President Trump Channels His Inner Nazi

IF YOU’VE NEVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, I can save you the suffering.

When I was teaching I waded through all 687 pages.

Sadly, with the rise of President Donald J. Trump, it seems we might need to reexamine what it was Adolf Hitler said. We need to ask what it means when it appears Trump is channeling his inner Nazi.

The first, most obvious Hitler/Trump comparison involves the two leaders’ capacity for hate. Hate has fueled all repugnant ideologies in history. Hitler hated Jews. ISIS hates infidels and the West.

Trump hates those who criticize.

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s poisonous ideas are on full display. Growing up in Austria, he claims he witnessed racial danger at every hand. Soon “the granite foundation” of a hideous ideology was set. Threats to racial purity were as life-threatening as “incurable tumors.”

Again, comparisons chill. You don’t have to scratch very hard to uncover racial fear at the heart of the Trump & Co. world view. In 2016 you had Candidate Trump scaring predominantly white crowds with nightmare scenarios of dark-skinned “rapists” and “murderers” pouring across our border. You had him drumming up support for punching protesters—had him threatening reporters—had him claiming thousands of New Jersey Muslims celebrated as the Twin Towers fell. 

Trump was peddling hate almost as skillfully as Hitler in Mein Kampf.

LIKE ADOLF HITLER, TOO, the man in the White House is fond of dehumanizing enemies, political or personal. His foes are “scum” or “animals.” Rosie O’Donnell clashed with him years ago. He labeled her a “fat pig.” MSNBC anchors who criticized the president were “low IQ Crazy Mika” and “Psycho Joe.” 

Gang members, Trump recently told police, “These are animals. They might not be sympathetic figures. True. Animals, however, have no constitutional rights.

Shooting animals, especially those with dark skins, some Trump supporters might agree, would be fine. 

It’s the kind of thinking that bred SS firing squads.

Executioners prefer to shoot people in the back of the head.
That way they aren't troubled by the human face.

When workers of differing political views tried to drive a young Hitler from a job site, the future Fuhrer labeled them “scum.” A century later, Trump has his own “scum” to battle. Angered by the way his campaign was being covered in October 2015 he described critical reporters this way: “They’re scum.”

Hitler, too, made war against a free press. At one point he refers to “the brutal daily press, shunning no villainy, employing every means of slander, lying with such a virtuosity that would bend iron beams, all in the gospel of a new humanity.”

Trump has made similar attacks a staple of discourse. In February he labeled media the “enemy of the people.” 

What Muslims are to men like General Flynn and Steven K. Bannon—an existential threat—Jews were to Hitler. He saw their diabolical influence in the press, in literature, in art and theater. “This was pestilence, spiritual pestilence,” he warned, “worse than the Black Death of olden times, and the people were being infected with it.” He began to examine the worldwide press. What he read was “more akin to lies than honest truth; and the writers were—Jews.”

Hitler had his “fake news” too.

IT WAS SHOCKING, TO SAY THE LEAST, when Trump watched tragedy unfold last month in Charlottesville and managed to see “many sides” equally at fault. On just one side you had Richard Spencer, Trump’s neo-Nazi fan boy spewing hate. On that side you had David Duke, former Republican candidate for Louisiana governor and Grand Wizard of the KKK. You had Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, billed as “The World’s Most Genocidal Republican Website.” You had James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old Ohioan, owner of a powerful car.

Steeped in dehumanizing rhetoric, Fields revved up his 2015 Dodge Charger and sent it careening into a crowd.

He was ISIS with a Confederate flag. He killed one and injured nineteen more, five critically.

And Trump couldn’t see a difference.

As for Hitler, growing up in Austria, he claims he was fooled by what he saw around him. The Jews had “become Europeanized and had taken on a human look.” Only slowly did he grasp the truth. “Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.” Eventually, he realized Jews were the root of evil:

Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?

     If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light—a kike!

Elsewhere, he likens them to a “spider” slowly beginning to “suck the blood out of the people’s pores.” The Jew is “the eternal mushroom of humanity.” Dehumanization—the polar opposite of humanism—would henceforth guide him on a twisted course.

You may forget: but Hitler’s hate was multifaceted. He hated homosexuals. He hated Gypsies. He hated Slavs. He describes himself as “repelled” by a polyglot “mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats.” In one passage he refers to Negroes as “half-apes.” The French were  a “negrified” people, a “mulatto state.”

All represented racial threats.

HERE AGAIN WE CATCH the same stench emanating from the modern alt-right, the same nauseating thinking reflected in the words of Alex Jones and the comment section of Breitbart News. The alt-right is anti-immigrant. The alt-right is anti-feminist. The alt-right opposes gay and transgender rights. The alt-right sees globalism as a Jewish plot to dilute the white race and undercut Christianity and American values. “White genocide” is their greatest fear. The concept was first popularized by Bob Whitaker, an economics professor and Reagan appointee to the Office of Personnel Management, who penned a 221-word call to action. His screed ended with the rallying cry: “Anti-racist is code for anti-white.”

If you believe such comparisons are overblown, remember: The neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were clear—the number “14” prominently displayed on battle shields. That figure represents fourteen words fundamental to their system of belief. “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” 

It’s a slogan coined by David Lane, a man sentenced to 190 years in jail for the murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg.

