Hey News Media. Trump’s Been Quoting Hitler All Along

To hear the news media, Donald Trump—the twice impeached, four-time criminally indicted former United States president—crossed some imaginary line when, in a Veterans’ Day speech this year, he called those he considered his enemies “vermin.” This, the pundits are saying, is an insult too far, verbiage akin to the hateful rhetoric of Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler.

What the press doesn’t seem to understand is Trump has been mimicking Hitler’s rhetoric from the minute he rode down his golden escalator with his trollop of a wife at his side to announce his run for the presidency back in June 2015.

Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, came straight from Hitler’s mouth—literally—when the Nazi leader promised he would “make Germany great again.” And Trump’s promise to put “America First,” comes from the pro-Nazi “America First” movement of the late-1930s and early-1940s orchestrated chiefly by Nazi propagandist and secret agent George Sylvester Viereck, who also co-opted some two dozen conservative members of Congress into becoming unwitting agents-of-influence for the Germans.

“Losers” and “Suckers”

In his Veterans’ Day speech, the six-deferment Vietnam War draft dodger—who considers everyone who served in the military “losers” and “suckers”—called those he perceived as his enemies—Democrats, the media, and the FBI—as “vermin” who posed a greater threat to the United States than the authoritarian regimes like Russia, China or North Korea that he so admirers.  "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” he vowed.

Such words, the media shrieked, echo the hateful rhetoric of the Fuhrer, who often referred to Jews, homosexuals, Slavs, gypsies and many others as “vermin” who needed to be eradicated. But it wasn’t the first time he mimicked Hitler. In his announcement speech in Trump Tower, Trump promised to build a great wall to keep out immigrants from Mexico who, in his words, were “animals … bringing drugs, bringing crime, bringing rapists.”

In a May 2018 White House roundtable discussion, Trump said of immigrants: “These aren’t people. These are animals.” The following month he equated migrants and refugees coming to the U.S. with vermin who would “pour into and infest our country.” In a video interview this October, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

In his book, Mien Kampf, Hitler described Jews—his favorite target of hate—as “bacillus,” “bloodsuckers,” “parasites,” and “vampires.” He considered Slavs such as Poles and Russians as “subhumans,” “barbarians,” and “vermin” needing extermination. He also decried the “blood poisoning” of the German people by the mixing of races and wrote how “the influx of foreign blood” was “the poison which has invaded the national body,” leading to the decline of Germany.

The Lying Press

Immigration isn’t the only topic Trump has turned Hitler’s vindictive against. Trump has used the tyrant’s words as his own when describing the news media. Hitler often referred to the press as the Lügenpresse, which is German for “lying press,” and accused it of being controlled by “Jews and Communists.”

Both during his Veterans Day rant and before, Trump called the American media “the lying press” and, in his November 11 speech accused them of being controlled by “Jews and communists.” Prior to this, Trump had his own way of paraphrasing Hitler’s attitude to the press, referring to them as “fake news” more than two thousand times during his presidency.

Hitler held democracy in contempt, blaming Germany’s parliamentary government for many of the nation’s ills and equating it with internationalism, weakness, and corruption. He also opposed the democratic principles of human rights, equality, and freedom of speech and press.

While Hitler never used Trump’s favorite term “Deep State”—the idea there is a hidden network of powerful and influential individuals and groups within the government­—the Fuhrer did express accusations about the existence of a hidden enemy within Germany and the world that was working against his interests and goals.

Since he entered the White House, Trump too has waged a war against democracy. He repeatedly questions the legitimacy of democratic institutions such as the free press, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy (i.e., the “Deep State”), the validity of elections, and the legitimacy of democratic contests. He has repeatedly exclaimed his admiration for dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korean’s Kim Jong Un and their authoritarian regimes, while deriding democratically elected leaders in the U.S. and Europe as weak.

The Big Lie

Finally, Trump’s attempt to overthrow the results of the last presidential election­—first by trying to co-opt members of the House and state legislators, then by stirring up the January 6 insurrection, and by repeating the “Big Lie” that he actually won that election—are all straight out of the Nazi playbook for overthrowing democracies. In May 2021, Trump said “the Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!” adding that “anyone who doesn’t say that the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged and stolen is either uninformed, naïve, or very stupid.”

