Felonious 45/47 gathers with MAGA faithful as America awaits its fate. Present, a delegation of far-right Germans. 45/47 strolls onto a veranda in a saggy blue suit, white shirt sans tie, and his devil-red logo cap. “So, where’s my German friends?” he says and beckons a group of five white dudes, including Alternative für Deutschland party candidate Phillipp-Anders Rau, and Fabrice Ambrosini, who’d resigned as the youth leader of the Christian Democratic Union over allegations he flashed the Nazi salute. The Germans parrot the “Fight! Fight! Fight!” that 45/47 chanted after a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed his ear last July. He thanks his fawning guests and they give a thumbs-up sign for a group photo.
This from a man whose first wife, according to Vanity Fair in 1990, revealed that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches at his bedside (a claim he didn’t deny), who equivocated for neo-Nazis marching through Charlottesville, who was accused by his longest-serving chief of staff of having said Hitler “did some good things.”
It is common to describe the Third Reich as the nefandum—the unspeakable evil—to avoid mentioning the Nazis’ mass malevolence alongside anything else. But what of the paradox that Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, and Finland of the EU have swung to hard-right governance, that for those intent on dismantling a liberal democracy, Nazi Germany is an exemplar? And what of Hitler praising America’s westward Native-annihilating expansion? Of the Jim Crow South and American eugenics inspiring the Reich’s Nuremberg Race Laws?
While wholesale comparisons between the United States and Nazi Germany have often been dismissed as hasty and/or hyperbolic, rather comparing MAGA to the Third Reich ain’t overblown or premature or alarmist—it is stock that beseeches: Just how close to them are we, really?
On 9 November, 1923, Hitler staged an unsuccessful coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler’s nascent Nazi party and coalition of nationalist groups were thwarted in trying to depose the German government. On 6 January, 2021, 45/47 incited a failed coup at the Capitol. Hitler at least served nine months in prison for his crime, but 45/47, even as a private citizen, received no consequence for his role, facts indicative of the (ill) health of each democracy’s legal system at the time. Not to mention, the events demonstrate demagogues kindred in their deep irreverence for the ideal of democracy, in their capacious tolerance of if not love for violence and chaos.
On 14 February, 1926, a few years removed from prison, Hitler organised the Bamberg Conference in Bavaria and reunited the socialist and nationalist arms of the Nazi party. In that ominous meeting, he also established the Führerprinzip, or leader principle, which demanded unquestioning obedience from party members and gave him total control.
The 2024 Republican National Convention, a sycophantic spectacle, paralleled Bamberg. And it has been clear ever since that most Republicans, even those who once criticised 45/47 (see: Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, and the rest) will comport themselves along MAGA lines. That it demands fealty to its leader above all else, even country.
Post-prison, Hitler helped the Nazis become the biggest political party in Germany, prompting the powers that be to vault him into the role of chancellor. But the country’s oligarchy was wrong about its ability to control Hitler. In 1934, he purged the Nazis of several foes during the Night of Long Knives. After president Paul von Hindenburg died a month later, Hitler combined the offices of president and chancellor into a Führerprinzip. He instigated the infamous Night of Broken Glass in 1938, pogroms during which 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps, the Nazis’ first mass arrests of Jews for nothing more than being Jews.
Elon Musk invested USD277 million into reelecting 45/47. Jeff Bezos forbade his Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong likewised. Mark Zuckerberg announced the abandonment of third-party fact-checking across all Meta’s platforms, which boast 3.2 billion daily active users. Meta and Amazon and McDonald’s and Walmart and Ford and umpteen conglomerates have caved to MAGA’s anti-DEI campaign (more on this). Unprecedented millions have been donated to 45/47’s inauguration fund. But what if the billionaires and operatives and politicos are as wrong about the efficacy of their schemes as their counterparts were during the Reich?
A few months after he became chancellor, Hitler coerced the Ministry of Propaganda, which imposed control over all media, into being. That same year, the Reich instituted the New Editors Law, forcing editors to “omit anything calculated to weaken the strength of Reich abroad or at home.” MAGA’s propagandic tools include Fox News, the Washington Examiner, Epoch Times, and Truth Social, which 45/47 founded, owns, and exploits.
