Pundits commonly compare Trump to Hitler on various leftist platforms, and even within centrist media. Should we think seriously about the resemblance, or dismiss this association as media bluster?
There are generic tactics that characterize all fascists – invariably radical rightwing leaders explain human misery in racist terms. They ally themselves with police, military and capital. Fascism assaults human rights and channels the inchoate anger of its base toward chosen targets. It flaunts latent violence – the tension flexing the trigger finger. But it is a mistake to assume that all fascists throughout history are interchangeable, with the same worldview, the same goals and the same methods. Rightwing extremists reshape their ideas to fit the specific contours of every capitalist crises.
Trump and Hitler represent very different personal and historical realities – both inhabit(ed) vastly incomparable points in time. Hitler’s fascism addressed the final paroxysms of imperialism. In Hitlerism one finds the merger of racism and bureaucracy applied to the act of global conquest.
Trump, on the other hand, personifies capitalism’s death throes. MAGA embodies contraction, isolation, a descent into incoherent blather, paranoia and trivial obsessions. The fascist leader in a collapsing capitalist empire has been reduced to a carnival barker drawing the attention of the masses away from the engulfing flames of environmental destruction. Imagine Hitler, with his finely honed theories of the master race and its Darwinian destiny, squandering time before a captive crowd nattering about the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis. Has racism in America been reduced to a form of prime time entertainment, or does bigotry still have lethal and genocidal potential? Should we view fascist rhetoric as an attempt to mobilize mass violence, or should we interpret Trump’s hateful threats as merely reality TV?
Hitler and Trump represent the far edges of the fascist cognitive continuum – the former wielded an intricately constructed narrative of racial struggle, and the latter employs fragments of racism interspersed with free associated filler. Picture Hitler, his shock of black hair tossed resolutely across his face, his voice pitched at a scream with a sea of youthful and hard edged Nazis performing the sieg heil. Women fainted and children gazed upon their Fuhrer with regimented awe. The Fuhrer saw women as reproductive cows and children as future cannon fodder. He held his German victims in the palm of his hand. Unlike Trump, Hitler had a plan.
Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl had perfected the grand political spectacle, and Hitler envisioned empire as an eternal and violent subjugation of inferior people. The Nazi empire would be buoyed by displays of military force, goose stepping robots, enormous statues, monuments and buildings.
For contrast, look at Trump swaying awkwardly to the strains of YMCA. Or consider his middle aged and elderly acolytes, many of them stereotypically obese, tittering or obliviously enduring Trump’s slow cadenced and tangential stories. Trump’s speeches are full of his narrative tics, his Tourette’s-like repetition of the lines “nobody ever knew,” and “everybody says,” interspersed with malapropisms and mispronounced words. A Trump rally, as opposed to a Nazi spectacle, does not forecast future world conquest, but, rather, illuminates the shared confusion of the moment. We watch Trump – the talisman of pretense and mediocrity – as a sort of half-hearted rejection of normalcy. In neoliberal America normalcy is a numbing and meaningless quest to stay a step ahead of creditors and wait for medical contingencies, evictions and loneliness to eclipse the momentary respite of alcohol, opiates, porn and video games.
Trump is old and Hitler took office months before turning 45. The age of our two fascists should not be seen as unrelated to their constituencies. Trump lost the youth vote in 2020 bigly – he garnered a mere 35% of the 18-29 demographic casting ballots, and also overwhelmingly lost the 30-44 age group to his ancient and confused opponent, the unredoubtable Joe Biden. Trump has little appeal to the youth of America even when opposed by another mentally frail and morally suspect candidate. The only age demographic in which Trump received a 2020 majority was the over 65 contingent.
On German University campuses in the 1930’s Hitler was a cult figure for students and faculty alike – The National Socialist German Student League members pranced about on every campus of The Reich sporting brown shirts and swastika arm bands. Nazi student activists threw Jewish professors from campus windows. The German academic sphere backed Hitler in every imaginable way, from conducting “research” in support of eugenics to performing sinister medical experiments. Scholars recreated the German legal system – even the mobile death squads operating in the occupied territories after the start of Operation Barbarossa, were bizarrely led by an assortment of psychopathic killers legitimized with doctoral credentials.
Otto Ohlendorf – the commander of Einsatzgruppe D – held doctorates in law and economics. Otto Rasch – the commander of Einsatzgruppe C – also had earned two doctorates, in law and in political economy. Franz Walter Stahleckler – the commander of Einsatzgruppe A – held a doctorate in law. Ludwig Han – of Einsatzgruppe L – possessed an advance degree in law. Franz Six – assigned to Einsatzgruppe B – had attained a doctorate in philosophy. Why did it become standard practice to bind illustrious academic achievers to the institution of paramilitary death squads?
It would seem that employing legal scholars and philosophers to oversee an endeavor that involved shooting naked women and children in the back of the neck as they lay face down in mass graves would be a waste of expertise. But, in Nazi Germany the act of genocide and the grandiose theoretical underpinnings of Hitlerian philosophy never existed apart from one another. In order to carry out industrial murder as a comprehensive act of social cohesion, binding all classes and segments of society, the university professor and the firing squad acted as a single force.
