Trump is Our Hitler: If He Comes to Power, Who Will Be His "Jews"?
As J.D. Vance, his own vice-presidential running mate once said before Vance’s opportunism overrode his sanity and thin sliver of decency, “Donald Trump is our Hitler.” While a lot of people would agree, I know this pronouncement may make others uncomfortable. It seems hysterical, hyperbolic, just plain wrong. To them, nobody is Hitler, not even Trump. It especially raises the antennae of Jews, of whom I am one, because it seems to normalize Hitler to whom no one can possibly be compared, even someone as obviously heinous as Trump – although in a growing segment of the right-wing world, Hitler is now the hero of World War II, and Winston Churchill the villain. Hitler started a massive war. Hitler killed millions. Hitler tried to eliminate a race from the face of the earth and nearly succeeded – my race. Trump doesn’t come close. He has, as I wrote in an earlier Substack, the affect of a clown, not a genocidal maniac. Trump has attempted to destroy democracy, and he may very well wind up destroying America, in the unlikely event he wins the presidency again this November. But these hardly compare to Hitler’s crimes, especially his ultimate crime.
And yet, is it really such a reach?
Back in 1990, Michael Godwin, a law student who frequented the internet, devised what is now known as “Godwin’s Law”: “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.” Godwin’s point was partly ridicule over how arguments inevitably escalate. But even Godwin now believes that his own law applies to Trump, that Hitler and Trump is not an unreasonable comparison, even an apt one, and that Trump actively invites it with his rhetoric, which often parrots Hitler’s. “Trump believes,” Godwin told an interviewer recently, “for whatever reason, that there is some part of his base that really wants to hear this message said that way, and he’s catering to them.”
Before dismissing outright the argument that Trump is our Hitler, it is imperative to remember that before Hitler became a genocidal psychopath who killed millions, he was already a tyrant and hate-monger, and that before he attempted to exterminate the Jews, he viciously and relentlessly scapegoated them. This is what genocidal psychopaths do. They find a perceived threat. They turn the threat into a target. Then they rouse the populace against that target.
This process is intrinsic to fascism. In his indispensable book, The Anatomy of Fascism, scholar Robert O. Paxton, observed, “Fascists needed a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers.” They needed to provide what Paxton would call “the thrill of domination” over those whom they regarded as inferior, those whom they regarded as contemptible and dangerous.
In his landmark study of why so many of the German people coalesced to commit the Holocaust, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen laid down the predicates for this demonization. Hitler didn’t create antisemitism among his supporters, a large number of whom were needed to execute the Holocaust. The Holocaust was only possible because of the preordained beliefs Germans held about Jews. As Goldhagen puts it, “Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.” To put it more bluntly: Germans hated Jews – hated them so much, as Goldhagen writes, that Germans generally thought they “ought to die.” [His italics]
And this hatred, as Goldhagen explains, was not simply the hatred toward people who were deemed inferior, contaminated, filthy, deceptive, cunning, greedy, parasitic, malevolent, even Christ killers, to use some of the terms Goldhagen adduces, though they were vilified as all of these, but, above all, evil – a mortal threat to the Christian moral order, “as violators of the sacred and as beings opposed to the fundamental good towards which people ought to strive.” To sustain the good demanded that Jews die. As Goldhagen shows, this was at the very heart of Christianity, which beat in the German breast. Thus did the Germans leap from hating Jews to feeling the necessity to eliminate them from the earth. They ought to die.
This feeling was omnipresent in Nazi Germany. This feeling was monolithic in Nazi Germany. This feeling was “shouted from the rooftops” in Nazi Germany. This feeling was “so commonplace as to go practically unnoticed” in Nazi Germany. Hitler stoked it, of course, but he really didn’t have to. His supporters were “willing” executioners. They were saving their nation and their souls from the scourge of Jewry. Everyone hated Jews.
And now to Trump – our pre-Holocaust Hitler. Anyone familiar with Donald Trump is surely familiar with this framework. He is a world-class hater. He stokes the hate in his supporters. His rallies are hate-fests. And anyone who believes that this country could not conceivably make the admittedly wide, wide leap from demonization to extermination is, I think, naïve. It already did. What was the South, both ante-bellum and post-bellum, if not a fascist state or cluster of states, demonizing, even exterminating Blacks when they were inconvenient? Americans are certainly not immune to these resentments.
