employ some intellectual capacity to dig a little deeper, you see that beneath the outrage at being compared to Hitler, the truth comes into sharper focus.
All we need to do is introduce greed to the picture: Is Trump prepared to see people die in large numbers for his self-enrichment, or to escape prison or accountability? What did he do during COVID? It’s at this point where things become even more aligned. The deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Gazans mean absolutely nothing to Trump. His entire focus is not on peace and never has been, but instead on what’s in it for him. Trump’s complicity in Gaza is now beyond contradiction, as is his complicity in the deaths of thousands of innocent Ukrainians as a result of his overt support for Russia.
Am I suggesting Trump wants to exterminate those opposed to him? No, he may be foolish, but he’s not that foolish. However, consider this. If there were 10,000 immigrants in a warehouse and Trump were given the choice of staying out of jail, having been convicted of crimes against the American people, or gassing the 10,000 immigrants, he’d turn on the gas in a heartbeat. I’m afraid that’s who he is, and I fear tragically, his base would cheer him on.
We often describe Trump as a convicted felon and useful idiot serving the oligarchs. A man who rambles on, vomiting hate and gibberish in equal measure as he commits crimes daily against the English language, but be in no doubt he will go down as the monster of his generation just as did Adolf Hitler, and I don’t mind being the one making that statement because I believe it to be absolutely true.
Well done! You are the Heather Cox Richardson of the British and put History in in its context. It takes a lot of energy, thank you.
I agree with every word in this piece. If you ever do see a glimmer of hope please let us know. I have considered leaving the US, but cannot imagine abandoning my country in its time of need.