In the closing days of the 2024 Presidential race, the Harris/Walz campaign has repeatedly accused Donald Trump of being a fascist, or more directly, “like Hitler.” This “Trump-is-Hitler” mantra is not new, but it has been lately intensified through an article in the Atlantic magazine, written by Jeffrey Goldberg, in which Goldberg alleged, based on anonymous sources, that Trump said during his time as President that he needed “the kind of generals that Hitler had!”
This remark by Trump, if true, would be most peculiar in so far as many of Hitler’s generals despised him, plotting and attempting to assassinate him on a number of occasions.
But putting aside the likelihood that most people, including Donald Trump, are uninformed about the historical facts concerning the inner workings of the Third Reich, let’s assume for just a moment that there is even a modicum of sincerity behind these accusations, that is, those who make them are not just engaging in the bare-knuckle sport of US politics and really believe that Trump is a Hitler-like figure who, if elected, would plunge America into a political state resembling Nazi Germany.
Is it true, that is, is Trump like Hitler? No it is not true, and a quick comparison of the characteristics, policies and beliefs of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump immediately reveals that Donald Trump is not a fascist, Hitler, or even remotely Hitler-like.
For example, while Trump, like Hitler, has an unconventional speaking style, complete with flamboyant gestures and hyperbole, he is no more a fascist than was Teddy Roosevelt, who, too, was an out-of-the-box speaker with a larger-than-life personality. Trump, like Teddy Roosevelt, is a populist and speaks in a manner (complete with comedic stylings) meant to appeal to the average American.
Although Hitler was theatrical in his speaking style, he was not a populist. He was a highly-skilled, seasoned politician who spent years playing the game, working with the established powers in Germany as a path to power. Although Hitler’s speeches were full of his expressed love for Germany, Hitler felt that his will was one-in-same as that of the German people. Hitler believed, quite literally, that he was the physical embodiment of the collective will of Germany and, therefore, had a license to do whatever he wanted to the nation’s people. Nothing in Trump’s current rhetoric or his past actions as President suggests that Trump believes his will is that of the American people.
Donald Trump is so much the populist that perhaps his most serious mistake in his first term as President was to snub the established Washington power structure and assume that those who stepped forward to govern with him all wanted to do right by the people. However, many of Trump’s staff turned out to be run-of-the-mill political opportunists, and when Trump found them out, he fired them. In response, those dismissed by Trump set about sabotaging his first term as President and/or seeing to it that he would never again hold public office. Trump was terribly naive about the power structure in D.C., and his first term played out more like the tragic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington than anything from Germany, Nazi or otherwise.
By way of policy, Hilter was, first and foremost, a militaristic imperialist who, like Otto von Bismarck before him, believed that Germany’s future must be secured through war and conquest. Hitler also believed Europe would be better off, more stable and prosperous, if an imperial Germany ruled over it.
Donald Trump, by contrast, believes the exact opposite, preaching a program of “America should first take care of Americans,” and the rest of the world needs to look after its own. In places where America’s and other countries’ interests intersect, such as NATO, Trump has been clear in word and deed that allied countries must “pay their fair share” of the obligations that come with being in an alliance. Germany’s Hitler, like other dictators such as France’s Napoleon, believed that he alone had the solutions to the world’s problems and should impose those solutions on other countries whether they liked it or not. Trump, by contrast, believes the world must take better care of itself and stop expecting the United States to foot the bill for its neglect.
All of this aside, it seems that the “Trump is like Hitler” invective grows primarily out of the media’s portrayals of him as a bigot, someone who hates other ethnic groups outside of his own. Trump, his critics imply, just does like the “other” and, like Hitler, persecutes them whenever he gets a chance. Here, too, a comparison to Hitler falls flat.
Hitler was, like many Europeans and Americans in the early twentieth century, an unabashed racist and anti-Semite who believed that Jews and Communists controlled the world and must, therefore, be exterminated wherever they might be found. In contrast, the Trump family, starting with Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump, have been dedicated humanitarians, quietly helping distressed minorities contrary to the prevailing social currents of their times.
