I keep seeing the word "unprecedented" to describe Trump's bullshit. I got bad news...
1921 - The Sturmabteilung – More commonly known as the ‘brown shirts’, militant branch of the Nazi party, loyalists who used violence and intimidation against opposing parties and targeted populations. Today we have MAGA or ‘red hats’ who use the same tactics but in a less organized fashion (arguably groups like the ‘Proud Boys’ are a closer match, but those are all just smaller subsets of MAGA). A few recent key highlights were the Jan 6 insurrection and the caravan that ran a bus of Biden supporters off the road; and of course countless individual instances of targeted bigotry.
1923 – Speaking of Jan 6, that was the modern equivalent to the Beer Hall Putsch, which was also an unsuccessful attempt at an insurrection.
1924 – Hitler was sentenced to a 5 year prison sentence for his involvement in the Beer Hall Putsch, for which he only served 10 months; during that time he wrote his manifesto “Mein Kampf”. Our current president was recently convicted of 34 felonies, for which he faced zero consequences. Around that time, Project 2025 surfaced, which echoes many of Mein Kampf’s key points, most notably a disdain for democratic institutions and a call to restructure the government into a more authoritarian model made up of loyalists. Trump has also directly quoted Mein Kampf multiple times, and borrowed other language from Hitler like "Lügenpresse" (Lying Press) as "Fake News".
1926 - League of German Worker Youth, or “Hitler Youth” – heavy exploitation of teen impressionability, especially teen boys, to woe support from a young audience. Today there are youth groups for just about everything, but leveraging insecurities of young boys played a role in the recent election, with exit poles showing Gen Z males leaning disproportionately to Trump.
1929 – The Great Depression left pretty much the entire planet dreaming of a more economically secure future, which gave opposition parties to the status quo a major point to criticize those currently in power; the Nazis were no exception, and gained a lot of their support promising an improved economy. The modern world economies were recently all hamstrung by covid, and remain weakened, once again giving opposition parties something to blame on their opponents – costs of groceries, housing, etc are a huge part of why people justified support for Trump (and more broadly, a global shift toward authoritarianism).
1933 – Enabling Act of 1933 – The gist of this one is that Hitler used their existing legal framework to completely undermine and rewrite their legal framework. He put out a rapid slurry of legal decrees and took a grand total of 53 days to basically destroy their constitution and grant himself absolute power. Today, we’re seeing a similar rapid-fire of concerning legislation from Trump via his executive orders.
1933 – Hitler appointed Chancellor by German president Hindenburg. Hindenburg was in his mid-80s at the time of that appointment. Trump may be more of a Hitler’s-enabler figure than an actual-Hitler, but it doesn’t take long to spot a younger vocal appointee that’s been handed power without the say of voters: today’s actual-Hitler could be Elon Musk. *as I understand it, voting for a party then appointment to chancellor was pretty standard for the German govt at the time, so this was very much Germany's equivalent to Trump taking the majority vote.
1933 – Book Burnings – Basically material that didn’t align with Nazi ideals was made contraband. Today, we’ve seen a push to remove things like LGBT or civil rights content from public schools and libraries.
v v v You are here. v v v
1934 – The Night of Long Knives – Purging of non-loyalists from government positions by execution. Today’s equivalent is happening right now, starting with the email that was sent to all federal employees essentially bribing them to resign, and threatening firing of those remaining as part of a restructuring of the federal workforce, and continuing with the gutting of non-loyalists from the military.
^ ^ ^ You are here. ^ ^ ^
There's also the seeming never-ending list of examples of minorities who support Trump.
Edit - this is just a list I cobbled together off the top of my head, but I'm no historian or anything, so if you've got any more to throw onto the pile, comment and I'll add it. Also if you ARE a historian with an interest in the period in question, please lay down as much insight as you're willing to hit me with.
The plan is to destabilize the US, cuz the people in charge of the US are domestic enemies to the US and its constitution. (Yo military peeps - sound familiar? Do your fucking job.)
The 'scramble to rehire critical staff' bit is pure show. The point is for that to fail.