Last October, in the home stretch of the US presidential campaign, Donald Trump told supporters at a rally in Atlanta that he was “not a Nazi”. He was reacting to comments by his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who said in an interview that during his first term in office, Trump more than once suggested that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler “did some good things”. Kelly said that after consulting a dictionary he concluded that Trump “certainly” met the definition of a fascist.
Since the start of Trump’s second term as US president, comparisons between his administration and the Nazi regime are back in the spotlight.
White House adviser Elon Musk‘s raised right-arm gesture at Trump’s inaugural parade prompted many historians to call it a Nazi salute. “How could you not?”, says Peter Hayes, professor emeritus at Northwestern University in Illinois and author of numerous studies on the Nazi party.
Musk’s salute was not as blatant “as Steve Bannon’s gesture” at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Hayes adds, referring to Trump’s former adviser, who made a Nazi salute at the conservative meeting in February.
‘Increasingly relevant’ comparisons
With Western societies facing rising nationalism, extreme right-wing rhetoric and inward-looking attitudes, some experts are increasingly seeing similarities between the current era and the period leading up to World War II.
For historians, it’s always difficult to establish parallels between the past and the present. But according to Hayes, certain comparisons are thus proving “exaggerated”, but also “increasingly relevant”.
“Exaggerated because Trump has not targeted a distinct group as the root of all evil in the world” to be singled out “potentially for murder”, Hayes says, in an allusion to the Third Reich’s extermination of the Jews.
But Trump has multiplied attacks on “the ‘enemies within’ who must be removed from the body politic, and he shows, like Hitler, absolute certainty about his own genius coupled with ruthless determination to remove any impediments to achieving his objectives”.
“And, lately, he’s coupled extreme nationalism with an appetite for expansion that he had not shown before.”
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During his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, Trump reaffirmed his expansionist aims for Greenland. The American president said he had a message for “the incredible people of Greenland. We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America”.
Trump said his administration was “working with everybody involved to try to get” Greenland.
“We need it really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or another, we’re going to get it,” he said in this, his first policy speech since returning to power on January 20.
For Hayes, this desire to seize the autonomous Danish territory can be compared with Lebensraum, or living space, one of the founding concepts of Nazi ideology. “The motivation behind hungering after Greenland and hungering after Ukraine and the Caucasus (in Hitler’s case) is the same: obtaining essential resources. For Trump, it’s minerals; for Hitler, it was grain and oil. Control of these things appears to both men as vital to victory in the dog-eat-dog struggle of world politics,” says Hayes.
‘A sense of unfettered power’
Christopher Browning, professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, takes a more nuanced view.
“Insofar as Trump has an image of America’s past greatness, it seems to be the late 19th century, with immensely wealthy business tycoons exercising oligarchic rule, and great powers carving out and dominating their respective spheres of influence,” Browning says. “Grabbing Greenland and Panama and subjugating impudent Canada fit into a late 19th century imperial mentality far more than something akin to Hitler’s Lebensraum.”
Browning, a specialist in Holocaust studies, shares Hayes’s analysis of the fundamental differences between the US president and the Führer.
“Hitler was an ideologue with a fixed idea of history as racial struggle, a false premise, from which he drew many seemingly logical conclusions,” he says.
In contrast, Trump exhibits “a much more personalised rule, based above all on gratifying his insatiable need for praise, a sense of unfettered power, on having all his loyal followers defer to his endless litany of lies substituting ‘Trump truth’ for reality”.
Browning does, however, note some “uncanny resemblances” between the two men, drawing parallels between the storming of Congress on January 6, 2021, by Trump supporters and the Nazi leader’s Munich Putsch in November 1923:
“Hitler launched a failed coup, faced a judicial system that would not or could not hold him accountable, was not expelled to Austria as an unwanted felon” (which would have ended his German political career). He then “revived his political career with support of the traditional conservatives on the right, and obtained power legally, ready then to carry out a ‘legal revolution’ from within,’” Browning notes.
