Trump's Hitlerian Month - by Timothy Snyder

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

A September to Remember

Trump just had quite a Hitlerian month.

But before broaching the subject of Trump and Hitler I have to say a with a word about the American taboo on "comparisons."

Anyone who refers to Trump's Hitlerian moments will be condemned for "comparison." Somehow that "comparison" rather than Trump's deeds becomes the problem. The outrage one feels about the crimes of the 1930s and 1940s is transferred from the person who resembles the criminal to the person who points out the resemblance.

This cynical position opposing "comparisons" exploits the emotional logic of exceptionalism. Americans are innocent and good (we would like to believe). We are not (we take for granted) like the Germans between the world wars. We would never (we imagine) tolerate the stereotypes German Nazis invoked. We have learned the lessons of the Holocaust.

Since we are so innocent and good, since we know everything, it just cannot be true -- so runs the emotional logic -- that a leading American politician does Hitlerian things. And since we are so pure and wise, we never have to specify what it was that we have learned from the past. Indeed, our our goodness is so profound that we must express it by attacking the people who recall history.

And so, in the name of our capacity to remember great evil, we make it impossible to actually remember great evil. A taboo on "comparison" becomes a shield for the perpetrator. Those who invoke the past are the true villains, the real source of the problem, or, as Trump says about journalists, the "enemy of the people." Indeed, the more Trump resembles Hitler, the safer the man is from criticism on this point.

I hope that the irony of all of this is clear: the idea that "comparison" is a sin rests on the notion of the inherent and unimpeachable virtue of the American Volk, who by definition do nothing wrong, and whose chosen Leader therefore must be beyond criticism. In this strange way, outrage about "comparison" reinforces fascist ideas about purity and politics. We should hate the dissenters. We should ignore whatever casts doubt on our sense of national virtue. We should never reflect.

Democracy, of course, depends on the ability to reflect, and that reflection is impossible without a sense of the past. The past is our only mirror, which is why fascists want to shatter it. In fascist Russia, for example, it is a criminal offense to say the wrong things about the Second World War. The reason why we keep alive the memory of Nazi crimes is not because it could never happen here, but because something similar can always happen anywhere. That memory has to include the details of history, or else we will not recognize the dangers.

"Never again" is something that you work for, not something that you inherit.

Before we think about this past month, we also have to consider the past four years. This entire election unfolds amidst a big lie. It was Hitler's advice to tell a lie so big that your followers would never believe that you would deceive them on such a scale. Trump followed that advice in November 2020. His claim that we actually won the election in a landslide is a fantasy that opens the way to other fantasies. It is a conspiratorial claim that opens the way to conspiratorial thinking generally. It prepares his followers for the idea that other Americans are enemies and that violence might be needed to install the correct leader.

This year we have seen that explicit Nazi ideas are tolerated in the Trump milieu. The vice-presidential candidate shares a platform with Holocaust deniers, and defends Holocaust denial as free speech. This is a fallacy people should see through: yes, the First Amendment allows Nazis to speak, but it does not ennoble Nazi speech. The fact that people say fascist things in a country with freedom of speech is how we know that they are fascists -- and that, if they themselves comes to power, they will end freedom of speech and all other freedoms.

Which brings us to North Carolina and to the gubernatorial candidate Trump once called the country's hottest politician. No one is denying that Mark Robinson has the right under the First Amendment to call himself a Nazi or to praise Mein Kampf. The question is what we do about this. Trump will not intervene here because he believes that Robinson is more likely to win than a substitute candidate would be. Consider that for a moment: for Trump, the reason not to distance himself a self-avowed Nazi is that he hopes that the self-avowed Nazi will win an election, take office, and hold power.

This is not surprising. Trump and Vance are running a fascist campaign. Its main theme in September was inspired by a lady in Springfield, Ohio, who lost her cat and then found it again. For J.D. Vance, who knew what happened, this became the basis for the lie that Haitian immigrants were eating domestic animals. For Donald Trump, that became a reason to promise that Haitians in Springfield would be deported. He had found people who were both Blacks and immigrants, who could serve as the "them" in his politics of us-and-them.

