Donald Trump and his surrogates are continuing to channel and amplify Nazism and Adolf Hitler. This is not random or happenstance. It is part of a strategy. “Feral politics” made even more explosive and toxic by adding blatant white supremacy, racism, and antisemitism. Occam’s razor, as it often does, provides the most simple and compelling proof of how Trump and his campaign’s feral hate politics strategy is very intentional: He and they have increased their antisemitism, racism, and white supremacy (and misogyny and hostile sexism) greatly in the last few weeks as the polls and other metrics show him tied with if not behind Kamala Harris, a Black South Asian woman, in the presidential election.
Adolf Hitler is one of the most evil leaders in recorded human history. Hitler and his Nazi regime are responsible for the systematic, industrial-scale mass murder of six million Jewish people and millions of others (including Black Germans). World War II, the deadliest in human history, resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world (estimates range from 50 million to 70 million or more). Almost 80 years after the end of World War II, Nazism and the various forms of racial fascism, and the other antidemocratic and illiberal political belief systems and ideologies in its orbit have not been fully vanquished. They are resurgent in the form of Trumpism, American fascism, and the larger global antidemocracy movement.
This very brief history lesson about the evils of Hitler and Nazi Germany is necessary given the broken state of America’s schools and a society where amnesia and organized forgetting are the norm. For many Americans of a certain age (and older,) Hitler and the Nazis have been reduced to the stuff of internet and social media memes from the movie “Downfall,” generic characters to kill in video games, or perhaps in their most real and frightening form as outliers in American society who rampaged in Charlottesville or commit hate crimes.
There are many examples of Donald Trump’s embrace and channeling of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as part of his chorus of hate and plans to turn America into a type of Fourth Reich. In the most recent escalation in their campaign of racism and white supremacy, Trump and his agents, most notably his running mate JD Vance, are now telling the lie that Black Haitian immigrants in Springfield are stealing and eating white people’s dogs and cats. Attacks on some type of “racial” Other and demands that they be deported (and worse) to “purify” the nation are core beliefs of Nazism and Hitler. Trump has explicitly used such language, describing nonwhite migrants, refugees, and “illegal” aliens as human vermin and “poison” in the “blood” of the nation that needs to be removed. Part of Trump’s “purification” plan involves the creation of a concentration camp system and the “bloody story” that will be the largest deportation plan in American history.
In a post last Monday on his Truth Social disinformation site, Trump issued the following statement. It reads like something written in the early 20th century by American eugenicists and “race scientists” such as Madison Grant, whose work heavily influenced the Nazis:
OUR BORDERS MUST BE CLOSED, AND THE TERRORISTS, CRIMINALS AND MENTALLY INSANE, IMMEDIATELY REMOVED FROM AMERICAN CITIES AND TOWNS, DEPORTED BACK TO THEIR COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN. …THE WORLD IS LAUGHING AT US AS FOOLS, THEY ARE STEALING OUR JOBS AND OUR WEALTH. WE CANNOT LET THEM LAUGH ANY LONGER. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan and purges will not stop here. They will expand to include any people who Trump and his MAGA movement and the other neofascists designate as the “enemy.”
Historian Richard Frankel, author of “States of Exclusion: A New Wave of Fascism” issued this warning:
Trump and Vance and their MAGA allies and other neofascists are erasing the distinction between the idea of deporting undocumented immigrants and those who are here legally. In their hysterical stories about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio stealing and eating household pets, they were talking about a group of people who came to this country legally with temporary protected status. But neither Trump nor Vance made any effort to note that. In fact, JD Vance went even further. After reporters informed him that the Haitians in Springfield were here legally, he responded by telling them, “I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien,” unconsciously echoing Karl Lueger, the notorious antisemitic Mayor of Vienna around the turn of the twentieth century, who famously declared, “I decide who’s a Jew.”
All this is to say that the idea that Trump is focused solely on deporting undocumented immigrants is absurd. His stormtroopers will round up anyone they decide does not belong in this country, whether they’re citizens or not. This is also something the Nazis did even before the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship. Only months after coming to power, the Interior Ministry stopped naturalizing Jews arriving from Eastern Europe and soon after that, they began removing the citizenship of Eastern European Jews who were granted citizenship between 1918 and 1933. Whatever their status, Trump means to remove anyone who does not fit within his particular vision of the American national/racial community.
During a recent rally in Tucson, Arizona, Trump wallowed in a disgusting story about “young (white) American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.” Trump’s language is evocative of that used to justify the lynchings and other extrajudicial murders of the thousands of Black men who were falsely accused of raping white women (or more generally of being “uppity” and “not knowing their place”) during the Jim and Jane Crow terror regime in the South and other parts of the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Trump is also promising to make it illegal for undocumented immigrants to own homes in America. Historian Timothy Ryback, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, highlights the historical precedent of such threats by Trump:
All this anti-foreigner, anti-immigrant foment by Trump and Vance, the doubling down on hate speech and outright lies, reminds me of Hitler’s election campaign rhetoric leading up to the November 6, 1932, Reichstag elections, inflammatory rhetoric that had already resulted in a foreign worker being bludgeoned to death by a group of rightwing vigilantes in the village of Potempa that August.