Some 50 court cases—many presided over by Trump-appointed judges—ruled the 2020 election was fair and that Trump lost. Still, to this day he repeats this lie, again following Hitler’s rule book.

It was, after all, Hitler who first dreamed up the concept of the “Big Lie.” Hitler said “it is not truth that matters, but victory,” adding “by means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.”

I was a hard news journalist for more than 20 years. I understand the need for the media to remain balanced and not toss accusations around wily-nilly. But there is a time when you need to take the duck test: "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” If the man thinks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, and goosesteps like a Nazi, he’s probably a Nazi.

Anti-vaxxers and the GOP Steal a Page from Hitler's Playbook

The most prevalent rhetoric of the Covid anti-vaxxers is that government requirement vaccine mandates are fascist. In fact, allusions to Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust are rampant in their rhetoric. What these protestors don’t understand is that the GOP’s extremists like Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida, as well as the screwball crew at Fox News, are taking a page straight out Hitler’s playbook.

How?

Because the Nazis were anti-vaxxers, too.

Before the Little Corporal became Der Fuhrer, Germany had a long history of compulsory vaccination. In 1847, after a smallpox epidemic killed tens of thousands of Germans in Prussia, the government ordered all newborns and military recruits vaccinated against the scourge as well as other diseases.

The German vaccination programs were quite successful. But in the waning years of the democratic Weimar Republic, an antivaccination movement took root. Called the Lebensreform, or Life Reform Movement, it advocated replacing vaccines with healthier lifestyles such as getting more sun and eating special diets.

The Life Reform Movement was also anti-Semitic. According to its adherents, vaccines were part of a global Jewish conspiracy to harm the German people. This isn’t too far from today’s antivaxxers who claim the Covid vaccines are unsafe (instead, they advocate taking a horse dewormer or drinking bleach) or that the vaccines inject tracking devices into our bodies (while they all carry cell phones by which they actually can be tracked).

Fearing protests, the Weimar government loosened its vaccine policies. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, they did not issue mandates for vaccination and what mandates were still in effect were largely ignored. In fact, like today’s GOP, they went out of their way to appease the Life Reformers. In 1935, Hitler’s Reich interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, said, “the popular character of the health laws, which must appear to be absolutely desirable in the National Socialist state, is better served if unnecessary restlessness is avoided in the implementation of the laws in the population.”

In other words, don’t rock the boat. German vaccination requirements under the Nazis became voluntary.

The Nazis’ nonchalance toward vaccination wasn’t just politically convenient. It had a more sinister side. Hitler and his cronies knew that the Germans they considered less desirable—Jews, gypsies, the mentally and physically handicapped—were also less likely to get vaccinated and, therefore, more likely to die. As the black shadow of Nazism spread across Europe and Russia, the party’s antivaccine policies became an even bigger genocidal weapon.

 According to Hitler’s Table Talk, a compilation of Der Fuhrer’s droning monologues, this was the Nazi leader’s ideas on vaccines and public health in the occupied countries: “Their conditions of life will inevitably improve under our jurisdiction, and we must take all the measures necessary to ensure that the non-German population does not increase at an excessive rate. In these circumstances, it would be sheer folly to place at their disposal a health service such as we know it in Germany; and so—no inoculations and other preventative measures for the Natives! We must even try to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous!” (Emphasis added.)

Is this so different from the sentiments of the far-right extremists of the GOP or the anti-vax “reporting” of Fox News? They know the Covid vaccines aren’t dangerous. Most of them­—hell, probably all of them—are vaccinated. We know the talking head yo-yos at Fox News are vaccinated—it’s a company mandate. They also know Covid is dangerous; at this writing, at least seven anti-vax and anti-mask conservative activists have died from Covid and its complications.

So why all the antivaccination rhetoric?

Could the GOP extremists be taking a page out of the Nazis’ antivaccine playbook? They know Covid deaths are highest among those they don’t consider desirable voters—the poor, people of color, the elderly—people who don’t normally vote Republican. Have the Republicans become so power hungry they are willing to sacrifice their own voters—who are, in fact, dying in droves from Covid—in order to “cleanse” the nation of those they don’t want to cast votes by trying to, in Hitler’s own words, “to stifle any desire for such things by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous!”?

Just asking.

