Is Donald Trump a Nazi?
He’s probably not competent enough to deserve the moniker, but he sure is trying hard to earn it.
The question pops up from time to time: Is Donald Trump a Nazi? It seems to imply that, at the very least, he utilizes Nazi tactics from time to time. He seems interested in the Nazi value structure, based upon the way he talks about minorities and the way he treats the poor and disabled. But in some sense, Trump represents a rural America which, profoundly uneducated, seems bent upon changing the American political conversation. Is this faction of loud, generally ignorant voices the same sort of faction which supported Hitler’s rise to power? This article will analyze the term and explore the reasons why more and more people are deciding to call Trump a Nazi.
Many of my friends dislike the association between Trump and Nazism. The Nazis were scarier and more efficient, they say, and Trump’s incompetence will prevent any sort of Holocaust. These are both decent points, and yet not every Nazi gave speeches and orchestrated the deaths of Jews. Many Nazis were stupid, and their core common attribute was not murder, but simply the necessary intellectual arrogance to allow murder to take place and assume their leaders were justified. Despite the numerous differences between our moment in the US and that of Germany a century ago, there is good reason to analogize between the Nazi movement and that of Donald J. Trump.
Where are we?
A fear of cancel culture. The ceaseless accusations of a “liberal tyranny of ideas” in universities. The terror of high taxes and nameless government interventions, during a time of historically low taxes. The fear of minorities; the terror of foreigners. The oppression of free-spirited people including gays and women and trans people, and the simultaneous vicarious glee in the promiscuity of a cis straight white man.
These occurrences are all unpleasant, and yet they all represent the dominant culture of authority in the United States today. This is a perverse authority, an authority characterized by seriousness in conjunction with oppression — that is, as the great mind of Simone de Beauvoir might have it, the capacity for laughter begins and ends with privilege in the United States.
The oppressed are numerous — they include whites and males, but most of the oppressed are people of color and women. Oppression is wrong no matter where it turns up or why we see it, but to some rural Americans oppression seems unreal.
To paraphrase these Americans, oppression is an abstraction so commonplace it feels like lidocaine on our minds when we encounter it. And yet, this is becoming less and less central to the overall direction of the nation. Americans are more concerned about police violence than they are about violent protestors. The debates that fuel the culture wars rage on, but with a diminished fervor in recent weeks and months. We could keep unpacking these issues, but it seems less relevant, now. The argument against understanding that oppression happens all the time in this nation is falling silent.
As the American people, we need to unify and recognize that the question of the moment is more poignant: we, the urban AND rural American people, white, black, brown, cis, trans, privileged and oppressed alike, can WE work together to prevent people like Donald Trump from increasing the brutality of the police? Can we work together to reduce the amount of police brutality directed at our fellow citizens for no good reason?
This question is on the mind of every protestor getting shot with mace or battered or wrongfully (or rightfully!) arrested by police today.
Its opposite shows up on the docket at Fox News media briefings, in the White House, and on the screens of Reddit right wing trolls.
How, these actors ask when they see the protests, can we pacify this uprising as well?
Trump’s answer, domination, is both wildly unlikely to yield any results and also deeply disturbing to anyone who appreciates the great American and democratic tradition of protesting unjust circumstances to force political actors to change the game.
How, the Trumpsters or Nazis ask, can we limit the progress of disenfranchised groups? How do we execute in order to maintain our chokehold on peace and prosperity in the United States? The answer usually comes back: More repression. More subjugation. More domination. And, for the first time in my life, the political actors perpetrating these crimes are doing so openly and honestly.
Despite the brutal savagery of the administration with regard to their suppression of information regarding COVID-19, with regard to the plague of racism and inappropriate brutality in law enforcement, and with regard to the insistence upon militarizing police forces, I believe we have cause to believe change is coming. The general disregard for human life exhibited by the Trump administration is only new insofar as they’ve become so brazen as to not even see the need to conceal these ulterior motives anymore.
Perhaps now this fight is, for the first time, winnable even in a diverse and heterogeneous culture such as that of the United States of America. Never before has it been possible to capture and disseminate information about the wrongdoing of law enforcement in real time. And yet, Trump only seems capable of doubling down. His campaign used a Nazi symbol in an ad recently, resulting in repercussions from Facebook, which took down Trump campaign ads for violating a policy against organized hate. Times are dark and strange when an active American government is so closely tied to fringe hate groups that it has seemingly lost its ability to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forms of communication in its rhetoric.
And yes, this is the sort of mistake a Nazi would commit.
The campaign called the symbol an emoji, which is both untrue and an attempt to cover for the fact that the symbol is closely tied to Nazi power structures. This response reflects neither care nor consideration, and from precisely the absence of the decency we usually expect from one another, it becomes evident that something has changed for the worse in American politics.
Why is this happening now?
There are myriad novel stressors in the United States today. The presidency of Donald Trump has taken a decidedly Nazi turn. After declaring himself a “nationalist” in 2018, Trump has repeatedly called for more police brutality as protests escalated in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic the administration is essentially working its hardest to ignore.
The word Nazi has its roots in the word Nationalist. It was coined in pre-WWII Germany as a slur for people who were essentially ignorant of global events and who wanted a strong socialist state for themselves and no one else. A distrust of Jewish people and an unhealthy level of confidence in the Aryan race led to unthinkable savagery we Americans reacted to by creating fictional characters such as Captain America to step in and save the day.