But what if the billionaires and operatives and politicos are as wrong about the efficacy of their schemes as their counterparts were during the Reich?
Quotidian: 45/47 platforming blatant mischaracterisations, incendiary speech, naked racism, and flat-out lies. Plus, his persistent portrayal of mainstream media outlets as “the enemy of the people,” the same exact phrase used by Hitler to target Jewish people. Add to that poisonous phrase 45/47’s penchant for claiming the truth is “fake news,” and his first administration’s admitted use of “alternative facts.” Plus, the omen that 45/47 received a USD15 million defamation settlement from ABC after George Stephanopolous said on air that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape” when the judge in the civil case wrote that “a jury found that Mr. Trump did exactly that.” 45/47 sued the Des Moines Register for election interference for releasing a poll days before the presidential election that understated his support.
In a press conference about that lawsuit, he was asked if he’d pursue more defamation lawsuits against media outlets, journalists, and even influencers. “I think you have to do it because they’re very dishonest. We need a great media. We need a fair media,” he said. 45/47’s disregard for facts and truth and integrity, the greasing of mechanisms for dis- and misinformation by outlets controlled by MAGA coconspirators, the signs that media will accede to dictatorial power—all resemble the reign of the Reich.
Though the article included critique, it also said, “Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s antisemitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded.” In 1937, Life magazine published a feature using photographs of Hitler with children shot by his personal photographer. The next year, 1938, Time named Hitler its Man of the Year (his second time covering the magazine). Time contends that all persons of the year follow the dictum of its founder, Henry Luce, who described it as not an honour but a distinction applied to the newsmaker who most influenced world events for better or worse. “Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today,” wrote the magazine.
Nonetheless, how many people read a cover story to discover it features a critique of the subject? Contrary to its founder’s rationale, covering of one of the most famous magazines in the world was and is laudatory.
True to Luce’s mandate, Time distinguished 45/47 as its 2024 Person of the Year (the same man who once had a fake Time cover of himself posted in at least five of his resorts), presented him without the context of a coverline other than his name. While there is something approaching criticism in the story, Time national political correspondent Eric Cortellessa also chose to describe 45/47 as having “an air of unhurried bonhomie.” Despite the magazine trotting out its trusty excuse, anointing 45/47 as its 2024 Person of the Year validates him in the same vein it did a fascist for the ages almost 90 years ago.
In 1933, the Reich also instituted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which excluded Jews and political opponents from all civil-service positions. A parallel: One of the agendas laid out by Project 2025 is purging the US government of civil-service employees who have not been vetted as loyal to MAGA. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” said Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 who ran the Office of Management and Budget during the last half of 45/47’s first term. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains... we want to put them in trauma.”
The German parliament legislated the Enabling Act of 1933, which allowed Hitler to govern by decree, a move analogous to the reported hundreds of executive orders drafted by Project 2025 authors that 45/47 began signing hours after he took office. A president employing his power of executive order ain’t new, but a president cueing a fusillade of executive orders to gut the government’s system of checks and balances and seize authoritarian control within the first 180 days of office is not only unprecedented in this tottering republic, it’s a perilous echo of the Reich.
Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk attend the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump in the US Capitol Rotunda on 20 January, 2025.
45/47 has promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to spur Operation Aurora and deport upwards of 11 million undocumented immigrants. Never mind this will cause manifold emotional and physical harm. Never mind there is no concrete plan for logistics, including how to house that many humans or transport them to their home countries. And should Americans protest their stark perniciousness, 45/47 has threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, which grants the president broad power to use the military for domestic law enforcement. “We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defence community come in and say, ‘That’s an inappropriate use of what you’re trying to do,’ ” said Vought.
The Reich’s Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service included removing judges who didn’t comply with Nazi principles. Hitler replaced the Supreme Court with the People’s Court, the Special Court, and later the Court of Honour, all kangaroo courts. In his first term, 45/47 reshaped the federal judiciary. Thanks to Mitch McConnell-led machinations that dated back to the Obama administration, 45/47 enjoyed the great fortune of appointing three justices to the Supreme Court, which, while not a full-on kangaroo court, yet, is looking a helluva lot like a joey—has shown not only right-wing bias but a susceptibility to corruption.
