Langer’s profile of Hitler wasn’t declassified until 1972, when much of it was published in a book titled The Mind of Adolf Hitler. As The New York Times explained that year:
“[Langer] saw Hitler as a weakling who masqueraded as a bully, Hitler the failure casting himself in the role, unconsciously for reasons of mental self‐preservation, as Hitler the Fuehrer the superman.
Based on his work, in 1943 the OSS summarized the strategy Hitler used — driven in part by his own psychopathy — to both seize and hold power:
“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
Sound familiar?
Donald Trump just told us that he intends to use the military to go after his “enemies.”
The military. That’s what Putin does. What Stalin did. What Kim Jong Un does. Trump said:
“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. … It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard — or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
Believe him. Members of our military certainly do.
We learned this past weekend that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — America’s most senior and powerful military officer — four-star General Mark Milley, unhesitatingly described Trump to Bob Woodward as “fascist to the core.” He added:
“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump. Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”
Milley added, according to reporting in The Washington Post, that the general:
“[A]lso fears being recalled to uniform to be court-martialed ‘for disloyalty,’ should Trump win against Vice President Kamala Harris in November.”
Milley’s fear of being put in front of a firing squad is well placed. Trump himself told Woodward about Milley and the other generals who refused his efforts to pit soldiers with live ammunition against Black Lives Matter and other protestors:
“I will order them back to active duty and then I will court-martial them!”
As Aswain Suebsaeng and Patrick Reis wrote for Rolling Stone, Trump often fantasized with his closest advisors about using firing squads against his political enemies. Several people who worked for him spoke with the two reporters; the title of their article summarized it well:
“Trump Plans to Bring Back Firing Squads, Group Executions if He Retakes White House.”
Trump has also promised to go after journalists — echoing Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, he calls us “enemies of the people” — if he’s reelected. Sadly, that may explain the reticence so many reporters and their publications have for calling him and his rhetoric out for what it is.
I frankly have little doubt that if he’s elected he’ll do everything he can to break people like me. And you, if you’ve ever posted against him on social media: both Putin and Orbán, Trump‘s explicit role models, imprison people who post against them on Facebook or other media.
As Mike Flynn, pardoned by Trump from prison for lying to the FBI about his meetings with the Russian ambassador and with a job promise from Trump, told a group in Reverend Moon’s son’s church:
“We have to win. And these people are already up to no good. So, we gotta win first.
“We win, and then, ‘Katy, bar the door.’ OK?
“Believe me: The gates of hell — my hell — will be unleashed.”
Trump is now laying out his fascist vision for his next administration, saying that he will criminally (with immunity from his friends on the Supreme Court) use the American military to go after those he calls “the enemy within” including “these lunatics that we have inside, like [Congressman] Adam Schiff.”
This is not a joke. It’s not even a warning. It’s a promise.
Meanwhile, Trump’s protégé JD Vance — who, given how old and sick Trump is, will almost certainly become president at some time in the next four years if their ticket prevails — worships an obscure political philosopher who’s reportedly argued that a reasonable way to deal with people who are “not productive” would be to “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”
Vance’s apparent role model also calls himself a monarchist and argues, perhaps rhetorically, that, “Real, Holocaust-free Nazism has never been tried.”
As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her weekly program, Vance’s muse has also explicitly argued that America should have an all-powerful CEO rather than a president. Corporations are essentially reinventions of old feudal kingdoms with an absolute (but presumably benevolent) leader at the top; to dispose of our presidency and replace it with a Chief Executive Officer, the American people, he argues, merely “have to get over their dictator phobia.”
It’s not like we weren’t warned about these pseudo-utopianists. Senator Barry Goldwater — who knew them well from personal association — told Republicans in his July 16, 1964 speech accepting his party’s nomination for president:
“Now those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.”
But here we are.
It’s become a cliché to quote Maya Angelou, but somehow half of us Americans have not learned the lesson that a pair of would-be dictators are simply telling the truth about who they are and what they intend for this country and the world.
Hitler publicly argued sentiments to the effect of, “I will get rid of the communist vermin,” “I will take care of the enemy within,” “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood,” and “One people, one nation, one leader.”
Today Trump and Vance are echoing these same obscenities, sometimes word-for-word.
There are few Americans alive today who remember Hitler, and for most of us the details of his rise to power are lost to the mists of time. But Donald Trump is bringing it all back with a fresh, stark splash of reality.
When I lived in West Germany in the 1980s, I worked with several Germans who had been in the Hitler Youth. One met Hitler and became a spy for the Reich; he spent the war in an Iranian prison awaiting execution. Another, Armin Lehmann, became a dear friend over the years and wrote a book about his experience as the 16-year-old courier who handed Hitler the news the war was lost and stood outside Hitler’s bunker room as he committed suicide.
They were good people, children at the time really, and were (they’ve all died within the last two decades) haunted by their experience.
It can happen here.
We’ve been sliding down this slippery slope toward unaccountable fascism for several decades, and this year we stand at the threshold of an entirely new form of American government that could mean the end of the American experiment.
To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice for our democracy to survive or fall is in our hands.
Vote!