The sheer brutality of the Potempa murder stunned a nation already reeling from a summer of Nazi street violence that saw newspapers publishing “casualty lists” from the country’s ongoing “civil war.” When the “Potempa Five” were sentenced to death for "political murder," Hitler sent the killers a telegram of support. He called them heroes. He vowed that once in office, no foreign life would ever be placed above that of a blood German. Indeed, one of Hitler’s early acts as chancellor was to pardon the five killers.
Most troubling to my mind are Trump’s repeated references to immigrants as “rapists” and “vermin” who are allegedly “poisoning the blood of our country.” Hitler had a shorthand term for such vile rhetoric: Rassenschande, or “bastardization” of the German race. He also had solutions: successive acts of legislation that curtailed their rights to employment, education, marriage, etc., and ultimately the creation of a vast government-funded infrastructure of homicidal machinery that led to the extermination of millions of human lives.
In a literal textbook example of antisemitism and white supremacy, Trump operates from the assumption that Jewish people constitute a type of inherently untrustworthy hive mind — one that must prove its loyalty to him.
In keeping with that pattern of behavior, Trump said the following during a series of speeches last week: “The Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss....It’s only because of the Democrat hold, or curse, on you.”
The Nazis tattooed serial numbers on Jewish people and members of other targeted groups during the Holocaust. In an interview last Sunday, Trump channeled such horrors:
But we're getting the criminals out, and we're going to do that fast, and we know who they are, and the local police know their names, and they know their serial numbers. They know everything about them. We're not a dumping ground. We're going to get all of those people out, and we're going to get them out fast.
Trump: Do you think Springfield will ever be the same? You have to get them the hell out. You have to get them out.
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 24, 2024
Crowd: *chants send them back* pic.twitter.com/0QVkXCQ9si
Frankel, who is not sure exactly what Trump meant by his reference to “serial numbers,” shares his broader concerns about the corrupt ex-president’s cruelty, nativism, racism, and violence:
If any comparison is to be made with Germany, it seems to me it’s the fundamental dehumanization of his targets. In this case, he sees them as “things,” “units,” and “pieces” (so much of his “business” involves selling things). Products have serial numbers. People do not. But he doesn’t see immigrants as human. Trump talks about them in the language of business, of accounting. The Nazis used similar language. As Primo Levi described it in his classic autobiography, "Survival in Auschwitz," they spoke of “pieces.” As the Germans held roll call while Levi and his fellow Italian Jews waited for deportation to Auschwitz in 1944, he wrote how the German officer asked, “Wieviel Stück?” How many pieces? That’s the similarity that strikes me here.
In the 40 or so days until Election Day, Donald Trump and his surrogates are only going to increase their channeling and amplification of the Nazis and Hitler. The stakes of the 2024 election are truly existential for American democracy and freedom.
Sharon Nazarian, who is a board member and former senior vice president of the Anti-Defamation League, implores the American people and their leaders to defeat Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, and the larger neofascist movement:
Over the past two weeks, Trump has given into his darkest and most dangerous tendencies showing everyone in America his intentions to dehumanize, bully, and endanger anyone and everyone who stands between him and the Presidency. His trafficking in conspiracy theories against the Haitian community in Springfield, his dehumanizing and terrifying allusion to the Holocaust by threatening immigrants with serial numbers and using terms like ‘hunt them down’, and his threatening words to the Jewish community last week, where he made it clear to his most extreme supporters that he intends to blame the Jewish community if he were to lose, all point to a man who is telling us outright that he intends to remake America in a dark and disturbing way.
When someone tells us who they are, we are supposed to listen. This is a man who urged on a violent insurrection against America and the peaceful transition of power just three years ago. Between his words, the words of his running mate, the words of his supporters, and the policies contained in Project 2025, we are witnessing a movement that needs to be stopped in its tracks, or we may not ever be able to stop a slide toward authoritarianism and threats to our democracy that we’ve never known in this country.
Although their country’s democracy is ailing, the American people still have the ability to choose their destiny in the upcoming presidential election. Learned helplessness and preemptive surrender will almost guarantee that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and the larger antidemocracy movement will win.
John Roth, who is a leading scholar on antisemitism and the Holocaust, counsels that resistance is not futile:
Trump has said he plans to visit Springfield “soon.” Like so much that Trump trumpets, might that claim be a lie? Trump knows he won’t be welcome in Springfield. The crowds enjoying the Rose Goute Creole Restaurant’s Haitian cuisine testify to that, and Mayor Rob Rue stresses that a Trump visit would put “an extreme strain” on the city’s resources. Cowardly bully that he is, Trump probably won’t show up in Springfield. But either way, Trump and Vance dangerously exploit the city as a prop to amplify their fundamental campaign falsehood, one emblematic of Nazi Germany and today’s neo-Nazis and others of their ilk: a flood of undocumented immigrants invades the United States and poisons American blood.
Trump and Vance think it’s a winning card to support racial fascism and authoritarianism. But the better bet is that American pushback will defeat their gamble.
The 2024 election is a referendum on democracy and a test of the American people’s character, morality, intelligence, and courage. As I often ask here at Salon, who are we, “the Americans?” I hope that Roth is correct and that the American people rise to the challenge of vanquishing Trumpism. Unfortunately, I have a deep and foreboding fear that he will be proven wrong.
