HITLER: TRUMP'S FAVE
For those of us baby boomers, who grew up with dads (and a few moms) who fought in the European theater of World War II, or even those who fought in the Pacific, Nazis were always the unmentionables, the very embodiment of evil. Many of us had family who were in Nazi concentration camps themselves (I had a relative who survived Auschwitz) , or there were the survivors themselves,, telling the stories of being tortured and starved. In the immediate post-war period in the United States, there were very small numbers of Nazi supporters, but before and during the Second World War, the Hitler government recruited dedicated agents, including Senators and House representatives, to take over the United States government. In 2023, Rachel Maddow expanded on the research she did for the powerful podcast ULTRA, and published PREQUEL: AN AMERICAN FIGHT AGAINST FASCISM. Maddow had uncovered an amazing plot: the German government recruited such traitors as Philip Johnson- famous architect and socialite and Hamilton Fish III, a congressman from New York, as well as paid for Nazi summer camps and junior Nazi regiments- in places like Long Island. As soon as Hitler was defeated, these men suddenly were no longer Nazis : Philip Johnson became the head of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, and his Nazi collaboration went into hiding.
Is it a coincidence that we are looking at a terrifying revival of the Nazis and Hitler in the United States at just the time when the generation who fought in World War II has mostly died- or are largely too old to be a political force? The racism and anti-Semitism of the Republican party has been a large part of their identity once they identified the “southern strategy”- with such men as Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon appealing to the worst of the Southern white supremacists. The Republican party has never backed down from their hate mongering, but had not been overtly pro-Nazi since the defeat of Hilter in 1945, until now.
According to the late Ivana Trump, Donald kept a book of Hitler speeches by his bed and read them periodically. The Republican party is bringing Hitler back. Some of Trump’s long time aides overtly identify as Nazis- the closest being Sebastian Gorka, who appeared in 2017 at a Trump event wearing the symbol of the Hungarian Nazi party, of which he is a member. Hitler still is controversial enough that the Trumpers do an interesting thing: they quote Hitler, talk about a “unified reich,” Moms for Liberty in Indiana quoted him: and then they walk it back as if they didn’t intend to quote the monster. The wannabe fascists are moving toward total acceptance, but know they aren’t quite there yet, “it was an aide that posted this.” “we only looked at the quote and reposted it.” For anyone who has been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, this is exactly how Hitler got the German people to accept the mass murder of millions of Jews, Roma, socialists and communists, and others. Gradually.
One of the features of the far right that seems to be embraced by Trump is Holocaust Denial. He very publicly dined at trashy Mara Lago with Nick Fuentes, known Nazi and holocaust denier and Kanye West (now Ye,) also famous for his amazingly graphic anti-semitism. The question I have is this: is the cruelty and pure evil of the gassing and starvation of millions in the camps something these people relish? They love Ayn Rand, a person who based her “philosophy” on the concept that selfishness is great, and the person she cites as her great role model is a young man who committed a cold blooded murder BECAUSE HE WANTED TO. The current crop of Republicans, the Trump cult, has taken to Hitler because they are sadistic. Whenever they do something that makes no sense to me, like being glad that asylum seeking families are being sliced up in Gregg Abbott’s razor wire, or complaining about the fact that the creepy guy who banged Paul Pelosi’s head with a hammer repeatedly after breaking into his home got a prison term, I realize that yet again, THE CRUELTY IS THE POINT (book title by Adam Serwer.) The writer Timothy Snyder has coined a very appropriate term for the current crop of Republicans: Sadopopulists.
As the Trump cult continues to try to dehumanize immigrants, Jews, Muslims gay people, trans people, Black people and pretty much anyone who is not a white, right wing Christian, the already endemic racism in this country is being augmented every day. Many statements by Republicans at this time are so racist that even as recently as ten years ago, they would have been scandalous. If anyone made the ridiculous statement that nobody is as oppressed as white men, something we hear an awful lot from these creeps, they would have been laughed out of the room. If anyone tried to publicly cite the “great replacement theory,”as they did in the tiki torch march on Charlottesville, (“Jews will not replace us”) they likely would also been told to keep it to themselves. Trump and his merry band of haters is working to keep the majority of white Americans unified as Christian Nationalists, and if you look at the voting numbers, sadly, it is working. 57% of the white vote went to Trump in 2020.
I expect that we will be hearing a lot more about the wonders of Adolf Hitler in the near future. When Donald Trump posts the desire for a unified reich on his sorry excuse for a social media account, things are getting real.