It is fascist to start a political campaign from the choice of an enemy (this is the definition of politics by the most talented Nazi thinker, Carl Schmitt). It is fascist to replace reason with emotion, to tell big lies ("create stories," as Vance says) that appeal to a sense of vulnerability and exploit a feeling of difference. The fantasy of barbarians in our cities violating basic social norms serves to gird the Trump-Vance story that legal, constitutional government is helpless and that only an angry mob backed by a new regime could get things done.

It is worth knowing, in this connection, that the first major action of Hitler's SS was the forced deportation of migrants. About 17,000 people were deported, which generated the social instability that the Nazi government the used as justification for further oppression. Trump and Vance plan to deport about a thousand times as many people.

Now, the Hitlerian things that Trump says would be Hitlerian with or without this Hitlerian context of the last four years, the last year, or the last month. And this context would be Hitlerian with or without Trump's recent Hitlerian utterances.

It is helpful, however, to see all of this together, as a whole, because it makes it harder to excuse each individual piece of the story. In September, in his most important remarks about international and domestic politics, Trump invoked blatantly antisemitic stereotypes.

In international politics, the key moment concerns Ukraine and its head of state. Since February 2022, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, has been rightly understood and admired as a symbol of physical and political courage. When Russia began its full-scale invasion that month, the American consensus was the Ukraine would crack within days and that Zelens'kyi would (and should) flee. Instead, he stayed in Kyiv despite the approach of Russian assassins and the Russian army, rallied his people, and oversaw the successful defense of his country. He has since visited the front every few weeks.

This is how Trump characterized Zelens'kyi in September, echoing comments that he has made before: "Every time he came to our country, he'd walk away with $100 billion. He's probably the greatest salesman on Earth." Trump seems threatened by Zelens'kyi. As Trump has made clear numerous times, his first and only impulse is to give Putin what Putin wants. The idea of taking risks to defend freedom from the Russian dictator is well beyond the pinprick-sized black hole that is Trump's moral universe.

And of course the claim itself is false. The number is too big. And the money does not go to Zelens'kyi himself, obviously. That Zelens'kyi does personally profit is a favorite idea of Vance, who repeats Russian propaganda to this effect. The money does not even, for the most part, go to the Ukrainian government. Most of the military aid does to American companies who build new weapons for American stockpiles. We then send old weapons to Ukraine, to which we assign a dollar value.

The essential thing, though, is the antisemitic trope Trump chose to express himself. It goes like this. Jews are cowards. Jews never fight wars. Jews stay away from the front. Jews only cause wars that make other people suffer. And then Jews make vast amounts of money from those wars. Volodymyr Zelens'kyi, the Ukrainian president, is Jewish. And thus "the greatest salesman on earth" for Trump. And the corrupt owner of "yachts" for Vance. A war profiteer, as in the antisemitic stereotype, not a courageous commander, as in reality.

Indeed, most of what Trump says about Zelens'kyi, Ukraine, and and the war itself makes sense only within the antisemitic stereotype. Trump never speaks about the Russian invasion itself. He never recalls Russian war crimes. He never mentions that Ukrainians are defending themselves or their basic ideas of what is right. He certainly never admits that Zelens'kyi is the democratically-elected president of a country under vicious attack and who has comported himself with courage. The war, for Trump, is just a scam -- a Jewish scam.

And that, of course, is why he thinks he can end it right away: he thinks he can just shoulder the Jew aside and deal with his fascist "friend" Putin, who for him is the "genius" in this situation, and who must be allowed to win. Despite the evidence, Trump says that Russia always wins wars, dismissing both history (regular Russian losses such as the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Polish-Bolshevik War, the Afghan War) and the actual events of the ongoing Russian invasion, in which Ukraine has taken back half the territory it lost and driven the Russian fleet from the Black Sea. Russia is counting on Trump. They need him in power to win their war, and they know it.