Escape from the Graveyard of Empires

Watching the hurried evacuation of American citizens, troops, and Afghani allies from the Kabul airport in August might seem to be an embarrassing defeat for the U.S. and the Biden administration. However, considering that the “former guy” had nearly a year to begin the withdrawal and did little, America’s exit from Afghanistan is nearly as remarkable as WWII’s Miracle at Dunkirk.

It’s all the more remarkable considering the long saga of failed ventures to occupy Afghanistan by some of the most powerful empires in history, from the Persians to the Mongols. After initial successes, these empires ultimately met with failure if not outright defeat. Even Alexander the Great’s unmatched record of conquering countries met its end in this country that is often called The Graveyard of Empires.

What we today call Afghanistan was Alexander the Great’s last stop on his rampage to conquer much of the known world. After defeating the Persians in Afghanistan, Alexander tried to push on to what is now called Pakistan (then the northern portion of India). Alexander left a good portion of his army lying dead in the Kindu Kush mountains. While trying to tame Afghanistan, Alexander began a physical and mental deterioration that led to a rebellion among his forces, forcing him to pull back to Babylon. He died not long after.

Britain's First Retreat

Britain fought two wars in Afghanistan in the 1800s; both failed to gain control over the region. (A Third Anglo-Afghan War was fought in 1919, but most of the fighting took place in neighboring India.) The First Anglo-Afghan War led to one of Britain’s worst military defeats.

Remnants of an Army by Elizabeth Butler shows the only British solider to

survive Britain's 1842 retreat from Kabul.

After occupying Kabul for three years, British forces were forced to evacuate the city in 1842. More than 16,000 troops and camp followers marched out of Kabul and into the Khyber Pass, a mountainous route through the Kindu Kush that links Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like Alexander before them, the British littered the mountain range with the bodies of their people. Out of the 16,000 troops and camp followers, only one British officer made it out the other end of the pass.

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 intending to prop up a pro-Russian government in Kabul. The ten-year Soviet-Afghan War was not only unpopular in the USSR (it was referred to as Russia’s Vietnam), it was also extremely costly in both blood and national treasure. When Soviet leadership was taken over by moderates like Mikhail Gorbachev, the decision was made pull their troops out.

The End of the USSR

The Soviet pull-out was not as disorderly as Britain’s 1842 withdrawal. The USSR allowed itself nearly a year to slowly evacuate Afghanistan, beginning the withdrawal in May 1988 and completing it in February 1989. While orderly, it wasn’t without problems. At one point, Soviet troops had to fight their way past a recalcitrant Afghan warlord and his fighters.

While the Soviet withdrawal was ultimately successful, the die was cast for the fate of the USSR. In December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

In nearly each case, the cause of the occupation’s failure lay in the fact that Afghanistan was never really a country to begin with. The region has always been a hodgepodge of tribal factions led by warlords who form and destroy alliances based on who they saw as common enemies. There was no sense of nationality or common interest. Even when the Taliban “ruled” Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal, they still had to deal with dozens of individual warlords who refused to bend fully to their reign.

Trump's Failure

Donald Trump signed a withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in February 2020 after months of “negotiation” in which he handed them everything they asked for. There can be no doubt Trump’s military advisors, pointing to the Soviet example, told him the withdrawal would take as long as a year to accomplish properly. While troops began withdrawing in mid-2020, Trump never ordered the evacuation of nonessential personnel like the families of embassy staff, contractors, and Afghani allies, which should have been the first step.

In fact, Trump policies that made it harder to organize the evacuations. For instance, his immigration policies made it nearly impossible to issue Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) to Afghani who worked for the U.S. and NATO during our 20-year war there, leaving a backlog of more than 17,000 SIV applications when President Joe Biden took over. In fact, Trump refused to even brief Biden and his transition team on the situation in Afghanistan, leaving the new president in the blind until he took office.

That Trump did little to accomplish the withdrawal from Afghanistan for nearly a year—despite the fact he said he want to be out of the country by May of this year—forced Biden into a quick and hasty withdrawal process. The massive C-17 air transports flying out of Kabul this August did not carry military personnel, they carried those people who should have left Afghanistan last year.

Considering how little had been done by Donald Trump after signing the withdrawal agreement, what we watched happening at the Kabul airport was nothing less than a miracle in military logistics and a sign that for the first time in four years, we have real leadership in the White House.