Resolved: Someone inside the uppermost circle of Trumpism is a pro-Hitler scholar of Nazi Germany.
The proposition is put forward as an objective reality. Whether it's a recrimination as well — a statement of j'accuse! — is a matter of interpretation to be left to the reader. Here the proposition is meant only as a dispassionate, verifiable fact.
Donald Trump is no reader, let alone an attentive student of fascist history. Yet his political pattern since January's reboot has mirrored Adolf Hitler's with a ferocity too uncannily precise to have been accidental or mere happenstance — that being the free, democratic Weimar Republic's transformation into the authoritarian state of the Third Reich, and where a leadership cult was central to its success.
Gven his erractic, undisciplined mind, it is inconceivable that Trump could have pulled off America's Hitleresque disfigurement — representative democracy horribly mangled into autocratic tyranny — through his own intellectual abilities. Surely his blitzkrieging politics received the helpful intervention of powerfully influential voices, his own Görings and Goebbels.
This is not to suggest that Trump is the puppet of some éminence grise, merely a demagogically talented tool exploited by a Miller or Bannon. Neither is the resolution above a pretense of original thought. The observation that history-makers are tethered to the aid and advice of others is as ordinary as biographers noting the birthplace of their human subjects. On the other hand, what's gone unobserved (as far as I know) is that Trump is given too much credit, pro or con, for being a man of his own mind — a kind of Tom Edison of politics, uniquely, even ingeniously innovative in his strategies and tactics.
His latest innovation? Assaulting the reputations and good character of federal judges has become rather monotonous for Trump; besides, judges are a symptom, not a cause, of what ails and annoys him. By the time one of his many crimes or general criminal activity lands on a magistrate's docket, the legal question of What is to be done? has already been asked. But in a genuine Eureka Moment of fresh, enjoyable corruption, there recently sparked in Trumpland the idea of expunging by diktat the human source of his troubles: the prosecutors who brought them before judges.
Such an angle on further undermining the rule of law was doubtless a new one to Trump, but not so to the person in his uppermost circle who had made a study of American law and the Austrian predecessor's fascistically destructive model.
In another executive order of personal vengeance and much more, Trump has again struck at the nation's system of justice by aiming his petty wrath at the D.C. law firm of Jenner & Block, once the professional home of Trump-Russia prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, whose brilliance I wrote about earlier this week. The pernicious E.O. claims the firm "has abandoned the profession’s highest ideals," hence "its employees should not have security clearances, federal government contracts, access to federal government buildings or be hired by the government."
Reading the order so early in the morning made me want to take a second shower. The filth and foulness of Trumpism's authoritarian bullying infiltrates every minute of every American day as the stench spreads miasmically across borders and converts into overt betrayal of Western ideals, ethics and civilized common law.
[Pardon me for a moment — this is important. It has been a while since I asked for your financial support. I eased off because there were too many interruptions in daily writings, largely because of time consumed in getting my Anas Platyrhynchoses in a row for an interstate move. But that's done and I'm back. Though my posting was interrupted, this site and my life's financial obligations were not; whether writing full- or part-time makes no difference, I have discovered, in overhead — which has put me underwater. In brief, PMC Commentary could sure use your help. Just scroll to the bottom of this page to make your donation. I thank you in advance, —PM]
Reinforcing this post's opening proposition of Trumpism's Hitlerian legal heritage as objecive reality, the Times reports that "current and former law enforcement officials say ... that what the president and his senior aides are doing is stripping away the ability of institutions like the F.B.I. and Justice Department to pursue such cases again." In the words of President Eisenhower: "The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law."
It was a 2013 publication I dug up this morning after reading the Times piece that captured Ike's passage, an article with the lengthy title of "Lawyers and Bar Associations Play a Vital Role in Preserving the Rule of Law: A Study of How Hitler Perverted Germany’s Judicial System Highlights the Importance of Lawyers." The article is of more than historical interest:
In March of 1933, just two months after he became chancellor, Hitler and his cronies began issuing decrees barring Jewish lawyers and judges from German courts. Consequently, the legal experts who were most likely to protect the Jewish citizens against property seizures and involuntary transfers of their businesses to Aryans were unable to do so. This move went unchecked and paved the way toward a methodical erosion of the rights of Jews and other citizens who did not meet the Nazi definition of Aryan. The incursions into human rights ultimately affected all persons under Nazi rule. (Italics mine).
Hitler entertained himself by issuing the Nazi version of White House executive orders, one of which dictated that no German court could judicially review any action taken by, as one of his fascist sucessors put it only last month, "He who saves his Country." In short, Hitler understood that not only judges but lawyers of a prosecutorial bent were "potential impediments to his quest for unfettered power."
One other article I ran across in my search for Hitlerian histories of Trump's kneecapping-prosecutors tactic is a 2020 journal article authored by professor of law Cynthia Fountaine, "Complicity in the Perversion of Justice: The Role of Lawyers in Eroding the Rule of Law in the Third Reich." Its thrust is handily compressed in an abstract, which I'll compress just a wee bit more:
This Article considers the failings of the legal profession in living up to [lawyers and judges' responsibility for protecting the rule of law] during Germany’s Third Reich. The incremental steps used by the Nazis to gain control of the German legal system ... turned the legal system on its head and destroyed the Rule of Law. By failing to uphold the integrity and independence of the profession, lawyers and judges permitted and ultimately collaborated in the subversion of the basic lawyer–client relationship, the abrogation of the lawyer’s role as advocate, and the elimination of judicial independence. As a result, while there was an elaborate facade of laws, the fundamental features of the Rule of Law no longer existed and in their place had grown an arbitrary and chaotic system leaving people without any protection from a violent, totalitarian government.
Fountaine concludes by noting that "the failing of the legal profession began with a willing ignorance on the part of the legal profession of the evil being promulgated by the Nazi Party." It's true that Hitler's calamitous 1923 putsch led him to reject revolutionary action as the means to gain power. He instead began concealing Naziism's more demonic depths so as to gain the public's democratic imprimatur. This, Trump never did. He hid nothing. He brayed his forthcoming authoritarian brutalities like the jackass he is, and if any attorneys somehow missed the gist of it all, even a C- lawyer would remind them that ignorance of politics is no excuse.
After reading the dovetailing contours of Trump and Hitler's contemptible yet intellectually sound approach to subverting the rule of law and repressing lawyers who might otherwise use it against them, is it believable that Donald Trump personally formlated his politico-legal battle plan as Adolf Hitler was far more likely to have done?
I've always thought that there is a dark force guiding dear leader's actions. I do not believe he nor his degenerate cabinet members are intelligent enough to devise this destruction of America that we are experiencing. Are the perpetrators of Project 2025 sufficiently deviant in wanting to make America all white and Christian that they are willing to destroy it in nazi-fashion to accomplish their goal?
Is Trump capable of forming any plan on his own? I know that he knows how to attract the biggest scumbags to do the work for him.