In the few weeks since he took up office as president of the United States of America, Donald Trump has been waging a relentless and comprehensive war on American democracy and its institutions. Increasingly, commentators have begun comparing the ongoing death of democracy and the rational conduct of politics in the US with the destruction of freedom and democracy in Germany in the early 1930s.
The short period that has elapsed following his assumption of office as president has seen Trump issue a blizzard of executive orders from the White House: they include directives that “erode voter access, hinder free and fair elections, and create greater distrust in the electoral system” according to a report from the Brookings Institution, a long-established, non-partisan thinktank frequently cited by American conservatives.
Trump’s executive orders have ridden roughshod over many of the provisions of the Constitution, which has governed the conduct of politics in the US since 1789. He has licensed an unelected and unaccountable individual, the billionaire Elon Musk, to attack a wide range of state institutions by ordering the firing of thousands upon thousands of legitimately appointed government officials. The US Agency for International Aid and the Department of Education are facing cripplingly severe budgetary cuts.
Loyalty to Trump is replacing competence and democratic accountability as the basis of state appointments. Legal challenges to these orders are being mounted, but it is by no means clear that Trump will obey them. Trump has declared his intention of unilaterally abrogating the 14th amendment, which guarantees American citizenship to anyone born on the territory of the US, without going through the long and complicated process of removing it from the Constitution. The Department of Justice has dropped legal proceedings against Trump, his allies and underlings, after purges of independent officials and the appointment of people loyal to the president.
The Supreme Court, which has a majority of judges loyal to Trump, has ruled, in effect, that the president is above the law and cannot be prosecuted for criminal acts committed while in office. The president has signed an executive order bringing the independent Federal Election Commission under his personal control and appointed throughout his administration loyalists who accept his bogus claim that the presidential election of 2020, which he lost, was rigged against him.
The Constitution was framed to ensure checks and balances between the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government, but both the legislative and judicial branches are in thrall to Trump, and are being reduced to cyphers. Republican senators and members of the House of Representatives have all but abdicated their independence, bowing to the president either because they support his assault on democracy or because they are afraid of the reaction of the Republican party base if they don’t.
Trump has suggested he would like a third term in office. He has referred to himself as “the king”.
Over the past weeks, as an essay by the journalist Sue Halpern in the New Yorker has pointed out, Trump has “pursued a renewed multilateral program to suppress the vote, curtail the franchise, undermine election security, eliminate protections from foreign interference, and neuter the independent oversight of election administration”. Trump has suggested he would like a third term in office, which is currently forbidden by the 22nd amendment. He has referred to himself as “the king”.
Trump has also turned his attention to the military, firing a swathe of top generals, including the chair of the joint chiefs of staff—America’s top military officer—as well as the head of the US Navy and the chief of staff for the Air Force. As a precaution against possible prosecution by Trump, General Mark Milley, another former chair of the joint chiefs of staff, was granted immunity by Joe Biden in one of his last acts as president.
Trump has also been attempting, with some success, to undermine the freedom of the press and other communication media. A thin-skinned narcissist, he reacts with undisguised hostility to any kind of criticism. He has repeatedly called the news media “the enemy of the people”, accusing them of spreading “fake news” and being staffed by “bad people” and “human scum”.
Faced with intimidatory statements and actions, the owners of key media outlets have caved in. Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, billionaire owners respectively of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, stopped their papers’ editorial endorsements of Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2024 election, Kamala Harris. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, whose CEO is Mark Zuckerberg, has settled out of court with Trump to the tune of $25m over its earlier decision to suspend his accounts following the January 6th storming of the Capitol. The mainstream news media and especially the press are in a difficult financial situation, with declining circulation and falling income. Led by their owners, they are gradually bowing to Trump’s campaign of intimidation. Despite the first amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech, Trump is evidently succeeding in turning the news media into a mouthpiece for his own views. At a state and local level, Republicans are encouraging the banning of books that deal with subjects such as homosexuality and gender identity from schools and libraries.
Trump is also openly hostile to accepted scientific fact and analysis. During the Covid-19 epidemic, he notoriously suggested that drinking or injecting disinfectant or bombarding people with ultraviolet light might defeat the disease, while criticising the use of face-masks as a preventive device. His criticism of Anthony Fauci, the widely respected chief medical adviser, was so fierce that Biden found it necessary to issue Fauci with a preemptive pardon to prevent any prosecution being brought against him when Trump returned to office. Declaring climate science to be nothing more than a “hoax”, Trump is systematically dismantling environmental protections across the US, opening the way to more extreme weather events, more devastating fires, more destruction of nature, more pollution and more deaths.
