The USA 2025, Germany 1933

 The various appointments that Donald Trump has announced, led by those of Matt Gaetz and Pam Bondi, Kristin Noem, Tulsi Gabard, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suggest that he intends a real transformation of the federal bureaucracy and even of the function of the US government.  Given that I studied the structure of the Nazi government in graduate school and that it figured in my first book, Economic Diplomacy and the Origins of the Second World War, I am inevitably pondering the similarities and differences between what Trump is trying to do and what Hitler and the Nazis did after seizing power 91 years ago.  I have a superb book by an excellent German historian, Der Staat Hitlers by Martin Broszat, to help me, and after reviewing some key chapters I am sharing some observations here.

Leaving aside for the moment their very real differences in style, background, and objectives, Trump and Hitler have played similar political roles.  They are two political outsiders who each took advantage of a collapse in popular confidence in established leaders and institutions to defeat established political leaders in democratic elections.  In both cases, their nations immediately wondered, in 2017 and in 1933, exactly what they would do and how much they would change the personnel, structure and function of those institutions.  There is one huge difference between their situations, one largely owing to differences in the nature and structure of the societies and governments over which they took power.  The German state, led by the Prussian state that had dominated it since its formation under the German Empire in 1871, had a highly developed bureaucracy that dated back centuries.  Most of the US bureaucracy that Trump wants to bring  under control is relatively young.  The FBI is only slightly more than a century old, and the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff are not even 80.  Six of our cabinet departments date from the postwar era.  Germany in addition had far more organized political parties under the Weimar Republic than the US has today. Three of them--the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the Nazis themselves--had uniformed militias that had battled each other in the streets for several years before Hitler took power.  The Nazi militia, the SA, numbered about a million men.  The Republican Party does not have formal membership, much less a uniformed force.  And in another key difference, the German national legislature, the Reichstag, had already lost much of its power when Hitler came to power.  Successive governments had ruled largely by presidential decrees--which were legal under the Weimar Constitution--since 1930.  Nothing like that has ever happened in the United States.  On the other hand, with majorities in both houses of Congress, Trump begins his second term with much greater power under the existing system than Hitler enjoyed in January 1933, when he was merely the senior power in a coalition.  Trump has won a majority in a free election, which Hitler never did, and at this point he has already held power for four years.  That actually distinguishes 2025 here from 1933 there, as we shall see in a moment.

Trump when he first took power in 2017 tried to work within existing structures, and with pretty traditional personnel.  His leading cabinet officers came from the same kinds of backgrounds as his predecessors', including elected Republican leaders, captains of industry, and high-ranking serving or retired military officers.  It did not take him long to fire James Comey from the FBI, but he replaced him with Christopher Wray, a Justice Department veteran who has served until this day.  He was enraged when Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and the FBI would not simply do his bidding by dismissing complaints against him on the one hand and undertaking investigations of political opponents on the other.  He parted company with his secretaries of state and defense and his national security adviser pretty quickly but eventually found men he could work with for those positions.  He did not try to install his own people at the heads of the military services.  

Hitler, on the other hand, took less than two years to seize total political power and reduce the national legislature to a rubber-stamping body composed entirely of Nazi Party members.  He replaced elections with plebiscites, national up-or-down votes that approved some of his most important steps.  On the other hand, he was at first was even more wary than Trump in 2017 in his dealings with the prestigious existing bureaucracies.  Hitler's first cabinet contained just two other Nazis: Hermann Goering, serving without portfolio, and Wilhelm Frick, who took over the Ministry of Interior--the closest analogue to our Department of Justice and FBI.  (The separate German Ministry of Justice, I believe, was chiefly in charge of the courts.)  Hitler did create a new Ministry of Information and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels, but many traditional bureaucrats remained in power for a long time.  Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler's inherited foreign minister, and Economics Minister Hjalmar Schact were not removed until 1938 and 1937, respectively.  

That, however was only one part of the story.  Although Hitler's militia the SA lost a power struggle in the first 18 months of his rule and was decapitated in June 1934, the competing SS under Heinrich Himmler assumed key police powers almost at once.  Officially deputized within a few months of the seizure of power, the SA and SS arrested political opponents, sent them to concentration camps, and began terrorizing German Jews. In 1939 all police forces were consolidated under Himmler and his new Reich Main Security office (RSHA) led by Reinhard Heydrich. Equally importantly, Germany in 1933, like the United States, was a federal state, and Hitler and the Nazis managed to extend their authority over the police of the various provinces, led by Prussia--which included more than half the whole country--by means of emergency decrees.  Within months, Nazi-led governments had taken over in every province.  Trump will presumably be able to rely on the cooperation of some red state governments in carrying out his measures against immigrants, and conflicts may develop between him and blue state governors who are pledging to resist those measures.  It seems to me that Trump would have the constitution on his side if states tried to resist authorized federal measures to deport immigrants.