How can these same Americans embrace nationalism and closed borders, an emaciated welfare state and doctors in trash bags?
During the rise of the Third Reich, it probably wouldn’t have gone over well if you had called Hitler a Nazi to his face — just like modern-day conservatives are repulsed by the slur, it was a derogatory term in the pre-war days. The question of whether or not Trump is a Nazi has nothing to do with whether he would call himself that or not; it is instead a question of his style of government and his values and whether or not these mimic Hitler.
Hitler and his associates never liked or used the word Nazi. They always called themselves “National Socialists.” Incidentally, before 1932, when the British and American media could not yet make up their minds in which camp to place Hitler’s followers, they too usually referred to them as National Socialists or sometimes simply as Hitlerites.[1]
Trump is, at the very least, easily mistaken for a full-blown Nazi. He embraces nationalist politics, he wants to see police brutality any time dissenting views are cried from the rooftops, and he is interested in protecting the interests of a small cadre of elite and rural American voters who have lost their stranglehold on electoral politics by failing to update their views to appeal to young and minority voters as time has gone on.
These views have given rise to the Jim Crow laws after slavery was ended, they gave us redlining and the systematic disenfranchisement of minority property owners since the New Deal created vast wealth for white Americans, and they repeatedly rationalize and justify the brutality suffered by minority groups in the United States today.
Make no mistake. The conflict has been escalated by the right wing of American politics. The only question is what ordinary American citizens will end up doing about it. Trump’s Nazi utterances have elated the worst of the conservatives while his funding choices and hardline policies continually make life more difficult for the urban liberals who make up the majority of the American electorate. It is no coincidence that these people — of all colors, sexes, races, and incomes — are taking to the streets in protest as their federal government continues to fail to even acknowledge the problems it repeatedly causes them.
What are the specific insults causing protests in the streets today?
1. Police brutality. Police kill people who have done nothing wrong time after time in this nation. U.S. Citizens the police should ostensibly serve are murdered in cold blood in their own houses, in their own communities, and on their own streets. American protestors have one message regarding police brutality even as they endure more and more senseless violence simply for promoting the message: This must stop.
2. COVID-19. The viral threat has gone ultimately unchecked by a federal government which, due to its own incompetence (both intentional and accidental), has been unable to meaningfully act. Testing was a complete disaster during rollout, and now that cases are surging after a faulty re-opening of the economy, the administration will not even speak to the threat posed by this deadly disease it arguably bears full responsibility for.[2]
3. The economy has systematically disenfranchised a large proportion of the U.S. population for decades at this point. The rich get richer while the poor are bankrupted by medical expenses and systematically prevented from saving money by an economy which at this point seems deliberately engineered to prevent their success.
Can Trump seize the moment, as Hitler did?
In any history book, you’re likely to read that there was a plague which swept through Germany shortly after World War I. You’re also likely to find that economic stress and civil unrest were commonplace before the rise of the Third Reich. Whether or not you decide to call Trump a Nazi, these parallels are shocking and disturbing.
If we aren’t careful, it is possible that bad actors such as Trump and the Koch brothers could push our American government into full-on totalitarianism and start murdering subsets of us — though Native American and Black community members who have faced a disproportionate level of police violence for decades and centuries at this point are already beginning to experience some of this, it can get much worse if we do not act collectively to stop it.
We have the capacity for tremendous violence in this country, but our capacity to do right lies precisely in the action we take right now to curtail this lethal side of our culture. Change will not be successful unless it extends all the way up through the White House. It does seem likely that the tide is beginning to turn against Trump, however.
Final thoughts
The imperatives are here. Support your fellow citizens. Protest an unjust government and its brutal police. Then stand up, take note of the situation, and work to effect change any time you see injustice. This American nation of ours is going through a lot of change — we will soon be a majority minority nation — and we must position ourselves to be a successful country in the future. That means taking a long, hard look within and coming up with a plan to deal with the myriad immediate problems we face.
Though the white nationalists and other weak minds of our time decry this change as unjust and/or unfortunate, diversity is a major source of strength for the United States. We must defend this aspect of our nation or suffer to have it taken from us in a new Holocaust — whether or not Trump ends up being the Hitler of our era.
Fortunately for anyone who is not white, Christian and small-minded, those who appreciate and/or are part of the diversity of the United States vastly outnumber those who are not. With history as our guide, we can prevent the worst from happening.
For my part, I believe it is fair, in the light of all of the evidence presented in this article, to call Trump and his supporters Nazis. Friends of mine disagree because Trump is stupid, or banal, or small-minded, but in my opinion this is simply a failure to recognize that Hitler himself was stupid, banal, and small-minded. The efficiency with which the Hitler regime was able to wage war and annihilate a subset of its own population are a testament to precisely how stupid, short-sighted, and arrogant Hitler was, and how gullible and foolish his supporters were. Let us not forget that these people were addicted to methamphetamine, and that Nazi rule brought no increase in happiness to Germany or the territories the rabid regime conquered.
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Thomas Dylan Daniel is an existential philosopher, professional ethicist, author, and biophysicist. Connect via his website or Facebook, or have a look at his books.
Notes
[1] https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_19_04_06_znamenski.pdf
[2] The Trump administration cut funding to a variety of institutions including the CDC and the Pandemic Response Team which would have acted to suppress the spread of COVID-19 had they remained intact. This fact results in direct culpability for the administration in almost half a million deaths globally at the time of writing.