It's Historically Accurate to Equate Trumpism With Nazism
If we think they are somehow different, then we are fooling ourselves.
If you have ever hiked in the mountains, you know how quickly a slippery slope can overwhelm the best plans. Perfect hiking boots, top fitness, and even experience can’t stop you from sliding downhill once you’ve lost your footing and fallen onto the icy slope. That is how I feel each time someone says that Trumpism and Nazism are not comparable.
Without trying to be rude or dismissive of other people’s opinions, I will offer up a two-word response: utter nonsense.
I guess because the movement created by Adolf Hitler called Nazism, which led to World War II and the deaths of 50 million people worldwide, including roughly six million Jews and one million non-Jews in concentration camps, is so nightmarish that no one today can imagine American citizens doing something similar. I agree. Even for me, it seems almost impossible to imagine Trump supporters committing such atrocities. I will even say most likely they won’t. There is something, however, that we all need to keep in mind: No one in Germany in 1933 thought it possible that Hitler would turn Germany into a mass-murdering machine.
Nonetheless, a country with the intellectual, cultural, and scientific power that Germany had before the rise of Hitler so lost its way that the over-the-top, hate-filled speeches of the wild-eyed Austrian led them to willingly — fanatically — rain down mass murder across Europe. God-fearing family men living in Germany and Austria in 1937 would just a year later roll into villages in Poland and tear infants from the arms of their mothers and then toss them into the air for shooting practice.
After the war, the guilty soldiers would use excuses that because, for so many years,Nazi propaganda told them that Jews and Slavs were subhuman and diseased like vermin, the act of killing them was not just necessary but saved their families. Trump cultists will never admit that Trump has said similar things because they always laugh off what he says. “He’s just joking. He doesn’t mean any of that stuff,” they tell us and then call us shameful for “picking on him.” Or, even for “taking everything he says so literally.”
Here’s the thing, though, in 1933, Adolf Hitler’s plans for the future were just words. Most also perceived everything he said as rhetoric and propaganda meant to get him elected. Many Jews even voted for him in 1933. Bankers and Big Business backed Hitler not because they wanted him to kill Jews but because they thought he would be easy to control and so better for their commercial interests. If you asked anyone in Germany in 1933, on the eve of Hitler’s rise to the Chancellory, what Germany would look like in 1940, no one could have imagined the camps, the war, or the imminent destruction of Europe.
Nazism in 1933 was, in many ways, what Trumpism is in 2024. Nazism in 1933 was not the same as Nazism in 1943. Trumpism, too, has evolved since 2017, having become more determined to destroy the system of checks and balances to guarantee that Trump has total power to rebuild America in his sick image — like every dictator dreams of. If anything I have written in this paragraph is inaccurate, tell me what. Give me the historical examples that show I am way off base.
How did Hiter’s 1933 version of Nazism eventually become the version of 1935, 1936, 1938, and then the war years? Simple. All along the way, no one stopped him. Each time more powerful forces in Germany could have stopped him, he was let to continue because everyone underestimated him. The world appeased him. He was let off the hook. He was forgiven. Little by little, he passed laws that undermined the constitutional order of Germany.
On the 23 March 1933, Hitler proposed the Enabling Law to the Reichstag. This new law gave Hitler the power to rule by decree rather than passing laws through the Reichstag and the president. If passed, the law would establish the conditions needed for dictatorial rule. The atmosphere of terror that had followed the Reichstag Fire, and Hindenburg’s and von Papen’s support, made the proposal seem legitimate and, to some, necessary.
The law needed two thirds of the Reichstag to vote for it to pass. The Nazi’s had the support of the DNVP, and had banned the communist party, the KPD, from attending.
The SA and the SS had also been on a month long campaign of violence to scare or imprison other opponents to the party. They had placed many in the first concentration camp , Dachau , which opened just a few days before the vote on the 20 March 1933.
The Centre Party’s vote was crucial. After Hitler had promised to protect the interests of the Catholic Church, the party conceded and supported the bill. Only the SPD opposed it.
The Bill passed by 444 votes for to 94 against on the 24 March 1933 (How Did the Nazis Consolidate Their Power?).
With the passage of crazy, formerly unimaginable laws and acts, the ability to stop Hitler disintegrated until all of the atrocities became a reality.
Doubting that our times are similar to what happened in Germany in 1933 is certainly okay. Dismissing that what happened then could happen in our country under Trump is wrong and just an active effort to ignore the 20/20 vision of history.
I am the granddaughter of a Nazi camp survivor I have told my story hundreds of times to MAGA supporters only to hear “never would that happen here”. Tell them that their hate for immigrants is the exact same as Germany and that Trump is a copy cat of Hitler that Putin is who they just voted in they laugh. That’s how my grandmother always started her story “ they laughed “ one point I would like to make is that there were thousands of concentration camps not just the ones we know by name. My grandmother stated that in the beginning the trucks would roll in and take everyone especially if you owned real estate or had money in the bank that many supporters of Hitler we’re smacked a Jewish Star later a tattoo right up to the gates they thought that this horrible mistake would be fixed. That in the camps were in every town they used public buildings she claimed that over half were not Jews but died as Jews. Today many supporters of MAGA will be killed not deported for being illegal immigrants. By the way history does show that in the 1930s Hitler frequently used the words “ deportation “ My father and many of his friends spoke that we were heading down this path no one payed attention and like my grandmother said “ Right up to the gate they refused to believe “My grandmother ironically also told us that in 193? That they took the ammunition first not their guns within a few years they only had guns that were useless.That even if they had the bullets they were out numbered.
No, it's historically idiotic to equate Trump 2024 with Hitler 1933 for a myriad of reasons, but one that particularly stands out: We've already had Trump 2016, and nothing happened: There was no Enabling Act (which would be impossible anyway under the U.S. constitution and separation of powers). Nobody was put in camps. No political parties were banned. etc etc. Your hysterical efforts to turn Trump into Hitler 2.0 are laughable.