Trump told The Atlantic that he runs the country and the world. Take him seriously. Hitler could have said the same thing. By Hal M. Brown -- Jennifer Rubin expresses optimism but also reminds us of how long it took to defeat the Nazis.

By the end of the day today anyone paying attention to the news on all but Trump TV will know about the interview Trump gave to The Atlantic and the two grandiose Trumpian things he said. 

The one that The Atlantic had on their cover and RawStory featured in their article about this (here: 'I run the country — and the world': Inside Trump's bombshell sit-down with The Atlantic) makes the second look hoohum. That was about his teasing the idea of running for third term.

This is an excerpt from Rawsotry’s article with the two parts I think are the most telling in bold:

“'I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,' Trump said in a phone call. “'You know, what I do is such serious stuff.'”

“The first time, I had two things to do — run the country and survive," he added later. "I had all these crooked guys, and the second time, I run the country — and the world.”

The reporters asked Trump about a rumor they'd heard about him tasking the Justice Department to examine whether he could legally run for a third term, which he denied but left open as a possibility.

“'That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?'” Trump said, laughing, according to the report. “'Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter [democratic norms].'"

He noted that supporters often shout out for him to seek a third term, but he expressed a recognition that wasn't a possibility.

“'It’s not something that I’m looking to do, and I think it would be a very hard thing to do,'" he said.

Taking the second statement about shattering democratic norms first, this tells me that Trump knows very well that when democratic norms are shattered democracy is destroyed. What’s left is autocracy. Who, then is in charge? He is, of course. What does that make him? It makes him a dictator.

What Trump said sbout running the country is true. Despite what optimists want to believe about all the defeats in court, his dismal showing in the polls, and the large anti-Trump protests, he is still running the country. For example, Jennifer Rubin lists numerous Trump failures in “Trump is worse off than he was 100 days ago. The battle for democracy, however, is not yet won.” The subtitle about the battle not yet won contradicts the illustration shown below.

We see a faded odd looking MAGA hat with weird orange straps in three pieces on a dirt road with tire tracks over it. 

Presumably this hat thingy represents Trump and Trumpism.

Rubin is more realistic in what she writes. She begins:

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. 
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

– Winston Churchill, 1942

We therefore cannot tell if the last week or so leading up to the 100-day mark of Donald Trump’s assault on democracy, decency, and truth has definitively shifted momentum toward the pro-democracy movement or just temporarily sidetracked Trump’s march to autocracy. If and only if pro-democracy forces draw the right lessons, cement their alliances, and pursue their MAGA assailants relentlessly will recent events come to be recognized as the end of the beginning of the fight to preserve the American experiment.

She goes on to describe 10 failures or setbacks Trump has had. She concludes with something I have written about:

In short, Trump lost the first 100 days, but democracy has not won the war. Had the Allies not gone on to prevail on D-Day and win WWII, their victory in North Africa in 1942, which inspired Churchill’s memorable observation, would have been viewed in retrospect as a bump in the road on the way to Nazi victory. Without persistent, ongoing opposition, recent victories on multiple fronts cannot end the MAGA threat.

Regular readers of my Substack know I have written about the Nazi blitzkreig and how Hitler invaded Europe, and then how long it took for the Allies to build their military might to the point where they could start the D-Day assault. The Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 marking the beginning of World War II. Churchill made his comment on November 10, 1942. 

Trump has four years to consolidate his power, two if you want to believe the Democrats winning control of Congress will make any difference to him. 

At present Trump has armed agents doing his bidding. He has already used ICE, the FBI, and other federal law enforcement agencies to arrest people he sees as enemies. Consider what happened yesterday when DEA agents and other law enforcement were used in Colorado (link)

The real test of whether he has Hitlerian or Putin power will be if he tries to use the military on US soil by declaring martial law to stop protests and round up and imprison protestors. He could attempt to do this by declaring martial law. This is what Wikipedia says about martial law in the United States.

Assuming the military went along with this we will have a true totalitarian country. There will be no coalition to mount a D-Day to save us.