Hate, great, all-consuming hate, is not only intrinsic to fascism. It fuels it. In order to keep his fascistic order going, Trump needs to up the ante of hatred, and he has. (It is ironic, incidentally, that in discussing just how deeply embedded antisemitism was in the German consciousness, Goldhagen uses as an analogy how deeply embedded democracy is in the American consciousness. Not any more.) Think of January 6 and the rampaging hordes who wore red hats instead of brown shirts. Think of Trump’s rallies where he still gets big laughs citing the assault on – the fractured skull of – Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Think of those supporters enjoying, cheering, the prospect of violence that Trump promises to rain down upon his enemies and upon innocent groups of American scapegoats. Think of the “bloodbath” he describes if he loses in November. Think of these people, and then say that it can’t happen here. Thomas Mann didn’t mince words, albeit ugly ones, about his fellow Germans when Hitler ascended to the chancellorship. “The common scum” had taken power, he wrote in his diary, though no one then could have foreseen, much less imagined what they would perpetrate.
We minimize the danger of Trump at our peril. We think that Hitler was sui generis at our peril. We assume that Americans do not sufficiently hate enough for them to believe that some people deserve to die at our peril. We ignore that 46% of Americans worship Trump at our peril. We read newspapers and watch television news that don’t seem particularly exercised about the threat of Trump, and we accept their passivity at our peril.
I know this has been a long preface, an awfully long preface, and I may have lost some of you along the way, but it leads to a frightening question about a man, a people, and a nation that we fail to ask at our peril: If he were to win, and if he needed to rile his red hats, who will be Donald Trump’s “Jews”?
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Jews. The ready answer is that Donald Trump’s Jews will be everyone’s Jews: namely, the Jews. Trump has a long history of antisemitism, and don’t even begin to think that his daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism has mitigated that in the least. He has used the trope that Jews are money-grubbing (he told the Republican Jewish Coalition, “I don’t want your money, therefore you’re probably not going to support me, because you stupidly want to give money.”), that Jews are untrustworthy (“A lot of you are in the real estate business because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers. Not nice people at all.”), that Jews have divided loyalties between the United States and Israel or that their loyalties aren’t divided enough (“Jewish people who live in America don’t love Israel enough,” and talking to American Jews about Israel as “your country” and Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister,” as if Jews weren’t Americans), that he knows better what serves Jewish interests than Jews themselves do (“U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel – Before it is too late!”). He heartily endorses antisemitism. He invited Ye, formerly Kanye West, to his Mar-a-Lago estate alongside Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and vocal Holocaust denier, after Ye had said that Jews should “stop dissing the Nazis,” after Ye had said that Blacks were the real Hebrew tribe, not Jews, and after Ye had said that he would go “Def Con 3” on Jews.
Trump has also used the idea of Jewish antisemitism against Jews. He accused Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, a Jew, of becoming a “Palestinian” for calling for Netanyahu’s ouster, and the Democratic Party for being antisemitic for not selecting Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Jew, as Kamala Harris’s running mate. “She hates Israel,” he said of Harris during the debate. More recently, Vance has appeared with Tucker Carlson after Carlson hosted a Holocaust denier on his podcast who lauded Hitler, and had lavished praise upon him. Carlson should have been a pariah. Instead, Republicans treat him as a member of the family – Trump’s family.
And Trump’s close association with the Christian Nationalist movement also makes Jews potential scapegoats since Christian Nationalists believe that America is a Christian nation, and Trump himself has promised to create a task force against anti-Christian bias, and to protect Christianity, though he doesn’t explicitly say who or what he is protecting it from. These allies of his, though, are not lovers of Jews. And there is one ally, Trump’s good pal, Elon Musk, who is an out-and-out antisemite. Read his tweets.