Trump has begun cutting funds for scientific research and withdrawing support from major research universities that, until now, have led the world in the advancement of science. The Association of American Medical Colleges has said that the cuts will “diminish the nation’s research capacity, slowing scientific progress and depriving patients, families, and communities across the country of new treatments, diagnostics, and preventative interventions”.
Trump has a long record of misogyny and disparagement of women. Most important is the direct and indirect support he gave to the Supreme Court, dominated by his appointees, when in 2022 it revoked the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed by its decision in the case of Roe v Wade in 1973. Since then, a number of states have imposed a virtually total ban on abortions, with appalling consequences for increasing numbers of women who are affected by the revocation.
All this amounts to a sustained and comprehensive attack on democratic institutions and practices, and on a political system based on freedom of speech and enquiry, and respect for voters. And there are nearly four more years of this assault to come.
So how does this compare with what happened in Germany in the early 1930s, as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party created the dictatorship they called the “Third Reich”?
Senior civil liberties lawyer Burt Neuborne has claimed that Trump’s rhetoric “mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy”. Others found an alarming parallel between Trump’s claim that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and Hitler’s racist beliefs. Describing his opponents as “vermin” inevitably recalled the notorious Nazi film The Eternal Jew (1940), with its juxtaposition of rats with footage of Jews. Some have compared the storming of the Capitol in Washington DC by a violent mob, egged on by Trump in an apparent attempt to stop the ratification of Biden’s election victory, with Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.
One of the most vocal advocates of a parallel between Trump and Hitler has been Mark Milley. At the beginning of 2021, Milley became concerned that Trump might be preparing to stage a coup and held informal discussions with his deputies about possible ways to defeat any such attempt. In his farewell ceremony as chair of the joint chiefs of staff in 2023, he noted that the military took an oath to the Constitution, not a “wannabe dictator”, apparently referring to Trump. And in October 2024 he said Trump was a “total fascist” who had to be stopped.
Trump and his sidekick Musk are not averse to referencing the Nazis, either. Musk has retweeted a claim that “Hitler didn’t murder millions… public sector workers did” before appearing to delete it. Trump is reported to have claimed that Hitler “did some good things”.
Historians of Nazi Germany have been cautious about drawing parallels. Peter Hayes, for instance, a respected author of studies of German industry and the Nazis as well as books on the Holocaust, finds some such parallels “exaggerated”, while Christopher Browning, a leading authority on the origins of the Holocaust, contrasts Hitler’s focus on the concept of racial struggle with Trump’s narcissistic drive for praise and personal advantage. Hayes points to Hitler’s obsession with the Jews as a supposed fundamental threat to civilisation, but Trump’s focus on the “enemies within” is far broader. Browning points to Trump’s “much more personalised rule, based above all on gratifying his insatiable need for praise, a sense of unfettered power, on having all his loyal followers defer to his endless litany of lies substituting ‘Trump truth’ for reality”.
Just as Congress has been sidelined, so the Reichstag ceased to function in the last years of the Weimar Republic
There seems to be general agreement that Trump poses a threat to American democracy, just as Hitler did to German democracy. Yet there are differences too. The rise of Nazism to political dominance in Germany was astonishingly rapid. In the national election of 1928, the Nazi party won less than 3 per cent of the vote. By 1932 it had become the largest party in the legislature. Trump’s Republicans have, of course, a far longer record of success. Moreover, while the Nazis never won more than 37 per cent of the vote in a free election, in 2024 Trump won very nearly half of all votes cast. This has made his dismantling and circumvention of the Constitution a relatively easy task, in the absence of a united and determined Democratic opposition.
Just as Congress has effectively been sidelined, so the German national legislature, the Reichstag, ceased to function in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Sessions of the legislature simply became shouting matches between serried ranks of uniformed Communist and Nazi deputies. Debate became impossible. In 1932 the Reichstag met for only a few days, each time breaking up in disorder. The parties were unable to form a government based on popular support because they could not agree on how to deal with the deep economic depression in which more than a third of the German workforce had lost their jobs.