(Clarence Thomas alone accepted more than USD2.4 million in gifts between 2004 and 2023, as reported by reform group Fix the Court.) Last March, SCOTUS ruled that states couldn’t remove 45/47 from their ballots for his role in an insurrection. Then last July, the court’s Republican-appointed supermajority belatedly and flabbergastingly ruled, “a former president is entitled to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority.” And despite beating two separate impeachments and all that obvious impartiality, 45/47 has been unabashed in bashing courts that haven’t sided in his favor. It’s incontrovertible truth, in my book, that 45/47 has forged a justice system that works most of all for him.
The Reich’s ideal of a master race catalyzed their attempt to exterminate European Jews. Prior to that astounding inhumanity, it manifests as subjugating them to the lowest of the low in every imaginable way. On the other end of that racial hierarchy were able-bodied, straight Aryan men. A semi-subtle way the able-bodied straight white men who rule MAGA are promoting the idea of a master race is the anti-DEI movement. The tacit claim is that identity is chief in whatever a Black person (or an othered) has achieved, that Black people are unqualified no matter our résumé or experience, which is to assert that we are inherently unqualified, code for genetically inferior.
More upshot: Statistics prove that the greatest beneficiaries of diversity and inclusion initiatives have been white women. (According to McKinsey & Company’s report “Women in the Workplace 2024,” white women outpace women and men of color from entry level all the way to the C-suite.) MAGA’s anti-DEI crusade is apt to expel white women from the workplace, forcing many of them back into the home. Would it surprise you to learn that the Reich believed the woman’s place was in the home? The easier to ensure their dependency, to breed more pure Aryan babies, which by law they could not abort. Of course, a MAGA-leaning Supreme Court also ruled against a woman’s right to choose. All to say, MAGA’s attack on DEI reaps them many benefits, not the least of which is the further entrenchment of America’s racial and gender caste.
Under the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service Act, the Reich fired Jewish schoolteachers and teachers with undesirable politics and made Nazi Party membership compulsory. (More schoolteachers joined the party than any other profession.) That vetted cadre taught from new textbooks that instilled a love for Hitler, obedience to the state and military, racism, and antisemitism. Though the Reich formed schools for students hoping to become future political and military leaders (Napolas) and schools for students who desired to enter Nazi politics (Adolf Hitler Schools), the pedagogy of the Reich was at heart anti-intellectual. To further indoctrinate the Reich young, the regime mandated membership in the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls in 1936.
MAGA doesn’t demand membership in a youth group, but they’ve been working overtime to program their young people. According to PEN America, there were 10,046 book bans in US public schools in the 2023–24 school year, a 200 per cent increase from the year before. The bans are part of the anti-woke movement, which, in the main, attacks efforts to educate kids on injustice as pertains to race, gender, and sex.
Concomitant with that cultural ressentiment is 45/47 and his coconspirators abolishing the Department of Education and return public schooling to the purview of the states. States’ rights—an argument used for centuries to codify American inequality, and which, in this case, would all but ensure that the curriculums of MAGA-ruled states would be censored against critical thought. The book bans, the anti-woke agitprop, the bluster to close the Department of Education—all diaphanous ploys to exert the same control over the minds of the MAGA young that the Reich sustained over its young people.
A critical reminder that Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933 and killed himself in 1945, that a mere 12 years of Reich rule turned Germany into a genocidal autocracy. In addition to the unspeakable, the Reich’s tactics allowed it to seize territory—it was called Lebensraum (living space)—define the flow of information, suppress free speech, crush dissent, persecute and eliminate foes: all things MAGA has promulgated. And with their advanced tools (can you imagine Hitler on X?) and frightening consolidation of power, how much swifter might they achieve their darkest designs? Aims which seem prophesied on their devil-red cap: “Make America Great AGAIN!”
As in, a return to manifest destiny and no less than Jim Crow; as in, the mass scapegoating of immigrants and an indoctrinated citizenry; as in, no one outside their Volk owning rights they must respect.
How close are we to the Third Reich?
Did you see Elon’s Nazi salute?
Try how in the world do we reverse course when we are this deep into it?
