America Is Passing Its Reichstag Fire Test

These last few days since the election have been some of the most important in modern American history. A slim majority of voters — slim, but a majority, nonetheless — voted out a president who had shown, time and time again, that he is an authoritarian in American clothing. Then, when he and his henchmen claimed that the vote was rigged, we have collectively done the least interesting act of heroism imaginable: We ignored him.

We are passing the Reichstag Fire Test. We are refusing to give a nascent authoritarian the support and the excuse he needs to finish becoming the dictator he wants to be.

But the test isn’t over. We’re likely coming to the point where the test changes and our role pivots from passively ignoring pathetic attempts to consolidate power to actively protesting increasingly blatant and desperate attempts to wrest power from the people.

The Reichstag Fire was Hitler’s coup

Like Trump, Hitler rose to power in 1930s Germany through fair and democratic elections. However, Hitler’s eyes were not on shared power: He intended to use a loophole in the German constitution that allowed him to govern by decree, like a king or dictator, in “emergencies.”

In late 1932, Hitler’s Nazi Party received 33% of the votes in the Reichstag — the rough equivalent of the U.S. Congress. While this was far short of the majority he needed to simply vote him the power to rule by decree, Hitler managed to get appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933.

Less than a month later, on February 27, the Reichstag building caught fire. Hitler and his Nazi followers claimed that the fire was set by communists and other members of the “far left,” and that the fire was the first salvo in a burgeoning socialist revolution to take over Germany.

It wasn’t, of course. Of the small handful of communists arrested and actually accused of setting the fire, the evidence against them was so flimsy that even the kangaroo court that heard the case only convicted one of them — an outcome that proved absurd, given the fact that the building caught fire so quickly that there had to have been more than one arsonist. Some historians even believe that the Reichstag Fire was an inside job by the Nazis.

How the fire was actually set, though, is irrelevant. What mattered was that Hitler used the event to convince the German president to give him temporary emergency powers. Hitler then used those powers to arrest communists and socialists — including left-wing members of the Reichstag, who were legally immune from arrest. Once enough left wing politicians were in jail and the Reichstag has been shrunk enough for the Nazi Party to have a majority, they moved to give Hitler plenary powers. The law passed, Hitler became a dictator, and the Reichstag was dissolved into a figurehead.

The next election held in Germany was less than nine months later. The Nazi Party was the only one left on the ballot, thanks to Hitler’s authoritarian maneuvers. It won 92% of the votes, and strut around like it had received a legitimate mandate by the voters.

The sudden slide into a fascist authoritarianism happened because Hitler managed to convince the right people that Germany was under attack by the far left, and that the only way to fix it was to give him more power.

Voter fraud is Trump’s Reichstag Fire

Faced with defeat in the election, Trump has repeatedly claimed, always without evidence, that the election was rigged and that there has been massive amounts of voter fraud.

When he has not overtly blamed Democrats, he has worked through implication.

The implied solution was long evident, but finally said out loud at 2:30am the night after the election: Trump said that the alleged fraud meant that he would stay in office and continue to wield the power of the presidency.

The tactic has a lot in common with the real Reichstag Fire in 1933 Germany:

• It uses a (real or pretend) catastrophe
• That catastrophe centers on a fundamental aspect of the government — the building housing the legislature in Germany, the electoral process in the U.S.
• It points the finger at political opponents and accuses them of subverting the government for their own ends, without evidence
• The allegation implies the threat of future criminal prosecution — for arson and sedition in Germany, for voter fraud in the U.S.
• The logical conclusion is to give the budding autocrat more power — the Enabling Act that gave Hitler plenary powers, for Trump it would be a second term

The response has been widespread skepticism

Unlike in Germany, though, a critical mass of Americans are seeing through the baseless allegations. They recognize it as a blatant power grab. We’re passing the Reichstag Test.

Just watch the reaction to this Trump supporter who has gulped the Kool-Aid:

But perhaps the most important tone of skepticism has come from, of all sources, Fox News.

Long the reliable mouthpiece for Trump and Trumpism, Fox News has the ear of the rank-and-file Republican voters that Trump needs behind him when he claims the vote was rigged.

However, Fox News took a turn during the election by calling Arizona for Joe Biden well before other networks. Now, Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud are falling on deaf ears at the network:

It seems like a stunning about-face for a network that was little more than a propaganda outlet for Trump. However, Fox has long seen the writing on the wall and has tried to position itself for an inevitable future without Trump at the helm by trying to salvage what little reputability it still has left. They even apparently refused to publish the smear campaign concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop before the election, claiming that it did not meet their standard for journalistic integrity.

As a result, the loudest and most obnoxious of Trump supporters have sworn off Fox News. However, more moderate followers apparently see Fox’s defection as a sign that Trump has truly lost. If not even Fox News has Trump’s back, it must be a lost cause.

The sudden deflation in the amount of energy among Trump’s supporters can be seen in the size of the “Stop the Steal” Facebook groups before they were taken down — they reached 361,000 members in a matter of only a few days — compared to the sparse and declining crowds turning out to contest the election.

The left was not going to buy into Trump’s Reichstag Fire moment. But even the right is treating his claims of voter fraud with suspicion and consignment.