In this situation of political paralysis, the German president’s extensive powers of rule by decree in time of emergency came into play. Paul von Hindenburg, an elderly retired field marshal of the old Imperial regime, wielded them to make ministerial appointments and force through economic austerity measures. To give these the appearance of legitimacy, as recommended by his advisers, he appointed Hitler, leader of the largest political party, as chancellor at the head of a coalition government on 30th January 1933.
But democracy was already effectively dead by this time. It proved relatively easy for Hitler to get Hindenburg to issue a decree suspending civil liberties after the Reichstag building was burned down by a lone Dutch anarchist protester on the night of 27th February 1933, then, in a meeting of the Reichstag on 23rd March, to bully the remaining parties, apart from the centre-left Social Democrats, into approving the transfer of power to Hitler and the cabinet alone. The Communist party was banned from attending, without any legal justification. In force only since 1919, the Weimar Constitution was widely unpopular, particularly with the millions of Germans who looked back nostalgically to the authoritarian rule of Bismarck and the Kaiser. The roots of democratic political culture in Germany were shallow, in contrast to the situation in present-day America, where they are deep and enjoy strong popular support.
Underpinning Hitler’s destruction of democracy was a wave of unbridled mass violence by his uniformed and jackbooted stormtroopers, which was far more widespread and extreme than anything Trump has been able to unleash. Hitler’s stormtroopers arrested and imprisoned 100,000 of his opponents, mostly on the left, in makeshift concentration camps in the first six months of his rule, releasing them only if they promised to stay out of politics. A mass purge of leftists, liberals and Jews from the civil service, enforced by a decree passed on 7th April 1933, ensured the loyalty of the administration. Threats of violence combined with bogus promises of immunity pressured the remaining independent political parties to shut down.
By July 1933, Germany was a one-party state. From this point on, the electorate had no choice but to vote for Nazi candidates and proposals. The law proved completely unable to stop any of this. Hitler simply used his power of rule by decree to quash prosecutions brought by concerned legal authorities against the stormtrooper thugs who had illegally arrested and imprisoned his opponents. In any case, most lawyers, prosecutors and judges active in 1933 had been trained and qualified under the Kaiser and, like him, regarded socialists and democrats as little better than traitors.
The army proved a more difficult nut to crack, but the generals, too, had spent most of their careers under the Kaiser and were won over by Hitler’s promises of rearmament, expansion and a new European war to reverse the result of the first one. However, despite the retirement of older, conservative officers and the promotion of younger, Nazi ones, Hitler never entirely won over the generals to his way of thinking. Alarmed by the pace of his drive to war, some of them hatched a plan to arrest him in 1938 and only gave up when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain stopped Hitler in his tracks with the Munich agreement of 30th September 1938. And in 1944 there were still a good number of army officers left with consciences independent enough to try to assassinate the Nazi leader in the Bomb Plot of 20th July. Trump’s claim that the generals all supported Hitler (“I need the kind of generals Hitler had,” he reportedly said) is a bogus one.
The Weimar press proved just as vulnerable to authoritarianism as the American media of the present day. Financial difficulties weakened its independence and falling circulation exposed democratic newspapers to hostile takeovers by the well-funded Nazi publishing house. With the establishment of the Nazi regime, censorship forced the shutdown or Nazification of oppositional newspapers, while the radio service was forced into propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s huge state media empire. Goebbels himself began to hold press briefings in which he laid down the law on what the papers were allowed to say, and what not. The weekly cinema newsreel became part of the Nazi propaganda apparatus.
Books critical of the Nazis and their ideas were publicly burned in the public squares of university towns. The gay rights campaigner Magnus Hirschfeld was forced into exile and his research institute trashed and torched. Germany’s prestigious universities were taken over by pro-Nazi managers and administrators, and Nazi pseudo-science, in the form of “racial hygiene”, eugenics and “German physics” (so-called because it rejected Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity as “Jewish”), were given generous funding.
By 1938, half of all the enrolments in German universities were to study medicine, while other subjects, notably the humanities, were marginalised. German science, which led the world before 1933, has never fully recovered from the experience. Radical or liberal professors were few and far between in any case—a strong contrast to American universities today—and there were few objections when the Nazis fired them. And the German student body was, from the First World War onwards, virulently hostile to the Weimar Republic, and welcomed the coming of the Third Reich. It was, after all, the students, not the Nazi regime, who organised the book burnings.