Trump made no drastic attempt to alter our Constitution during his first term until he lost the 2020 election, and that attempt failed.  It now appears that his relations with the rest of the executive branch in his second term will more closely resemble Hitler's in the latter stages of his regime, when he finally let go nearly all the traditional conservatives who had held key positions until 1938 and replaced them with sycophantic Nazis.  Although he does not seem to have any plans to create new police forces,  Trump is stocking the top level of government with key allies in his propaganda war against his opponents who will do whatever he wants. Pete Hegseth at Defense, Pam Bondi at Justice, and Tulsi Gabard as Director of National Intelligence have all spoken out against Democrats as violently as he has and share his contempt for the permanent bureaucracy of the United States.  And to judge from these appointments, the 2025 Project, and other leaks from Trump's entourage, he wants to put the most important elements of the bureaucracy under his direct control and purge them of anyone who stands in his way.  That  project calls for changes in rules to make it easier to dismiss federal employees and for reduction of their pay and benefits, which would obviously make federal employment less attractive.  Matt Gaetz at Justice would surely have undertake the investigations and probable prosecutions of Democrats like John Kerry and even Joe Biden that Trump's first-term attorneys general refused to undertake, and Pam Bondi may as well. .  Reports claim that Hegseth would use the recommendations of an independently appointed body of retired officers to relieve senior military leaders who seem ideologically unfriendly to Trump.  And Kristin Noem, the designated Secretary of Homeland Security, must have signed on to Trump's plans to round up and deport millions of illegal immigrants--the cruelest part of Trump's agenda as it has so far emerged.

Trump will be doing most of these things in alliance with a long-standing strain of conservative Republicanism that regards the last 140 years of American history as a great mistake.  Its acolytes see the Pendleton Act of 1883, which enshrined the idea of an independent, merit-based civil service, as the first big step down the road to perdition, followed by the moderate reforms of the Progressive Era and the more sweeping changes of the New Deal and the Great Society.  Such ideas are also very popular among the conservative majority on today's Supreme Court, which has already drastically rolled back the government's regulatory authority.  Trump's new allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who want to privatize many federal government functions, add a new ingredient to the mix--and Musk has already privatized key parts of our defense establishment and created a private space program.  Just today, Musk and Ramaswamy have sketched out how they hope drastically to cut back federal regulations and personnel in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.  The particular ingredient Trump is providing his coalition is his goal of turning key segments of the federal government into legal weapons against anyone who stands in his way or who has a following of their own.  This, he feels, will only be doing unto others as they have done unto him, and sadly, there is some truth to that claim.  He may have to seize unprecedented presidential power to make that happen.  If the Republican Senate refuses to confirm appointments like Gabard and Hegseth, he wants to force Congress to adjourn, which would allow them to use the recess appointment clause of the Constitution to put them in power until January 2027 without confirmation.  And according to one never-used provision of the Constitution, if he could orchestrate an argument between the two Houses of Congress over whether to adjourn or not, he could sent Congress home until a date of his choosing and attempt to govern without it.  

Of all Trump's goals, the only one that can be compared to Hitler's is the desire to deport millions of illegal immigrants.  He wants to weaken the state while Hitler wanted to strengthen it, and he does not want to fight a great war, or, apparently, any war.  War to his right-wing allies has become just another excuse to expand the power of the deep state.   Trump seems to want to create a state based entirely on personal allegiance to himself while removing all governmental obstacles to maximum profit and economic disruption.   This is nearly the opposite of Hitler, who wanted to marshal all of Germany's resources to fight a great war and create a new empire, and who imposed severe sacrifices on the German people even before the war started in 1939.  All over the world--even in Communist countries--corporate power has grown at the expense of state power now for more than forty years.  Trump will continue that trend by turning Washington politics into a circus once again.  

 As I have said here many times, it is the gradual collapse of our democracy and of the habits that allowed it to function over the last 60 years--not racism or sexism or homophobia--that has made this possible.  Exit polls showed that the increasing divide between college-educated people and the rest of the population is perhaps the real secret to Trump's success.  Our educated class needs to re-educate itself and establish a new bond between itself and the rest of the population.  I have no idea where this will end.