So what do we get from Trump and too many members of his loyal crew? We get a man who spent years hinting the first dark-skinned president of the United States wasn’t really an American. We listen as Trump claims a judge of Mexican heritage can’t possibly be trusted. We get Pam Taylor, a fan of President Trump and the First Lady, who referred to Michelle Obama as “an ape in heels.” We have Carl Paladino, New York state chairman for the Trump 2016 campaign, who, when asked what he’d like to see go away in 2017, replied, “Michelle Obama. I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

We get racism and hate—thinly veiled—or not veiled at all. We get Congressman Steven King of Iowa, channeling the pure blood ideas Hitler peddled, saying we have to stem even legal immigration because, “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

DOES THIS MEAN ALL Trump supporters are racist haters? No.

Not at all.

But you get Jeff Sieting, a small town official from Michigan, dealing in visceral hate. All you need to hear “Heil Hitler” chants echoing down the decades is to replace the word “Muslim” with the word “Jew.” On Facebook Sieting has posted bigoted anti-Muslim sentiments such as these: “Kill them all, every last one.” Sounding like a Nazi dictator, Sieting also warned that Muslims  were “dangerously destructive to society” and “there simply is no place for them in our world.” 

Islam was a “flesh-eating bacteria,” not a religion, “a death cult.”

Hitler might have complimented Candidate Trump on his ability to sway the simple masses. The Nazi leader had scant respect for the intellectual capacity of his followers. For that reason, he said, political ideas would have to be “engraved in the memory and feeling of the people by eternal repetition.”

So it was: Trump peddled simplistic fixes to complex problems. Who would pay for the border wall?

“Mexico,” crowds chanted.

Hillary Clinton?

“Lock her up!” his followers shouted.

Keep it simple.

Like Hitler, Trump also finds democracy to be an unworkable concept. He grows angry when courts oppose him, when “so-called judges” block his path. He fumes when the Senate acts too slowly. He demands immediate changes to fundamental legislative rules. In a German democracy, Hitler explained, “the leader is elected, but then enjoys unconditional authority.”

Call it: Trump Heaven.

HITLER, TOO, WON VOTERS with a promise to make Germany great again. Even defeat in World War I could be pinned on Communists and Jews. “Marxism…this pestilence,” Hitler warned, must be stamped out. It was a “venomous plague,” rooted in “Jewish universities.” It should have been the duty of any wartime government to destroy the threat, “to exterminate mercilessly the agitators who were misleading the nation.” 

“If the best men were dying at the front,” during the fighting, “the least we could do was to wipe out the vermin.”

That last statement is typical of Nazi and Trumpian thinking. Enemies are always subhuman—incurable tumors—vermin—animals—or scum.

Hitler often returned to the import of propaganda in his book. It must “be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.”

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.

And so it is even now.

Trump can contradict himself at will—Trump giving the lie to Trump—and his followers’ “power of forgetting is enormous.”

As far back as 1923, Hitler was already advocating the approach Trump instinctively grasps. In “view of the primitive simplicity of their [the masses’] minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big.”

So Hitler lied big.

Trump follows suit. Obama tapped his phones at Trump Tower. Millions of illegals turned out to vote for Hillary. No one in the campaign had any dealings with Russians. Obamacare would be easy to repeal and replace. “You’re going to have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost. And it’s going to be so easy,” Candidate Trump repeatedly promised.

Big Lies. 

IN MEIN KAMPF, HITLER POUNDS away at racial themes. The Aryan race, cutting across national boundaries, bonded by blood, a folk group, must be preserved.

Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood.

     All who are not of good race in the world are chaff.

The Jew:

…is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is also like that of spongers: wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter or longer period.

Put a Nazi armband on Congressman King and there you are.

Hitler focused again on the schools. Science, world history and cultural history would all be taught in such a way as to foster “national pride,” “so that when the young man leaves his school he is not a half pacifist, democrat, or something else, but a whole German.”

The crown of the folkish state’s entire work of education and training must be to burn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it. No boy and no girl must leave school without having been led to an ultimate realization of the necessity and essence of blood purity.

Humanism—even today a bugaboo of thinkers on the American right—would be ruthlessly suppressed.

WHEN GERMANY WAS FORCED to surrender in November 1918, Hitler blamed traitors in the nation’s midst. Politicians, puppets of evil Marxists and Jews, stabbed the people in the back. Punishment would come swiftly once he came to power. A “German national court must judge and execute some ten thousand of the organizing and hence responsible criminals of the November betrayal and everything that goes with it,” he insisted. 

The future would be filled with gas chambers:

If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas…the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future.

And so it was. 

And so it is. The neo-Nazis and Klansmen who marched in Charlottesville this summer and a frightening minority of Trump fans who voted in November seem happy to vouch for every word Hitler said. “The Jew shall not replace us!” marchers chanted in Charlottesville. Like Hitler’s minions at rallies in Nuremberg, they marched in torchlight formation. Others wore hoods representative of an organization founded to ensure the U.S. never “negrified,” as Hitler said the French had already done.

Hitler spoke often of the great sacrifice of blood that would be necessary in taking wide swaths of soil in the East.

Just as our ancestors did not receive the soil on which we live today as a gift from Heaven, but had to fight for it at the risk of their lives, in the future no folkish state will win soil for us and hence life for our people, but only the might of a victorious sword.

“Blood and soil,” men like the driver of the killer Charger last summer screamed. It was Mein Kampf 2.0.

As for the Jew, “No nation,” Hitler wrote, “can remove his hand from its throat except by the sword.”

That’s what Hitler said, what President Trump either fails to grasp or secretly supports. To the degree that the man in the Oval Office is channeling his inner Nazi, exactly to that degree does he represent a fundamental threat to what most Americans have always claimed they hold most dear.

(All quotes are from a translation by Ralph Mannheim first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1943. Mein Kampf was first published in Germany twenty years before.)