Mr. Trump has been encouraging America’s most violent people, vilified minorities, studied Hitler’s racist speeches and rise to power, glorified dictators, asserted he’d be dictator on day 1, and repeatedly denied that constitutional limitations apply to him. This station and other media have covered that in detail and I won’t repeat it here. Some don’t think he’d do all the bad things he says he’d do or encourage. But what are the risks?
In this commentary, I think it’s worth outlining some history[1] about one of Trump’s idols.
Two-thirds of voters in Germany and other Fascist countries voted against Hitler’s party – leaving proportionately fewer supporters than Mr. Trump’s support here. But those countries’ leaders caved thinking other parties were worse and made Hitler chancellor. He then instituted a reign of terror making opposition to him impossible.
He anchored his power by vilifying others. His “final solution” to German Jews was extermination. Holocaust deniers haven’t grappled with the fact that thousands of American GIs found the concentration camps, gas chambers and stacks of dead bodies waiting to be disposed. That’s not some social media fake. Social media didn’t exist then. They took indelible photographs of what they saw. I can’t erase from my mind the news films I saw as a young boy, of American GIs confronting those stacks of dead and naked bodies. Holocaust denial is a deliberate fabrication.
Hitler referred to “real” Germans as Aryans and despised, attacked or tried to exterminate everyone else. He threw many non-Jews into concentration camps or exterminated them as “useless eaters” – Gypsies or Roma, people who were LGBTQ, and others. Hitler’s solution to countries with German speakers, the so-called Sudetenland, was conquest of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Then Hitler drove his tanks across Belgium, the Netherlands and conquered France, leading to the retreat across the English Channel at Dunkirk after which Hitler aimed his air force, or Luftwaffe, at the English people in their cities.
World War II cost 60 million lives – equivalent to a fifth of present-day America. Other countries bore far more casualties than America but our armed forces turned the tide of that war. The carnage Hitler inflicted on this world invariably brings tears to my eyes.
Here’s some of what I wrote about the UN Commission on Human Rights after studying their records:
Eleanor Roosevelt chaired the seventeen-member UN Commission on Human Rights, with representatives from every continent, all major religious blocks, and countries at various stages of development.…
The delegates were quite familiar with Nazi brutality. One high official described Nazism as “applied biology,” referring to the Nazi’s differentiation between the “master race” and “useless eaters”—the old, infirm, and terminally ill in nursing homes, asylums, and hospitals who were starved or executed along with despised minorities, and those who opposed or showed little attachment to the regime. Brutality toward non-Aryans extended to labor and sex slavery. And Nazi differentiation between German Aryans and everyone else brought delegates from the rest of the world together. Virtually every clause in the … [UN Declaration of Human Rights] reflected those reactions. It was drafted in the hope that specifications of liberties and protections for human rights would help sustain free and democratic government and block the brutality of tyrants.
We’ve seen Trump’s hostility toward immigrants, non-English speakers, Black- and Brown-skinned people, his willingness to condone those who killed Jews and to lock up, jail or execute his opponents. I wouldn’t take the risk that Mr. Trump or his supporters wouldn’t turn America into a killing field to solidify his power or for self-styled white or Christian nationalists, the “right-wing,” whose principles are neither Christian, nationalist nor “right” about anything.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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[1] Nancy Bermeo, Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy 38–41 (Princeton Univ. Press 2003); and see my Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics, 130-32 (2016) and references.