Stupid Reichstag Fire: Why no one is buying it

The reason Trump’s Reichstag Fire isn’t gaining traction is very simple: Like so much else that Trump has done in office, he has botched everything from the preparation to the execution to the post-event messaging. It’s John Oliver’s “Stupid Watergate” all over again:

Trump has been saying for months — or for more than four years, if you want to include his voter fraud claims during the 2016 election — that the election would be rigged if he loses:

This year, he focused his ire on mail-in ballots, which everyone knew would strongly favor Democrats:

Everyone knew what was coming on Election Day: Republicans, insistent that the coronavirus was not a threat, would congregate and vote in person and see their ballots counted right away. Democrats would vote overwhelmingly by mail, leading to a counting delay thanks to Republican efforts that successfully prohibited those mail-in ballots from being counted beforehand, as they were received. Trump would outperform his eventual tally early on Election Day, only to see his lead get whittled away as mail-in ballots slowly got counted in swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and then he would claim that mail-in voting was fraudulent and rigged.

And that’s exactly what happened.

So there was no shock at Trump’s attempt to duplicate the Reichstag Fire. Unfortunately for him, that was one of the things that made it so successful for Hitler. It had caught everyone by surprise, and then Hitler had acted quickly to take power.

Instead, in 2020, media outlets knew that this was a possible outcome. They had made contingency plans for what would happen in the case of a “red mirage” that culminated with Trump declaring victory well before the results were in.

It also let media outlets prime the American public for a long Election Day process, and enough of us listened.

We knew that we might not know who won the election on Tuesday night, and were ready for that outcome.

But blatantly telegraphing his claims so we could all anticipate what was coming was not the only thing that Trump did to make this the Stupid Reichstag Fire: He also picked the wrong play to run.

Trump has run the voter fraud play so many times in the past that, by now, if there were any evidence to support it, we would have seen it.

We haven’t.

Over the course of those four years, Trump has never provided any evidence of rampant voter fraud. He has never even tried to provide that evidence, even when he had the power to do so as the President of the United States.

Recall that Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity back in 2017 to investigate the voter fraud allegations that he had made during the 2016 election. He tapped Kris Kobach to run it.

The Commission disbanded quietly less than a year later without showing there was any voter fraud.

Aside from that Commission, which was notoriously inactive, Trump hasn’t tried backing up his voter fraud claims with statistics because there isn’t any evidence of widespread voter fraud and never has been. He knows that providing misleading data to back up empty allegations would end up just shining a spotlight on how flimsy the claims were. Trump’s allegations of voter fraud are so weak that they are at their strongest when made off-the-cuff, without adequate fact checking, and with nothing to back them up.

In short, the alleged problem of voter fraud has already been debunked. But Trump ran with it anyway.

The media — the same American institution that Trump has been seeking to undermine since before he was inaugurated — justifiably called him out. They demanded to see the evidence of fraud. They were primed to demand the evidence because they’ve been demanding it for years. In those years, they have never been provided with a shred of it.

Once again, the Trump campaign has failed to show its receipts. Instead, they have only hearsay and anecdotes that fall at the slightest breath.

Rather than give credence or airtime to these baseless allegations, again, news outlets have taken up a new tactic — one that they maybe should have been doing for years, now: They ignored him.

As Trump’s henchmen sounded the alarm on voter fraud, again, news outlets refused to cover their pressers. Twitter and Facebook have aggressively flagged their claims as “misleading.” Mainstream outlets cut away from briefings when the empty claims came too fast to refute.

It got so bad that even Fox News balked at reporting these empty talking points — a watershed moment in the long overdue demise of the credibility of the Trump administration.

But picking the wrong play to run was not even the end of Trump’s Stupid Reichstag Fire. His messaging has been so erratic that it’s difficult to take it seriously because of how often it contradicts itself or flies in the face of other, undisputed facts. For example:

• Trump supporters in Michigan are chanting “Stop the count!” while in Arizona, they’re chanting “Count the votes!”
• A key element to Trump’s voter fraud case has been his claim that Republican poll observers were not allowed to watch the vote-counting process in Pennsylvania. But they were allowed to watch. In one of the Trump campaign’s many lawsuits challenging the election, Trump’s own lawyers admitted that they were there, in the room.
• The Trump campaign has sent out fundraising emails to supporters, asking for money for the lawsuits challenging the election, but admitting in fine print that half of the proceeds would go towards paying the campaign’s existing debt, not the lawsuits.
• The allegations that “Democrats rigged the election” are drastically undercut by the fact that the final tallies are likely to be well below the winning margins predicted by pre-election polls, and the fact that Democrats lost several seats in the House and failed to meet their expectations in the Senate. So they rigged the election, only to lose a substantial chunk of it?

Desperate times, desperate measures

Unfortunately, this is increasingly putting Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in a box. It has expended all of its credibility and political capital. It is being cut off in news interviews when it turns to its preferred talking points because they’re so bad the media won’t give them credence. It has threatened administration workers by saying they’d be fired if they dared to look for new jobs. Its lawsuits challenging the election outcome are being thrown out of court for lack of evidence. Those lawsuits are so shoddy that the big name law firms are getting uneasy being associated with them. It has been degraded from a golden escalator in a luxury hotel to a parking lot at a landscaping company.

As his reputable options dwindle, Trump is only left with the disturbing ones, like to incite violence, call up the military, declare victory and try to imprison Joe Biden, and dismantle the executive branch beyond repair.

He has already started:

• On November 9, Trump abruptly fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the cabinet member who refused to send U.S. troops to quell protesting in Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, this summer.
• Also on November 9, Attorney General William Barr announced that the Department of Justice would open an investigation into claims of voter fraud, saying that there were “substantial allegations” of misconduct, even as courts were dismissing lawsuits alleging the same thing for lack of evidence.
• On November 10, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had stumped for Trump’s reelection campaign in violation of political norms, told reporters that “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” as if Trump had gotten reelected.

At some point, these actions will cross a line. And when they do, passively ignoring the Trump administration’s attempts to give itself a second term will not be enough.