Leading civil rights lawyer shows 20 ways Trump is copying Hitler
Leading civil rights lawyer shows 20 ways Trump is copying Hitler
PICKENS, SOUTH CAROLINA - JULY 1: Former President Donald Trump speaks to a crowd during a campaign event on July 1, 2023 in Pickens, South Carolina. The former president faces a growing list of primary challengers in the Republican Party. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images).
Steven RosenfeldAugust 22, 2023


This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

A new book by one of the nation's foremost civil liberties lawyers powerfully describes how America's constitutional checks and balances are being pushed to the brink by a president who is consciously following Adolf Hitler's extremist propaganda and policy template from the early 1930s--when the Nazis took power in Germany.

In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen's Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America's constitutional foundation in 2019--an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority--is not positioned to withstand Trump's extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, "Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?," extensively details Trump's mimicry of Hitler's pre-war rhetoric and strategies.

Join Alternet All-Access. Go AD-Free.
Neuborne doesn't make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU's national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.

"Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?" he writes. "Partly it's just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it's hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln's house. But that's not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton's mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play."


A younger Trump, according to his first wife's divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler's pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches' impact on his era's press and politics. "Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation," Neuborne says.

"Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler's speeches--spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy," Neuborne says. "You see, we've seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump's rhetoric--as a candidate and in office--mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy."

Many Americans may seize or condemn Neuborne's analysis, which has more than 20 major points of comparison. The author repeatedly says his goal is not "equating" the men--as "it trivializes Hitler's obscene crimes to compare them to Trump's often pathetic foibles."

Indeed, the book has a larger frame: whether federal checks and balances--Congress, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College--can contain the havoc that Trump thrives on and the Republican Party at large has embraced. But the Trump-Hitler compilation is a stunning warning, because, as many Holocaust survivors have said, few Germans or Europeans expected what unfolded in the years after Hitler amassed power.

Here's how Neuborne introduces this section. Many recent presidents have been awful, "But then there was Donald Trump, the only president in recent American history to openly despise the twin ideals--individual dignity and fundamental equality--upon which the contemporary United States is built. When you confront the reality of a president like Trump, the state of both sets of brakes--internal [constitutional] and external [public resistance]--become hugely important because Donald Trump's political train runs on the most potent and dangerous fuel of all: a steady diet of fear, greed, loathing, lies, and envy. It's a toxic mixture that has destroyed democracies before, and can do so again.

"Give Trump credit," he continues. "He did his homework well and became the twenty-first-century master of divisive rhetoric. We're used to thinking of Hitler's Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn't take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump's bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic. It fell into their hands as the fruit of Hitler's satanic ability to mesmerize enough Germans to trade their birthright for a pottage of scapegoating, short-term economic gain, xenophobia, and racism. It could happen here."

20 Common Themes, Rhetorical Tactics and Dangerous Policies

Fascists embrace Authoritarianism...so do Conservatives.
Fascists embrace Nationalism...so do Conservatives.
Fascists embrace Militarism...so do Conservatives.
Fascists embrace Corporatism...so do Conservatives.
Fascists embrace religion intermixed with government...so do Conservatives
Fascists label minorities as the enemy...so do Conservatives.
Fascists are against Socialism and Communism...so are Conservatives.
Fascists are against intellectualism and liberalism...so are Conservatives.
Fascists are against Democracy and so are Conservatives.

In fact, when you read about fascism there is literally nothing in it that conservatives disagree with...yet they will scream that it is Liberal because Hitler used "Socialism" in the name of his party. What they neglect to understand is that that was simply propaganda because Socialism was popular at the time not because he intended to integrate it into his political theme. And when you look at Hitler's Fascism in practice he both deported Socialists and Communists or sent them to labor camps where they were worked to death.

And the problem with all of this is that conservatives don't understand that Fascism is the worst part of their ideology so don't know how to avoid it. With liberals, we understand that Communism is the giant wart in our ideology so we've used Social Democracy successfully since the 1930's.

SNIP>>>Many fascist ideas derived from the reactionary backlash to the progressive revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 and to the secular liberalism and social radicalism that accompanied these upheavals. De Maistre condemned the 18th-century Enlightenment for having subverted the dominance of traditional religion and traditional elites and paid homage to the public executioner as the protector of a divinely sanctioned social hierarchy. Taine lamented the rise to power of the masses, whom he suggested were at a lower stage of biological evolution than aristocrats. Le Bon wrote a primer on how to divert the barbarism of the masses from revolution to reaction. Barrès fused ethnic rootedness with authoritarian nationalism and contended that too much civilization led to decadence and that hatred and violence were energizing remedies.

In short, Fascism was formed as a backlash to progressivism which is why when it rears its ugly head it's as a backlash to progressivism as we see now...