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.