Hitler’s assault on liberal views extended not least to the idea of female equality. Unlike the assault on female rights launched by Trump, however, his policy towards women was driven not by religion but eugenics. Abortion was already criminalised by a law dating back to 1871, but the Nazis allowed it where the foetus was found to be “deformed”, and, especially during the war, where the mother was considered racially inferior.
There is a more obvious parallel in Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ+ rights—and transgender rights in particular
Feminist organisations were closed down, but women kept the vote they had won at the end of the First World War—though, like men, they were no longer able to cast it freely. Hitler considered their role was above all to have children for the Reich, so he instituted welfare measures to encourage them to leave paid jobs outside the home and set up financial and other inducements to have more children. The Nazi regime was uncompromisingly male supremacist. Women had no role in politics, Hitler believed, so there were no women in his administration (in contrast to Trump’s).
There is a more obvious parallel in Trump’s attacks on LGBTQ+ rights—and transgender rights in particular— foreshadowed by the Nazi treatment of homosexuals, who were consigned to concentration camps in their thousands, marked out with a pink triangle attached to their uniform and subjected to a degree of maltreatment and discrimination beyond that of any other categories of prisoner apart from, needless to say, Jews.
Of course, there are many differences between Germany in the 1930s and America today. Even in foreign policy, where in his second term Trump has declared his ambition of extending the territory of the US to include Greenland and even Canada, the contrast is obvious. What he wants is not what the Nazis called Lebensraum, “living space”, to which to transplant supposedly racially superior German settlers while murdering millions of their original inhabitants; Trump seeks access to economic resources, not to feed the American population, but to line the pockets of American businessmen.
And while Trump, like his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, is claiming territory in what he thinks of as his own backyard, Hitler’s declared intention was to achieve what he called “world domination” in 1930, through war without limits of time and space, waged to keep the German population tough and battle-hardened. Hitler’s militarism, his drive to put all Germans into uniform and discipline them in labour and training camps, is a world away from Trump’s encouragement of the ill-disciplined and chaotic militias who stormed the Capitol in 2021. And while Hitler boosted the size and power of the state, creating huge new organisations with massive powers and prerogatives, Trump, aided by Musk, seems determined to shrink the state, reducing its powers in most areas and firing tens of thousands of its employees.
Goebbels seems to have known that he was lying. Trump doesn’t understand the difference between truth and fiction
The world we live in today is different in many respects from the world of the 1930s, and drawing historical parallels is fraught with difficulties. One major difference, says Anne Berg, a historian who has written extensively on the Nazi regime, lies in the fact that “Nazi Germany didn’t change the nature of information. What is happening now,” she says, “is much more insidious and much more consequential, globally. We are living in a post-truth environment” in which “Trump’s attack on the media is actually an attack on truth, fact and objectivity itself”.
As the Nazi’s chief propagandist, Goebbels lied and lied, but he seems to have known that he was lying, while Trump doesn’t appear to understand the difference between truth and fiction. But believing his lies—or at least seeming to—has become a central criterion for showing loyalty to him. As the saying goes, history rarely repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.
Democracy is a fragile plant, all too easily uprooted and cast onto the bonfire of history, and the lessons to be drawn from the precedent of the fall of the Weimar Republic and the creation of the Nazi dictatorship are not encouraging.
Nevertheless, despite Trump’s assault, democracy in the US is not dead yet. While almost all German lawyers in the early 1930s were hostile to the Weimar Republic, the great majority of American lawyers today, despite Trump’s appointments, are loyal to the Constitution and prepared to defend it. Similarly, while the German army loathed the Weimar Republic and cheered on Hitler’s promise of rearmament and expansion after the massive restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, the US military has prospered since the end of the Second World War and remains loyal to the supreme law of the country. The Democratic party still has the support of almost half the electorate, and it is not impossible that it could rally more before the next election.
Hitler’s massive rearmament programme soon began to generate economic recovery in Germany, while Trump’s trade wars are already depressing living standards in the US. Levels of repression in the Third Reich were extreme, with concentration camps set up for Hitler’s opponents, and the justice system co-opted into the service of the Nazis with a raft of draconian new treason laws, sweeping aside legal obstacles to unbridled dictatorial rule in a way that still, for now, seems impossible in America. The first amendment still guarantees freedom of expression, and the courts are still vigorously opposing many aspects of Trump’s radical agenda.
It will be a long haul to the next presidential election in 2028, but if enough Americans fight to preserve their basic rights, democracy may yet survive.
