(Dobbs) Hitler Couldn't Have Said It Better
"With ‘Vermin,’ Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk.”
“We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
It doesn’t take much imagination to conclude, those words came from the murderous mind of Adolf Hitler.
They’re close enough to what he said in Mein Kamph, his blood-chilling blueprint for Nazi Germany, written in the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War One: “It ought to have been the duty of any government… to take this opportunity of mercilessly rooting out everything that was opposed to the national spirit.” Hitler also wrote, “While the flower of the nation’s manhood was dying at the front, there was time enough at home at least to exterminate this vermin.”
But the first quote about rooting out “Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin” isn’t Hitler’s, it’s Trump’s. Donald Trump’s.
The frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination for president.
Since Trump first set foot on the political stage, I have been loathe to join others who compare him to Hitler. It trivializes the horrors and diminishes the deaths from Hitler’s Third Reich. On his worst day, I don’t think Donald Trump envisions death camps for those he sees as adversaries and inferiors. But he is adopting a rhetorical playbook right off the pages of Mein Kamph. The headline this week in The New Republic summed it up: "It’s Official: With ‘Vermin,’ Trump Is Now Using Straight-up Nazi Talk.”
Characterizing people as “vermin”— as he did at the New Hampshire rally on Veterans Day, and as he also did on his Truth Social website— probably was no accident. As New Republic editor Michael Tomasky wrote the day after, “It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only.” It is the context Hitler used to dehumanize the human beings he intended to exterminate. In his wicked world, it was a common theme.
And it’s conceivable that other parallels between Hitler’s speech and Trump’s are no accident either. In Mein Kamph, Hitler wrote, “All the great civilizations of the past became decadent… as a result of contamination of the blood.”
Here’s Donald Trump, almost a hundred years later, speaking with the right-wing website The National Pulse about illegal immigrants: “It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”
I don’t think Trump envisions death camps, but we have seen reports about what he does envision. Detention camps for illegal immigrants. Shoplifters shot on sight. Firing federal workers— “rogue bureaucrats” he calls them— who he deems disloyal. He said in a video that they “will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies.” He implied this year that the nation’s top military officer should be executed for treason. And he is preparing for an unprecedented and unprincipled system of justice, telling an interviewer last week on Univision, “If I happen to be president and I see somebody who's doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them. Mostly what that would be, you know, they would be out of business. They'd be out of the election.”
He also seems to feel more kinship with dictatorships than with democracies. On China’s leader: “President Xi is from central casting… the look, the strength, the voice.” On North Korea’s Kim Jong Un: “He’s a tough smart guy.” On Vladimir Putin: “I got along with Putin. Let me tell you, I got along with him really well.”
When you throw in other pronouncements from the mouth of the ex-president— like when he said at his first campaign event this year, “I am your retribution,” and he would use the Justice Department to exact it— it is fascism hiding in plain sight. “The threat from outside forces,” Trump told that Veterans Day rally, “is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.”
That could have been drawn from an infamous speech in 1950 by Senator Joe McCarthy, who created a “red scare” by issuing reckless and baseless accusations against prominent liberal Americans, crushing their careers. “When a great democracy is destroyed,” McCarthy claimed, “it will not be because of enemies from without but rather because of enemies from within.” Here’s the connection: McCarthy’s merciless attorney and abetter Roy Cohn went on to mentor Donald Trump.
But Trump’s “threat from within” also might be another unnerving echo of Adolf Hitler who wrote, “Never in our history have we been conquered by the strength of our outside enemies but only through our own failings and the enemy in our own camp.”
Maybe all this should come as no surprise. Back in 1990, Vanity Fair ran a feature about Trump’s first wife, Ivana, and reported, “Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler's collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.” My New Order was Hitler’s followup to Mein Kamph.
Of course Trump’s people call any comparisons with Hitler’s hateful rhetoric “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And yet as they try to disprove the point, they actually prove it even more. Responding to critics who say Trump echoes the language of Adolf Hitler, his spokesman Steven Cheung warned, “Their sad, miserable existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
Hitler couldn’t have said it better.
We have enough protections in our system that even if, unthinkably, Donald Trump wins back the White House, he is not likely to achieve the worst of his Machiavellian ambitions. But it will be perilous and painful if he’s even given the chance to try.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
This is absolutely right on the mark Greg, and needs to be taken seriously!
Thanks Greg. Trump is clearly an authoritarian with a god complex who intends to take down the institutions of government to serve his malignant personality. But the amazing thing about him is his followers and the huge numbers of them. Many wrap themselves in the American flag and the church and warn that civil war is coming for those who don't fully support this sick man. By his definition I am one of his 'vermin'.