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.Combine DOGE and ICE and we could have an American Gestapo armed with both guns and computers. By Hal M. Brown - Trump could be Hitler with a giant mainframe database of undesirables who are poisoning the blood of America.

 

American ICE agents don’t look like they are members of the Nazi Gestapo. They wore plainclothes. Even so, whether in their black body armor uniforms carrying assault rifles and enough bullets to take on a drug cartel’s lair, or wearing ski maks and in plainclothes, they instill terror in people.

The photo above is from an article about the Gestapo in The History Place.

This is an excerpt from the RawStory article “DOGE could be headed for a 'a new, more dangerous phase' as Musk steps away”

A decision by billionaire Elon Musk to restrict his involvement in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that he created so that he can tend to his ailing Tesla automobile company does not mean that the damage being done by the DOGE staffers will be coming to an end.

According to Guardian journalist David Smith, their work is not done and, with Musk out of the picture as the face of DOGE, things could get a lot worse.

Conceding there is a feeling among some that the "lull" that will follow Musk's department is reason for relief, Smith wrote instead it "presages a new, more dangerous phase."

The following is from Chaos unleashed by Musk’s Doge is starting to wane – what does that mean? in The Guardian:

Last week Musk announced that he is hanging up his chainsaw and stepping back from his role overseeing the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, to focus on Tesla, his beleaguered electric vehicle company. The news led some to hope the chaos unleashed by Doge is finally waning.

But it is just as possible that the relative lull presages a new, more dangerous phase. While Musk intends to reduce his schedule, he also said he would continue to work for Donald Trump for “the remainder of the president’s term”. On Friday CNN reported that Doge is building a master database to accelerate deportations of undocumented immigrants by combining sensitive data from across the federal government.

“It’s well established that they’re using the data not just to cut spending but to advance policy goals,” said Judd Legum, the author of Popular Information, an independent newsletter that maintains a Doge tracker. “As they realise there’s nothing left to cut that they want to cut or can cut, they’ll probably turn to more of those more policy-oriented initiatives.”

The actual Gestapo didn’t have the luxury of large mainframe computers and databases to track down their victims. At present the campaign to “purify” America depends on a variety of mechanisms to identify those it wants to get rid of. Some of them are hit and miss. They deport innocent people and even children who are citizens and this is bad PR. Damnit, they are inefficient!

DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency. The original idea was to save money and eliminate waste and fraud. 

Wiki defines efficiency as “the often measurable ability to avoid making mistakes or wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time while performing a task. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste.”

Trump has been upset, to put it mildly, that ICE hasn’t been as ruthlessly efficient as he promised it would be in his immigrant purge. DOGE created the fear and chaos he relishes at goverment agencies, but I doubt this has been enough for Trump.

Now it makes perfect sense for him to claim DOGE was a huge success in its original mission and to repurpose it to be the brains behind ICE. Of course, he’d never admit Tom Homan lacked the brainpower to do the job as Trump promised it would be done. After all, Trump never claimed Homan was an Einstein.

He just needed an assist from the INCEL DODE computer boys.

Consider what Hitler, and Heinrich Müller (shown below), who is not nearly was well known as Göring and Himmler, ran the Gestapo for most of the war, could have done with even the 1960’s computer below. Trump could be Hitler with a giant mainframe database of undesirables who are poisoning the blood of America.

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Hitler turned anti-semitism into a reason to demonize Jews, Trump is trying to turn fear of Hispanic gangs into reason to hate all brown skinned immigrants. By Hal M. Brown

 

The Nazis succeeded in demonizing Jews. Trump is doing the same thing with Hispanic immigrants. While the typical immigrant looks like a normal person who happens to have brown skin, conveniently for him gang members with the same color skin have tattoos all over their faces and bodies. 

While all, or perhaps most, members of Hispanic gangs aren’t violent, Trump wants to portray them as rapists and killers.

In many ways Trump has more going for him than Hitler did in turning Jews into the enemy of other Germans.

Some Jews may have had large noses making them look different but what made them easy to cast as enemies was the existing anti-Semisticism based on their religion and animosity towards them because many were successful members of the merchant class.