For example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when most of America was still openly hostile to Jews and growing Jewish communities in cities like New York, Fred Trump realized that newly arriving European-Jewish refugees needed support to settle in the United States. To that end, Trump senior donated the land and much of the money needed to build Brooklyn’s Beach Haven Jewish Center, which became the first stop for thousands of Holocaust survivors fleeing a hostile post-World War Two Europe where, although Nazism had been defeated, anti-Semitism had not.
Like his father, Donald Trump continues his family’s support for the Center and its humanitarian work. Additionally, while President, Trump prayed at the Western Wall and moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, two things that no sitting US President had ever done. Trump’s actions simply do not support the accusation that he is a Hitler-like anti-semite or xenophobe.
While the reproach that “Trump is like Hitler!” is easily exposed as groundless, because Trump is in no way like Hitler, there is, ironically, a scenario materializing right under our collective noses that could very well give rise to a Hitler-like figure in the twenty-first century. Someone who, like Hitler in the early twentieth century, would deliberately start a global war and hope to use the resulting death and destruction as a means to advance their ideological aims.
Since February of 2022, Russia and Ukraine have been at war. During that time, the United States has continuously pressured European leaders to thwart efforts by Ukrainian and Russian officials to negotiate an end to the war. The Biden Administration does not want a negotiated end to the war. Instead, it has pursued a strategy meant to politically isolate and damage Vladimir Putin and break the will of the Russian people by imposing sanctions on their nation while giving billions in money and weapons to Ukraine.
This strategy has not worked. Not only have United States sanctions resulted in a more robust Russian ruble, but Vladimir Putin is not politically isolated and has, as a matter of necessity, moved Russia into a closer economic and diplomatic arrangement with China, Iran, and North Korea.
This is a very bad development, and the world in 2024 is starting to look like Europe in 1914. At that time, major European powers came together into two opposing ideological alliances, each with aspirations of global domination at the expense of the other. Each alliance believed it could pursue its global ambitions through proxy wars and aggressive diplomatic maneuvering with impunity since, it was assumed, the power of its alliance would discourage a larger conflict with any nation from the opposing alliance.
As it turned out, the European nations were tragically wrong in their assumptions. When the two alliances eventually came to blows, the resulting clash, World War One, engulfed the world in conflict, ground millions of innocent men into an unrecognizable, bloody pulp and set in motion the conditions needed for the rise of Hitler and the start of World War Two.
A similar situation is taking shape right now, in 2024. China, Iran and North Korea are all well-known bad actors on the global stage, and each, individually, has demonstrated a willingness to use money, threats, terror, and proxy war to advance its ambitions of global dominance. Thanks to a short-sighted U.S. foreign policy, these nations are now working in concert, supporting each other’s maneuverings against their collective enemy, the West.
The next Hitler is rising in the twenty-first century, but he is not Donald Trump. He is more likely Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, or Kim Jong Un, the dictator of North Korea. And while dictators who think like Hitler are not uncommon in the world, the conditions needed to enable a Hitler-like figure to act out his Hitleresque goals are, thankfully, rarer. But Russia’s need to end the war with Ukraine has driven it into the arms of China, Iran and North Korea. These nations are helping Russia against Ukraine, but not without a quid pro quo at the expense of the West, especially the United States and Israel.
As we approach November 5, 2024, we must ask ourselves the following question: Who is most likely to emerge as the next war-mongering Hitler-like figure of the twenty-first century? Donald Trump, a man who is stridently pro-peace, pro-minority, and pro-America? Or a figure like Ali Khamenei or Kim Jong Un, who have openly and repeatedly preached war, terror and ruin as a way to advance their own ideological interests?
To thawt the next Hitlet rising, whichever candidate wins the 2024 U.S. Presidential race, he or she must move quickly to end the war between Russia and Ukraine, rebuild relations with Russia and work, with great urgency, once again isolate Iran and North Korea.