The second sentence of this post may be internally inconsistent. A couple of things are clear, I think.

One is that American Nazis and Nazi sympathizers tend to support Donald Trump and MAGA. Another is that Hitler had and Trump has totalitarian tendencies, and that totalitarian tendencies are totalitarian tendencies.

Yet, if anyone dares to say anything that shows any similarities between Germany in the 1930s and the United States in the 2020s, people want to chop their heads off. But many who were alive in Germany during the 1930s (and obviously, the word “many” refers to a proportion of a smaller number every day) do remark on the similarities. How can that be?

Before I go further, let me add one more thing that is perfectly clear, I think. and that is that Germany in 1933 and the United States in 2025 are very, very different. Hard stop here.

Okay, now let’s proceed. What are the similarities?

We can start with an obvious one. America First and Deutschland Uber Alles are very similar, at least on the surface. Can anyone disagree with that?

Both Trump and Hitler do not like opposition and do their best to demean or restrain those who publicly oppose them. I think this is pretty clear, too.

Both Trump and Hitler are master orators in that they are able to use their charisma to draw supporters to their side.

Neither Trump nor Hitler show any self-restraint in describing their opponents or those who they target, using types of descriptive language which, before their times, would not be used or allowed in public discourse (this trait becomes part of their attraction to their supporters).

In both countries, for some similar and some differing reasons, you had legislatures that gave full support to the government and permitted their own authority to be diminshed, and you had judicial systems which fell quickly into lockstep.

In both situations, the enemies were the liberals, the globalists and the communists. In both cases, tremendous pressure was put on newspapers and other media and certainly on educational institutions.

Both Trump and Hitler have expansionist tendencies. Hitler’s “Drang nach Osten”, over time, turned into a World War II, but it took time. Trump’s proposals, which will probably not result in World War III (but you never know, do you?), include the desire for the United States to take over Canada (a land, excluding Alaska, which is bigger than the United States) and Greenland (of course, Greenland and Canada together are bigger than the U.S. with Alaska) and the Panama Canal.

Hitler hated Jews. There is no reason to think that he didn’t hate Jews as Jews, but it is even more relevant to recent history that Hitler used hatred of Jews as a political ploy to get him into power. Jews, he said, were infiltrating Germany and controlling and changing German society. As historian Tim Snyder described it in Bloodlands, his first book about the Holocaust in Poland and the Baltics, Hitler viewed humanity as groups of ethnic peoples who were in constant conflict with each other looking for power and control, with some groups having superior characteristics giving them at least a leg up, all of this demonstrated by wars and shifting borders throughout history. The Jews, on the other hand, were a cosmopolitan group, with members here and members there. They didn’t fit into Hitler’s vision of human dynamics, but were constantly disrupting things, and therefore, one way or another, had to be eliminated.

There is obviously no reason to think that Trump shares Hitler’s feelings towards Jews. In fact, whether it is a matter of principle or one of expediency, or even if it is to make it difficult for others to compare him to Hitler, Trump has adopted a  public emphasis on fighting antisemitism everywhere he sees it, and even in some places where he doesn’t.

But Trump has his own target. Immigrants. And Trump’s policies regarding immigrants are closer to Hitler’s regarding Jews than you may think. Remember, the Hitler’s Final Solution didn’t start until 1942, nine years after he came to power, and that at first, his idea was simply to expel the Jews from lands under his control, using terror as a weapon. It took time for that program to be implemented, and when it was, it was kept secret.

I do not want to draw the analogy too tightly, and I am not trying to foretell the future. But in both cases, we had ruthless government troops whose sole job was to arrest members of the target group, to send them to detention centers (in Germany, they were often work camps), and to hold them indefinitely without any form of what we call due process. In both countries, the arrests were sudden, unwarned, and often violent. In both countries, there were detention facilities outside of the country to which prisoners were sent. In both countries, families were split. Jobs were lost. Services were denied.

If you study Germany, you will see that restrictions were increased gradually over a period of years until Kristallnacht in 1938, an expansionist war in 1939,and death camps in 1942. Hitler came to power in 1933 and at that time, although the targets were identified, there was no way to see what was coming down the road.

But now we have the history of the Holocaust to serve as a warning. And the fact that so many who lived through the 12 years of the Third Reich see so many similarities today should concern us all.

And as to antisemitism? While there is no hint that this will become government policy here, when you have a totalitarian government, things can change on a dime.

Could anything have been done in Germany to stop Hitler? This is probably a question with no answer, but one worth contemplating.