Even though other Germans had contact with Jews until they were segregated into ghettos and knew they weren’’t violent criminals” Nazi propaganda was successful in characterizing them this way. For example: 

The following is from an article in this U.S. Holocaust Museum website:

Demonizing the enemy is an effective technique for wartime propaganda. Hitler recognized this technique during World War I. Although most wartime propaganda demonized the political and military leaders of enemy countries, the Nazis went further. They considered all Jews—men, women, and even children—to be a deadly threat to the German people.

On posters and in speeches, newsreels, and radio programs, Nazis demonized and dehumanized European Jews. They depicted European Jews as carriers of deadly diseases such as typhus to justify segregating them in ghettos. They identified European Jews as a violent threat, calling them bandits and terrorists. Nazi propaganda held the Jews responsible for causing World War II, for which they would have to pay. All Jews, Hitler’s propagandists proclaimed, were accomplices in an international plot to enslave the non-Jewish world. Using such false claims, Nazi propaganda presented its war against Jews as a struggle between good and evil.

There were no Jewish criminal gangs in Germany in the 1930s, at least not in the way we describe a criminal gang. The Nazis wanted to cast them as criminals. This is from The Construction of “Jewish Criminality” in Nazi Germany:

This chapter shows that the right wing's essentialized construct of the Jew as criminal in the Weimar period was translated into policy and action in Germany after 1933. Until 1938, when the Nazis unequivocally embraced the guiding principle that “The Jew is outside the law,” they often took pains to charge individual Jews with specific crimes, usually focusing on technical aspects of tax laws and currency-exchange regulations. On the one hand, they sought to exploit the racist agenda and traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes. On the other, they wanted to give the impression that the Nazi State was simply zealous in applying the letter of the law.

Trump has lucked out. There are criminal American Hispanic gangs that can easily be depicted as the kind of people who would break into your house and do unpseakable things to you and your family.

Trump went from making the ludicrous claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pet dogs and cats to lucking out because the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is really composed of some real bad guys. Consider:

27 Members or Associates of Tren de Aragua Charged with Racketeering, Narcotics, Sex Trafficking, Robbery and Firearms offenses

The following fact doesn’t matter:

There's little evidence to support the administration's contention that large numbers of the deportees are members of the violent Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua. Reporting by USA TODAY last fall found ICE, the FBI and law enforcement agencies in states with reports of the gang's activity had tallied fewer than 135 members of the gang, while the Trump administration says it deported more than 200 members to El Salvador last week alone. USA Today

The logical next step for Trump and his minions is to begin to plant the idea in public perception that anyone who has crossed, or is trying to cross, the southern border trying to make a better life for themselves will become a member of a violent criminal gang. 

Trump and minions like Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Pam Bondi have the perfect foil in Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They are trying to convince the public that although he may look like a normal nice family man he’s really a secret gang member. This does not bode well for him or any other person deported without due process ever returning home. If they can pull this off with him they will keep doing it with others. 

Plans to build a huge detention facility (aka prison) in Texas have been paused (see article), but I expect Trump will stop sending anyone to El Salvador due to public pressure and will eventually build facilities in the United States. We will end up with an American Gulag. They will provide lots of jobs for those who couldn’t meet the standards for thuggery to be members of ICE or other Trump Gestapos.

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Trump's Hitlerian Henchwomen: Pam Bondi and Karoline Leavitt offer the feminine tone as their Führer sets the stage for sending people to the modern day version of concentration camps,

Attorney General Pam Bondi and Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, put a pretty face on his cruel policies. They might as well be twins. Even my AI can’t seem to tell them apart. 1

Now we have news about Trump exploring ways to “deport” U.S. citizens to a prison hellhole in El Salvador.

The Trump administration can now be called nothing less than downright Hitlerian in its aspirations and soon, if they can get away with it, in their actions. 

This is from the HUPPPOST article subtitled “The administration could try removing American citizens if it identifies a pathway it can claim to be legal.”

The article begins:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador, where the administration has already arranged to house deported immigrants in a prison known for its human rights abuses.

Leavitt suggested the effort would be limited to people who have committed major crimes, but Trump has also mentioned the possibility of sending people who commit lesser offenses abroad.