In the Trumpist universe racism has become a fetish of the disaffected, white, petty bourgeoisie, and the white working class (that has been abandoned by the Democratic Party). Racism, in Nazi Germany encompassed all social classes and factions. Such illustrious thinkers as the philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and the psychiatrist, Carl Jung, praised Nazism with lavish enthusiasm – both occupied academic leadership posts during Hitler’s reign.
Hitler wrote Mein Kampf with the sort of scholarly tone that gave genocidal racism a patina of scientific inevitability:
“Walking about in the garden of Nature, most men have the self-conceit to think that they know everything; yet almost all are blind to one of the outstanding principles that Nature employs in her work. This principle may be called the inner isolation which characterizes each and every living species on this earth.
Even a superficial glance is sufficient to show that all the innumerable forms in which the life-urge of Nature manifests itself are subject to a fundamental law—one may call it an iron law of Nature—which compels the various species to keep within the definite limits of their own life-forms when propagating and multiplying their kind. Each animal mates only with one of its own species. The titmouse cohabits only with the titmouse, the finch with the finch, the stork with the stork, the field-mouse with the field-mouse, the house-mouse with the house-mouse, the wolf with the she-wolf, etc.”
Hitler conflated human ethnicity with the concept of speciation, but Nazi ideology had a compelling metaphoric hold on the dislocated and shamed post war German masses. Hitler created a connection to a mythical, pagan past of rural purity and genetic perfection. By comparison, MAGA is little more than banal nostalgia for the 1950’s of Fred Flintstone cartoons and lunch counter segregation.
Trump, like all fascists, embraces the value of hierarchy and a vague fidelity to eugenics, but membership in the cult of MAGA brings together a loose assortment of white supremacists, religious cranks, Q-Anon devotees, neo-cons, born again leftist podcasters, and billionaire donors. MAGA requires no more depth of inheritance or commitment than the willingness to buy a red baseball-cap made in China. Trump has neither the discipline nor intelligence to formulate a narrative that might appeal to an above average middle school graduate. His oft repeated idea about refugees being pipelined to the southern border directly from mental institutions and jails sounds like something being screamed from a neglected room on the dementia ward of a nursing home.
Trump, as if tailor made for the corrupt and floundering society he aspires to dominate, offers a free flowing, head scratching mixture of simplified memes and word salad. While Hitler had the ungodly task of presiding over a massive military buildup and subsequent conquest, Trump’s mandate is one of systematic inaction – dismantling rather than building. Trump will deconstruct the EPA, gut safety nets, eliminate tax payer funded medical insurance, and slash education and public works. He aspires to privatize and hand over the levers of power to greedy capitalists. Only police and military spending will expand under Trump. Therefore, he has nothing to do and nothing to explain. Trump’s task is to waste time and entertain the masses.
Nazi aspirations revolved around the notion that the German “master race” needed “living space” (lebensraum) to create a racially based empire. But Trump is wedded to contraction, not expansion – America does not require lebensraum, but needs to build a wall around itself to keep the rest of the world out. The America that Trump envisions resembles an underground, survivalist bunker. In a world being reduced to ruins by climate change, the fascist ideal involves protecting limited resources. In Trump’s worldview, we are not invaders in search of living space, but victims of invasion playing a game of Zombie Apocalypse.
Invading Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, France and Russia was a consuming task, and required well honed rhetorical scaffolding – Hitler, the gifted orator used his brilliance to convince his followers that global conflagration aligned with the demands of fate. Trump’s ideological centerpiece – the threat of a “migrant invasion” – is less of a call to action than a distraction, designed to keep the masses in a state of terminal befuddlement while their meager wealth is siphoned into corporate coffers.
There are, of course similarities binding Hitler to Trump. The Fuhrer had his feckless Weimar Republic to pave his ambitions with cowardly capitulation, and Trump has his feckless Democratic Party as an ineffectual foil. In some parallel universe Merrick Garland is having a good laugh with the judge who sentenced Hitler to nine months for the 1922 beer hall putsch. Garland, at his fiercest, would have given Hitler community service.
If we see Trump as a Hitler “knockoff” – the 5 dollar cheapo version of a Rolex Watch, the chosen autocrat to usher in the collapse of capitalism – does that signify that he is merely a mirage, a harmless plastic Hitler blow-up toy?
In Holocaust research there is an ongoing disagreement between “intentionalists” and “functionalists.” The former argue that Nazi genocide was “intended” from the outset – a baked in process powered by Hitler’s eugenic principles. The functionalists maintain that Nazi genocide took shape incrementally from below – low level bureaucrats created genocidal policies with a series of escalating steps. Trump has talked about deporting tens of millions of “illegals.” This will require a vast bureaucracy in which Adolf Eichmann type functionaries can acquire lethal power.
Can an incoherent clown like Trump provide the direction and leadership for a US version of the Nazi Holocaust, carried out on asylum seekers from the global south? If we adopt a functionalist perspective – that low level decision makers might attain murderous powers within the context of a growing bureaucracy – than Trump’s buffoonery becomes irrelevant. In other words, yes – genocide has latent potential in Trump’s deportation schemes.
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