Jews are never especially popular, and since the Israeli retribution against Gaza after the Hamas attack on Israel last October, they may be less so. But even as antisemitism spikes, we Jews have protections. American antisemitism is nowhere near the deep-seated, intractable, murderous antisemitism of pre-war Germany; much of it comes from the left today because of Gaza and not from the right, Trump’s people; and there is a great sensitivity about antisemitism, as witness the reaction to the campus disruptions late last year and early this year, in the culture generally, and in the media that make Jews unlikely scapegoats for the grievances that animate the fascistic right. It is a steady but fairly low-grade hatred that gets lumped with liberalism. Trump is likely to spare them his wrath because he wouldn’t have much to gain by stigmatizing them when he can stigmatize liberals instead.
Blacks. Blacks are the next likely and easily available target. Blacks have historically suffered as America’s favorite scapegoats for challenging white hegemony, and they satisfy one of the largest white grievances: the sense of victimization as they believe Blacks are gaining what they feel they are losing. Blacks are also routinely demonized as less than whites.
Trump is a racist, and not an especially subtle one. He began his political career with racism, by challenging Barack Obama’s American birth, and he has continued to use racism as a political tool, trying to undermine the Black Lives Matter movement by threatening the protesters, and these days questioning Kamala Harris’s blackness and purposely mispronouncing her name, as if it is something exotic. Trump can get a lot of mileage out of this disrespect – Black Lives Matter was something of a turning point in Trump heightening anger against Blacks - but racism toward Blacks, however much white Americans may resent them – and, as I always say, there is a strong correlation between Trumpism and racism – is more of a low hum than of a crescendo.
And there is this. While racists dream of somehow triggering a race war, there are simply too many Blacks for Trump to meaningfully launch any sort of full-scale attack against them, only his cruel digs. In Germany at the time of Hitler’s rise, Jews were only .8% of the population, making them extremely vulnerable. Blacks are nearly 14% of the American population, making them far less so, despite white supremacist wet dreams.
The LBGQT+ community. Here is where things get dicier. Both Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have waged war on the LGBQT+ community on the basis that by doing so, they are restoring “traditional values.” Does that sound familiar? In November 2022, Russia passed a law preventing the expression or display of gay lifestyles. A year ago in July, Putin signed into law a draconian edict banning transitioning surgery and hormone therapy, annulling marriages if a partner changes gender, and prohibiting adoptions by transgender couples. One member of the Duma, which passed the law unanimously, called transgender individuals “the first step on the road to hell.” Another said the law protected Russia from “Western anti-family ideology,” which sounds very much like J.D. Vance. And last March, Putin’s Supreme Court added the “LGBT Movement” to a list of extremist and terrorist organizations, basically forbidding LGBQT activism. Meanwhile, Viktor Orbán, whom Trump cited as a character reference during the debate, signed a bill repealing legal rights for transgender individuals, again, in the name of traditional family values, and forcing them to accept their birth gender identity, including their birth names.
But while Trump often takes his cues from these European fascist strongmen, this time, transgender advocates say that Putin and Orbán are taking their cues from the American right, which also believes that transgender individuals threaten the social and moral order - precisely the German argument against Jews. (Of course, Nazis tormented gay people, too.) By one account, the Russian Supreme Court decision that effectively outlawed the LBGQT+ movement contained a passage from Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, the case that decriminalized consensual sodomy.
Trump has been actively and spitefully anti-trans – saying transition was “invented” by the “radical left”; vowing to investigate transgender transitioning; mocking transgender athletes and promising to prevent them from competing; calling them “sick” and “deranged”; and claiming that children were being transitioned while they were at school. (These are only a few of several dozen anti-trans comments and policies listed by GLAAD. You can hit the link and read them.)
This time, because there are so few transgender individuals and because the Trumpista right is as monolithically arrayed against them as the Germans were against the Jews, Trump might very well see great political value in harassing the transgender community, should he need a new cause. The encouraging news is that, according to a GLAAD poll, a majority of voters of all parties oppose candidates who campaign against transgender people. Score one for Americans.