Any such move on the part of the Trump administration is certain to be challenged in court. It is also not clear what legal authority could be used to justify expelling U.S. citizens from their homeland.

“These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly. These are violent, repeat offenders on American streets,” Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing.

“The president has said if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that. He’s not sure, [and] we are not sure if there is,” Leavitt continued. “It’s an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly in the effort of transparency.”

Many people mistakenly think all of Hitler’s concentration and death camps were in Germany. They weren’t.

From 1933 to 1945, more than 40,000 concentration camps or other types of detainment facilities were established by the Nazi regime. Only the major ones are noted on the map (shown here) Among them are Auschwitz in Poland, Westerbork in the Netherlands, Mauthausen in Austria, and Janowska in Ukraine. By 1941, the Nazis began building Chelmno, the first extermination camp (also called a death camp), to "exterminate" both Jews and Gypsies. In 1942, three more death camps were built (Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec) and used solely for mass murder. Around this time, killing centers were also added at the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek.

It is estimated that the Nazis used these camps to kill approximately 11 million people. Reference.

You could say that Trump and his Gestapo think along the lines of “out of sight, out of mind.” To a large extent this is true. Once someone from America, a citizen or non-citizen, is swallowed up into the bowls of the notorious Salvadorian prison, they are indeed out of sight.

They should not be out of mind. Even the worst or the worst criminals deserve to be afforded their rights under the American judicial system. 

If they are non-citizens and found guilty of whatever crime they were charged with I do not think it can remotely be called the American way to send them to serve time in a Salvadorian prison under Salvadorian law. 

The gang members deported aren’t even from El Salvadore. There are allegedly members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. While this gang has members who have committed violent acts and broken laws it is wrong to assume that mere membership means they all are the same. Here’s a good article about the gang.

If they are Venezuelan citizens and they are going to be deported anywhere it should be back to where they came from.

So here we have happy Pam Bondi wearing her $50,000 watch doing a photo op in front of a group of prisoners in the Salavdorian prison where, behind the bars, you can see sleeping bunks reminscent of those in Nazi concentration camps. And then we have happy Karoline Leavitt talking about the idea that it’s just fine and dandy to send American citizens to the same prison.

Trump has put these women forward because he thinks they are photogenic and they are as American as Mom with her apple pie.

In fact, these two henchwomen may look the part to Trump and MAGA men and women, but I see them as far darker personalities.

They don’t look the part of a sadistic psychopath like Tom Homan (in the news today):

I see them as being just as cruel and sadistic. They are out front in the bright lights, but the malevolent parts of their personalities are visible to anyone whose eyes are wide open. They can see them for who they really are. 2

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1

Images of Bondi and Leavitt are AI created.

2

Image created by AI and darkened by Apple Photo

Another "how dare he from Trump," this one may be his most insensitive one yet, By Hal M. Brown Trump wants you to celebrate his Liberation Day. Let's remember the real liberation days when millions of lives were saved.

 .

The photo above shows Dutch civilians and Canadian Army troops celebrating the liberation of Utrecht, Netherlands, May 7, 1945. (Credit: Alexander M. Stirton/Canada. Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada/PA-134377). You can click this photo and the other photos below to go to the websites which featured them.

A good friend of mine experienced a true liberation day when she was a child. She lived in a small village in the Netherlands that had been occupied by the Nazis. Even though she was a young child at the time she has an indelible memory of the day that American paratroopers landed in the village square and people came out to greet them. 

Several American soldiers ended up in front of her house and her parents invited them inside and gave them a meal. 

Several years later some of those soldiers came back to visit them for a heartfelt reunion.

The Canadians played an outsized role in liberating the Netherlands. This is particularly both ironic and disgusting since Trump has turned Canada into an enemy he wants to basically invade.

The photo below is from “A Dutch Spy’s Photographs of the Liberation of the Netherlands – May 1945.”

We’ve all seen photos of concentration camp survivors which were taken by Allied liberators so I won’t include them in this Substack.

You’ve been hibernating if you have missed Trump’s hyping tomorrow as his Liberation Day.

