Sarah Jewett suggests lessons from history show us that rhetorical alarm bells should be taken seriously.
The saying goes “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” but what of those who learn the history with the intent of repeating it? In the past decade since Donald J. Trump’s dramatic entrance into U.S. politics, whispers of Hitler have followed in his wake. Now the deceased dictator seems to be joining Trump in the same spotlight amid revelations by John Kelly that made headlines two weeks shy of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. Trump reportedly told then Chief of Staff Kelly that he wished he was more like Hitler’s loyal Generals and that Hitler had done some “good things.”
But to what “good” things could Trump possibly be referring? Hitler’s rule over Germany is defined by the Holocaust, and whether Trump has the capacity to replicate that specific and horrifying aspect of Hitler’s rule is, at this point, irrelevant. While I’m not suggesting that Trump will be the next Hitler if re-elected, I’m saying it appears that he wants to be the next Hitler. But does this distinction even matter at this point? We can no longer shy away from exploring the parallels between Trump and Hitler vis-a-vis the Holocaust.
The functionalism and intentionalism debate on the start of the Final Solution facilitates exploration of how any admiration of Hitler is incredibly dangerous in a president, as it ultimately comes down to intent and implementation. This debate essentially argues that the orders for the Final Solution either came from the bottom up (functionalism) or the top down (intentionalism).
Intentionalists view the Final Solution as Hitler’s brainchild and part of a long standing plan to eliminate the Jews, possibly going as far back as the 1920’s. Gerald Fleming, a notable intentionalist, traced what he points as the origins of the Final Solution via Josef Hell in 1922. Hell asked Hitler his intentions with Jews upon achieving full “discretionary powers,” to which he replied ”[o]nce I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.”
Functionalists, however, emphasize the need to look beyond Hitler alone in an escalation of Jewish and minority persecution into genocide. His disorganised and mishandled leadership — not unlike Trump’s first presidential term — led to chaos, and so varying ranks of individuals were in positions to move along the Final Solution, motivated by their own desire to impress the Fuhrer and/or their own murderous antisemitism. Where this applies to the upcoming election is best considered with this quote from Donald Bloxham, in which one can swap out Hitler for Trump: “The question is never about Hitler’s extremism, however, it is about the alignment of the people and organizations that would give shape and substance to his violent fantasies, and about the course of events that opened new vistas of possibility.”
Trump’s first term struggled with implementation of his mal-intent, such as with his rejected suggestion to shoot protestors, leading some to believe that a second-term would see the same safeguards as before. But this sort of thinking seems reliant on the mentality that comes before many other tragedies: it can’t happen here. Perhaps not easily, but it is trying to happen here. Trump is becoming bolder in declaring his intent and expressing his own violent fantasies. While some might dismiss these expressions due to his age and possible dementia, implementation, as with Hitler, will rely on those people and organizations who ideologically align themselves with Trump’s cult of personality.
Ultimately, Trump is telling us who he is and so are those who are backing him, including the world’s richest man, and it is vital we believe them. Attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 are dubious. Even while increasing numbers of Trump’s former staff oppose his return to the Oval Office, we cannot trust that his second administration will feel the same way. So, when Trump announces his desire to imprison his political opponents, I recall how Hitler first established Concentration Camps shortly after his appointment as Chancellor — for imprisoning political opponents, not Jews (yet).
When Trump claims he wants to toy with American citizenship, I think of the Nuremberg Race Laws, which robbed Jewish, Romani, and Black Germans of their citizenship in 1935 — eight years before the start of the Holocaust. Trump recently mused about reinstating The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in order to deport millions of immigrants, and so I recall the Evian Conference of 1938, where Hitler knowingly placed the onus on the rest of the world to take Germany’s persecuted Jews. And when this political theater failed, most of these Jews would be murdered — nearly 2.7 million Jews in death camps alone. So, as a political scientist and scholar of the Holocaust, I must ask: How will Trump react if — like Germany’s Jews — America’s immigrants have nowhere to go, but they must somehow disappear?
And truly, what hope do the people living in America have when Trump suggests his own nephew’s disabled child should die when asked to financially support him? If this staggering lack of empathy and humanity is expressed towards Trump’s own family, what of the desperately needed government funding for those Americans who are similarly disabled? Or will he suggest they die too? I offer here yet another chilling parallel to Hitler’s regime: Aktion T4, the involuntary euthanasia program responsible for killing 250,000 disabled or ill Germans, an estimated 10,000 of whom were children.
Whether you view Trump through an intentionalist lens — believing he is orchestrating a master plan — or through a functionalist lens — expecting that any dangerous intentions will be driven by subordinates — it is clear that a second Trump presidency would likely look nothing like the first, posing profound challenges to the very democracy on which the United States was founded. The alarm must be rung, even if it sounds alarmist.
Note: this article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the LSE Department of Government, nor of the London School of Economics.
