As we begin another week of state-induced trauma, things are becoming ever more reminiscent of 1930s Germany. Immigrants are being hunted, educators and scientists are being portrayed as the enemy of the people and detention camps are being erected across the country, as mass deportation takes priority over the welfare of the American people. Expansionist imperial ambition is now at the forefront of US foreign policy, as domestically, purity tests begin to creep into the legislative agenda.
Trump, as the 47th President of the United States, denotes the number of training days for new immigration enforcement officers receiving a $50,000 signing bonus. In just 47 days, they are provided with a badge, a gun and apparently, immunity from prosecution. It’s a racist misogynist’s wet dream come true. The only thing they are not given is an SS badge, because let’s face it, the optics would be good. ICE is a reincarnation of the Blackwater private contractor model used in Iraq to murder Iraqi civilians for fun, and I suspect many in their ranks come from the very same labour pool.
The objective from the outset has been to establish a federal army of thugs who are able to hide behind the protections afforded to highly trained police officers, allowing them to act outside the limitations of a police officer in order induce a perpetual state of fear and anxiety in communities across America. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. In many instances, they are being deployed without proper vetting and with little to no psychological evaluation. As for de-escalation training, it appears to be nonexistent. We hear time and time again, officers making the now almost familiar soundbite of ‘today you got lucky’, when they find the person they just targeted was, in fact, a US citizen. Never an apology, just a reluctant, backhanded admission that they got it wrong, if the victim is lucky.
Again and again, we hear outrage from the right as ICE is increasingly described as the ‘Gestapo’, but history tells us that the comparison is absolutely justified. The Gestapo were responsible for the coordination of the deportation of Jews across Europe to ghettos and concentration camps. You don’t get bonus points for not turning on the gas taps.
If you examine the undertone now permeating US far-right politics, racial purity is creeping its way into the conversation. They are planning ahead to ensure the private detention facilities maximise profit. Those who have created the blueprint for an American white nationalist state are looking ahead to who is next in the quest to leave only native born Americans in America. I think they call it confining yourself to the bottom of the academic barrel. Those given the right to remain are first on the list, then naturalised Americans.
We are already seeing proposed legislation, such as S.3283, the Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025, which, if enacted, as outlined in guidance notes from Americans Overseas, would prevent an American citizen from holding dual nationality. Those who currently have that status will be obligated by law to choose just one nationality:
The bill seeks to prohibit American citizens from holding dual nationality and introduces the principle of “exclusive loyalty” to the United States. In essence, the Exclusive Citizenship Act proposes that:
American citizens may not simultaneously be nationals of another country. Those who already hold a second nationality at the moment the law takes effect would have one year to choose whether to renounce their foreign citizenship or their U.S. citizenship.
Americans who voluntarily acquire another nationality after the law takes effect would automatically lose their U.S. citizenship.
Trump, I’m sure, encouraged by Stephen Miller, who is clearly a scholar of the Third Reich, is seeking to reimagine the Nuremberg Race Laws for 21st Century America. I want you to read this opening paragraph in an important article from The National World War II Museum from January 7th 2025 :
“I decide who is a Jew.” Viennese mayor Karl Lueger, a vicious antisemite who ran an 1895 political platform based almost solely on hatred toward Jews, made this infamous statement in response to a question about why he had Jewish friends. It captures in horrific succinctness how, by the turn of the 20th century, the label “Jewish” increasingly had little to do with actual religious or ethnic identity, and instead had been transmogrified into a broadly conceived slur hurled at anyone perceived as an “other.”
The key point is that the right will claim suggestions that this administration is behaving like the Third Reich is sensationalist left-wing propaganda, when nothing could be further from the truth. The horrors of the Holocaust are a shield that the right hides behind, suggesting it’s preposterous to compare Trump to Adolf Hitler. Trump would never gas the Jews because nobody loves the Jews more than Trump. have to tell you, if it were a choice between going to jail or turning on the taps, I’m not sure. If truth be known, the internal civil war, quietly simmering within the MAGA base, between the Trump faction and Nick Fuentez, would also suggest that the exclusion of the Jews on the enemies list might not be assured moving forward.