I can’t imagine that Trump doesn’t know that this term has a deep meaning to millions of people. How warped and pathological can a person be to use these words to glorify himself for instituting a political policy? I don’t have to answer this.

It is hard to find words to express how insensitive and downright disgusting it is that he uses this term in reference to tarrifs, the word he says is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. He may not know that Trumpism is in the dictionary.

The liberation of Nazi occupied Europe began with D-Day, the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. There was an enormous number of Allied casualties on just D-Day itself. This is estimated at 4,900 Allied troops were killed, went missing, and were wounded during the assault.

The total number of casualties that occurred during Operation Overlord, from June 6 (the date of D-Day) to August 30 (when German forces retreated across the Seine) was over 425,000 Allied and German troops. This figure includes over 209,000 Allied casualties:

• Nearly 37,000 dead amongst the ground forces

• 16,714 deaths amongst the Allied air forces.

• Of the Allied casualties, 83,045 were from 21st Army Group (British, Canadian and Polish ground forces)

• 125,847 from the US ground forces.

Reference.

World War II took six years before the Allies achieved their final victory with the surrender of Japan. This was formalized on on the Battleship Missouri:

(Personal note” When I was a child the Missouri visited New York harbor and we went on a tour and saw where the capitulation was signed. I was amazed to see the inside of those gun turrets and the six inch thick armor protecting the ship.)

Addendum:

If you subscribe to The Washington Post this is well worth reading (here).

This is what Phillip Bump wrote:

I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long. There’s not a really great comparative model, but countries like Ukraine and Ecuador have kind of broadly resembled that in the last 30 years. The United States is a much more high performance state in democracy than those two countries, so we’re not going to really look like Ukraine or Ecuador. But the idea of passing back and forth between governments that behave well but don’t perform well and more autocratic governments that also fail to consolidate power? I think that’s right now where I’d put my dollar.

You probaly know who Ruth Ben-Ghiat is. If not, she’s a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University who writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda and democracy protection.

This is what she wrote in Phillip Bump’s Washington Post column “What America could look like a decade from now? Political scientists and historians weigh in on authoritarianism’s impact on the United States.”

If Trump and MAGA stayed in power for the long term, the U.S. would be acting in concert with authoritarian leaders and would have likely invaded some territories of democracy, as well as lending support to others’ autocratic aggressions, for example in Taiwan.

Domestically, you don’t need to abolish opposition parties today. You just engineer the electoral system to keep Democrats out of power.

However, I believe there will be a reckoning as the outcomes of the plunder operation on benefits and government and the costs of propping up Russian leader Vladimir Putin become clear to Americans. To stop that reckoning, recourse to repression may be necessary, and that will also be unpopular.

Of all the experts writing heir prediction her’s may be the most optimistic.

Consider: 

This is from Thomas Pepinsky, the Walter F. LaFeber professor of government and public policy at Cornell University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The long-term implications of the second Trump administration are sobering. The administration’s simultaneous attacks on the legal profession, the federal bureaucracy, higher education and the U.S. military are destroying the societal pillars of American greatness with blinding speed.

Basic government functions are being turned off, seemingly at random and illegally, by Elon Musk and his ragtag crew of coders. And U.S. alliances are fraying, as countries around the world are adjusting to an administration that publicly threatens to abandon its treaty commitments while beating a hasty retreat in the face of Russian aggression and Chinese power. For its part, Congress has abdicated its own responsibility to serve as a check on the presidency, with GOP members counting on Trump’s brashness and charisma to protect them from voters.

Back to the Nazis. It took six years for World War II to end. We don’t have to speculate as to what the world would look like 10 years later. Russia became a dictatorship and a superpower. Democracy won the day in Germany and Japan. The NATO alliance was established in 1949. The United States was the undisputed leader of the free world.

We do not know what Trump will turn the country into during his tenure at president. If it is the one or another form of authoritarian state we don’t know how long it will take for democracy to be restored or what it will take to achieve this outcome.

The war to undo what the Axis did took six years. The only efforts so far have been in courtrooms where despite victories against Trump as far as having an effect on stopping Trump’s blitzkrieg have been about as effective as shooting Nerf balls at a tank.

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