Immigrants. Nowhere, however, is Trump more stridently Hitlerian than when it comes to immigrants. He began his first campaign with a vitriolic tirade against immigrants illegally crossing the Southern border. Like Hitler railing against the Jews, Trump castigated them for everything from criminality to insanity. He has accused them of rampaging the country in gangs, of taking jobs from white Americans, of being alcoholics and drug addicts and rapists, of smuggling drugs into the country, and, just recently and absurdly, of stealing and eating pets – which combines racism and nativism, since the immigrants he accuses are Haitians. He has labeled them “animals.” He has said they were “poisoning the blood” of the country - verbatim from Hitler’s libels against the Jews – and reportedly calling it “a great line.” His accusations against the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, has had his desired effect of putting them at risk. There are, as you know, bomb threats against schools, city offices, and hospitals there. This is incipient Hitlerism. To Trump and his followers, apparently, they ought to die.
And here is where demonization edges a bit closer to extermination or, at the very least, brutalization. Trump goes beyond his typical name-calling. He promises to round them up – all 11 million undocumented immigrants – and deport them. He brags of “mass deportations” – the biggest deportations of all time, implicitly drawing comparison to the previous great deportations: of the Jews to concentration camps. And he has said this at a recent rally with his typical boastfulness: “It will be a bloody story.” His rally-goers love it.
Such a deportation would also be a prohibitively expensive story and probably prohibitively difficult story. Writing in The Atlantic, David Frum said, “Trump’s `bloody story’ talk is not a guide to what a hypothetical future Trump administration would do. A future Trump administration will be a chaos of constitutional and foreign-policy crises, incapable of any kind of considered or consistent domestic policy. Bloody story is instead a revelation about how Trump feels—and a troubling reminder of the sources of his appeal.” In short, Trump is too incompetent to carry out his bloody plan.
But as a reminder of the sources of his appeal, it is also a reminder of how millions of Americans feel about immigrants, even in this nation of immigrants. Jews, Blacks, even some transgender Americans may escape the cruelty. But immigrants hold a special place in Trump’s animus and in that of his supporters. In Germany, Hitler was able to mobilize the public on his murderous mission because they so hated Jews, they felt the Jews’ deaths, the Jews’ torment that preceded those deaths, were perfectly justified. Here, it is possible that many Americans might feel the same way, that they think of these poor people seeking a new home and a new start as “animals” who will “poison” our blood, and that eliminating them, whether deportation qualifies as a form of elimination or it requires something more drastic, is both justified and necessary to maintain our moral order and our national purity. Certainly, no other group in recent memory has received so much opprobrium, so universal a hatred as this veritable trickle of people.
Maybe Frum is right. Maybe Trump is just blowing smoke, acting tough, pretending to be a big shot like Mussolini or Hitler or Putin. Maybe this is just campaign talk. Maybe Godwin’s Law inflates Trump. Maybe he knows he can goose the “common scum” with this sort of rhetoric and win the election. Maybe Trump doesn’t really have Hitlerian ambitions, though he has used the word “Reich” to describe his next administration. Maybe any concern is misplaced, and there is no critical mass among the American people to punish immigrants or kill them. Maybe it is a bridge way too far for us to cross.
Or maybe not.
Notes
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/19/godwins-law-trump-hitler-00132427
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. NY: Vintage paperback, 2005.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. NY: Vintage paperback, 1997.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/17/trump-history-antisemitic-tropes/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/10/27/antisemitism-kanye-trump-adidas-jews/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/08/trump-anti-semitism-comments-fox-news/679459/
https://apnews.com/article/trump-schumer-israel-jewish-democrats-35bd1522edd64caf1dedbb10fddf0fcf
https://forward.com/fast-forward/652707/debate-trump-harris-israel-gaza-hamas-palestinians/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-twitter-antisemitic-report-1234953165/
https://www.axios.com/2024/09/10/jewish-house-democrats-rebuke-tucker-carlson
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/us/politics/jd-vance-tucker-carlson-darryl-cooper.html
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/russias-war-lgbtq-community-continues
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/at-cpac-hungarys-viktor-orban-decries-lgbtq-rights-migration
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/19/hungary-votes-to-end-legal-recognition-of-trans-people
https://glaad.org/fact-sheet-trump-transgender/
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/trump-false-claims-schools-transgender-surgeries-rcna170217
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/us/politics/trump-debate-migrants.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/09/donald-trump-bloody-story/679751/
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