The final solution was as much about political enemies as the Jews; there were just fewer of them, as was the case with Gypsies and the disabled. We already know Trump does not want to be seen next to disabled war veterans. In a book by his nephew, Fred Trump III, he notes that, during a conversation about his disabled son, Trump said, “I don’t know,” then let out a sigh. “He doesn’t recognise you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
There is no doubt that Trump, Miller, Vought and a number of the puppet masters have an ambition for the US to be a white Christian Nationalist nation, not dissimilar to Hitler’s ambitions for an Aryan nation. The administration simply does not want you to read between the lines of Project 2025 and its consolidation vision, ‘Restoring America’s Promise’. The similarity between Hitler’s Nuremberg Race Laws is uncanny. In a bitter twist of irony, Hitler’s laws took their original inspiration from Jim Crow laws in the US South.
There is little doubt that these laws targeted the Jews, but to focus on that in the context of this administration is to miss the point. This was purely about targeting the “other”; the Jews were just the shop window to rally the German people against them. The concentration camps were not the sole preserve of the Jews; they were also a dumping ground for anyone who disagreed with Hitler. The final solution playbook can be overlaid over Stephen Miller and Russell Vought’s plan for a Christian Nationalist America. We get sidetracked by assuming that because there is no mass extermination element in the MAGA strategy, it’s not the same, when almost every other aspect of it is identical.
This administration is a reincarnation of the 1970s American hate group Aryan Nations. The Heritage Foundation has sought to breathe new life into neo-Nazism, combined with the Christian Identity belief that white people are the chosen people of God. Indeed, it is not uncommon for Trump to refer to himself as ‘the chosen one’. The really interesting thing is the misappropriation of the term ‘Aryan’, which dates back to an ethnocultural self-designation used by ancient Indo-Iranians to mean "noble" or "peer". It crossed over into 19th-century European racial theory, being misinterpreted as a racial category to define a superior white or Nordic race, which I suspect is why Trump often bemoans the fact that there are not many immigrants coming to the US from Norway.
The 1930s ‘Jewish question’ has simply morphed into ‘the immigrant question’. Both have been referred to as "poisoning the blood of our country, a direct quote from ‘Mein Kampf,’ Hitler’s blueprint for a ‘pure Aryan’ Germany, and the removal of Jews. Detention and mass deportation became a catch-all not just for Jews, but also for any other troublesome dissenting elements of German society. Trump will have no problem using the same tools to detain his political enemies.
We have already seen measures being taken to lock up the homeless and those deemed unable to take care of themselves. The whole strategy is a mirror image without the gas chambers. You can read the Nuremberg Racial Laws and simply replace ‘Jews’ with ‘immigrants’.
In Minnesota, we are clearly seeing the transmogrification of ICE into a mirror image of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, the original paramilitary organisation under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany, a force very focused on intimidation and fear. The shooting of Renee Good is evidence of the evolution of Trump’s presidential militia. A militia which his Vice President declared has ‘absolute immunity’, even though US law provides no such immunity. When it comes to mass deportation, the administration is shifting from the rule of law to the law of the jungle, and they make no apology for the direction of travel. Minnesota is just another in a long line of stress tests for a democracy. The democracy stroke victim appears to have lost control of its left side. It’s becoming difficult to understand, and it’s tragically just a heart attack away from life support.
It seems America has decided to put its faith in free and fair elections in November 2026, in the hope that the heart attack doesn’t happen before then. I do love an optimist. America and, in many ways, the world are facing the most consequential year in modern history. The adults in the room will be forced to become geopolitical firefighters, trying to extinguish fires set almost daily by the petulant child in the White House. An arsonist going around the world, lighting fires under the rules-based order. There will be no safe haven from his lunacy, and lots of people are going to get hurt. The only winner in the death spiral Trump is subjecting America to is China, I’m afraid.
I wasn’t suggesting there was any adult in the room in the states, I was more focussed on international leaders.
"ICE is a reincarnation of the Blackwater private contractor model used in Iraq to murder Iraqi civilians for fun, and I suspect many in their ranks come from the very same labour pool."
A more current source of recruits would be the Proud Boys and militias that used to be in the news constantly, but that we hear little about these days. Why risk getting in trouble through affiliations with them when it is possible to continue the same work as a paid, immune official for the United States Government?!