Trump, too, “launched a failed coup, was not impeached (which would have ended his eligibility to run for president), outlasted a lethargic judiciary unable to hold him accountable for his crimes, revived his political career with support of the Republican party, obtained the presidency legally, and now is launched on a ‘legal revolution’ to dismantle and reshape America government”.
Some observers also point to the subservience of a large proportion of the US business elite to Trump, in the same way that German companies Krupp and Thyssen were subservient to the Third Reich.
For Browning, this analogy is apt: “The business community is obsessed with obtaining lower taxes and more deregulation. Nothing else seems to weigh on the scale as long as they get these two things, regardless of the ultimate cost to society and country. Even the prospect of ruinous tariff wars has no effect on them. In that sense they are as deluded and blinkered about the ultimate consequences of Trump as German businessmen were about Hitler.”
‘A normal procedure for dictators’
Paul Lerner, professor of history at the University of Southern California, also observes a series of parallels between Trumpism and the authoritarian rulers of the 1930s and 1940s. One in particular concerns the type of language used by the US president.
“Especially in the way that Trump uses innuendo. The way he encourages violence, his coy attitude reminds me of Mussolini. The language also parallels fascist anti-intellectualism, contempt for expert knowledge, nuance,” Lerner says.
Lerner also says that the American media have been brought to heel since Trump’s return to power, something that is “very much standard operating procedure for dictators”.
“Trump already has his ministry of propaganda and he is edging out the mainstream media which has failed to hold him accountable for ten years already. Journalists get stories by keeping access to the White House and if writing critical pieces means you lose your access, eventually only the friendly press will have access.”
Anne Berg, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, notes that “these attacks on the press are horrendous”, but according to her, their implications are far greater today than under Nazi Germany.
“Germans after all could listen to enemy radio,” she says, even though it was “forbidden and during the war, severely punished”.
“Nazi Germany didn’t change the nature of information. What is happening now is much more insidious and much more consequential, globally. We are living in a post-truth environment,” where online information ecosystems “are transformed by AI generated content. There no longer is a Feindsender” (the Nazi regime’s term for enemy radio stations).
“The whole world is on X” (formerly known as Twitter), she says.
“Trump’s attack on the media is actually an attack on truth, fact and objectivity itself, most powerfully expressed in his concerted attacks against higher education and elite universities such as my own,” Berg says. “And while people certainly realize what is happening,” the content they see on their phones ends up being skewed toward the “sensational and entertaining”.
‘Democracy is under serious threat’
“There’s no doubt that US democracy is in acute danger,” Berg says. “In fact, at this moment we no longer live in a functioning democratic society. The system hasn’t been fully transformed or dismantled, but we are literally watching the making of a dictatorship in real time even if the precise contours of such dictatorship are still ill-defined. The question is how much time do we have until the window for effective resistance closes.”
Her fellow historians are equally pessimistic. “We are six weeks in” to Trump’s second term “and democracy is severely imperilled” says Lerner. “I don’t know if it will be restored in my lifetime, which is very depressing.”
“Trump has strengthened his control on the police powers (the FBI, the Justice Department) and the military,” says Hayes. “Trump is vainglorious, solipsistic, and a bully preoccupied with demonstrating his strength. When things begin to unravel and opposition mounts, he and his backers will instinctively resort to violence.”
For his part, Browning doesn’t expect the “immediate construction of a one-party, police-state dictatorship, as Hitler achieved in five months”.
Although he sees “considerable ‘democratic backsliding’ into an ‘illiberal democracy’” akin to the administration of Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary, he points out that “the US constitution is very difficult to amend”, and “the US federal system with strong state governments cannot be overturned”.
“The pluralism and diversity of American society and a strong federal system of state governments, combined with the incompetence of so many Trump appointees, is the best hope of slowing down the erosion of democracy,” Browning says.
This article was translated from the original in French by David Howley.
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