It need hardly be said that if Trump throws American power on the Russian side, the "deal" that follows will not end the war. It will only mean that Russia is able to kill more Ukrainians faster. Trump will then claim that the deal itself was beautiful and perfect -- and try to change the subject from the slaughter he brought about through his antisemitic hubris and admiration of Russian fascism.

In domestic politics, the key moment concerns the elections themselves. In September, Trump told Americans that, were he to lose the elections, "Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss." Jews who did not vote for him would be, in his words, "voting for the enemy." This was so obviously troubling that the American press, in fairness, did draw attention to it.

It is worth considering, though, just how deeply this statement reaches into fascist practice. In five essential ways, which I will place in italics below, this is Hitlerian antisemitism.

1. Jews must be singled out as a group. There are countless other demographically small groups in the country who could be assigned responsibility when Trump loses the election. If the election is close, one would be able to carve out hundreds of sections of the population who made the difference. And yet somehow Trump blames Jews. They cannot be allowed, like everyone else, to go to the voting booth and make decisions on the basis of what they think, as citizens. Instead they must be treated as a group -- because as a group they can be threatened.

2. Jews must pass a loyalty test. Americans have the right to vote how they like. That is the essence of the American system. But not Jews. Those who vote for Democrats are the victim of, in Trump's words, "a hold, or curse." Jews have to prove their loyalty by voting for the candidate who claims to be the more patriotic one -- Trump. This is something that he has said over and over again. If Jews vote otherwise, he said in September, they are voting for the "enemy." This loyalty test has been a plague for Jews for centuries.

3. Jews have unusual powers. It seems normal to single out the Jews as a group, and to claim that they must pass a loyalty test, if you believe that their actions are especially significant. Jews will have "a lot to do" with outcome, says Trump. And therefore they can be blamed in an outsized way when he loses, and the government that results can be treated as not truly American.

4. Jewish votes make a left-center coalition illegitimate. This has been a favorite claim of antisemites in democracies. In the first Polish presidential election after the First World War, parliament chose a centrist president. Among the votes that got him across the line were those of Jewish parties. According to right-wing antisemites, that made the process illegitimate. After loud propaganda to this effect, a fanatic assassinated the elected president. Hitler similarly said that left-center governments in Germany were illegitimate because of the supposedly central role of Jews in creating the "system."

5. Jews stab you in the back. Trump describes himself as the victim of the Jews. In his view, 100% of Jews should vote for him, and the fact that they do not is the result of an inexplicable plot: "I really haven't been treated very well, but it's the story of my life." The idea that the Jews are responsible for betraying the natural leader of the Volk was Hitler's. He blamed electoral defeats on the Jews. The notion of a Jewish "stab in the back" arose from the First World War, where the German defeat was blamed on Jews who supposedly did not go to the front and who supposedly betrayed Germany on the home front.

And so we see the internal consistency of Trump's Hitlerian ideas, as expressed this past month. At home, Jews cannot be seen as normal Americans, since they must be presumed disloyal and to have special powers. An election won with Jewish votes is artificial and its outcome is not to be taken seriously. Violence against Americans would be the natural outcome. Abroad, the courage of Jewish president of Ukraine must be ignored and his person denigrated. A war led by a Jewish leader is artificial and Ukrainian victories are not to be taken seriously. Violence against Ukrainians is thus the natural outcome.

In both cases, the violent collapse of a democracy is seen as natural.

I do not expect there to be much talk of any of this in October. We have all been disciplined to avoid the "comparisons," and the media are restrained by the threat of lawsuits. And there is a simpler fear: Trump might come to power and then use force to punish the journalists.

The Harris-Walz campaign, for its part, has wisely chosen to campaign with slogans involving freedom and the future. This is, no doubt, a better strategy than dwelling on what would happen were Trump to win.

In any event, Trump's Hitlerian month has provided more clues about the form the darkness will take. It was a September to remember.

In the silence about Trump's fascism, those who care about freedom and the future will hear one more reason to act.