A Bonus Post

I have already seen the movie A Complete Unknown and enjoyed it very much.  It took more than a week, however, for me to be reminded of one of the funniest things I have ever seen on youtube, which is highly relevant to the movie.  Enjoy.

Adams and Jefferson and us

 It was more than 40 years ago, I am sure, that I first purchased a one-volume paperback edition of the complete correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  Its 614 pages are actually two very different books, separated by a brief interlude.  The correspondence begins in the midst of the outbreak of the American Revolution, but really gets going in 1786, in the time of the Articles of Confederation, when the two men took over the new nation's most important diplomatic posts, Adams in London and Jefferson in Paris.  They wrote frequently until they both returned to the United States in 1789 to become Vice President and Secretary of State in Washington's administration.  During that administration they became the leaders of the rival Federalist and Republican parties, and an unfortunate provision of the original constitution made Jefferson Adams's vice-president in 1797, after Adams had won the electoral college over him.  They did not exchange a single letter until Jefferson was about to succeed Adams in 1801, and none afterwards for nearly a dozen years.  The volume includes seven letters between Jefferson and Abigail Adams in 1804, occasioned by the death of one of Jefferson's two legitimate daughters.

When Jefferson left the White House in 1809, he, like Adams, had lost most of any popularity he had enjoyed.  Three years later, in early 1812, Adams, then 77, re-opened the correspondence by sending Jefferson a book of lectures given by his son John Quincy Adams, who was now a member of Jefferson's party and had served in the Madison administration as Minister to Russia.  Jefferson was then 68 and the correspondence continued--with Adams contributing about two thirds of the letters--until shortly before they both died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Finally picking up the book recently, I decided to begin that last chapter in their correspondence, while planning to tackle the earlier periods subsequently.  They promise a fascinating account of the diplomacy of the first, deeply flawed phase of our national history from 1781 to 1789.

I have now made my way from 1812 until the middle of 1816.  The letters are fascinating, not least in what they do not discuss. They include almost nothing about the progress of the War of 1812, although Adams in 1814 mentioned that he had become deeply unpopular in Massachusetts for supporting that war, which had harmed New England very badly and led in that year to talk of secession.  They say just as little about other contemporary political controversies or elections.  Religion occupies the most space of any topic in the correspondence so far.   Both men were Unitarians in the literal as well as institutional sense: they regarded Christ's teachings as the finest guide to human behavior ever written, but they denied his divinity and rejected the authority of all the great religious institutions that had been built around it.  They shared pride in the 18th century which had tried to elevate reason over faith.  Yet between 1812 and 1815, they observed momentous developments in Europe which cast some doubt on their shared gospel of human progress.  They were delighted in 1814 by the fall of Napoleon, but distressed to see the old order reassert itself in the Congress of Vienna, which divided whole nations like Poland among the victorious conservative powers.  Jefferson also commented that there was really nothing to choose between Napoleon and the British government that had helped defeat him, since neither seemed to care about anything but their own power.  When Napoleon returned from Elba in early 1815 they thought he still enjoyed the support of the French nation, but he lasted, of course, only 100 days before Waterloo.  Then the Bourbon dynasty returned to the throne again.  The two men began to wonder where history was going, 

Jefferson on January 11, 1816, commented on the impact of the ideas of the 18th century on European politics.  "With some exceptions only," he wrote, "through the 17th and 18th centuries morality occupied an honorable chapter in the political code of nations."  He regarded the partitions of Poland as an unfortunate exception for which the "barbarous government" of Russia was chiefly responsible.  "How then has it happened," he continued in reference to the last three decades, "that these nations, France especially and England, so great, so dignified, so distinguished by science and the arts, plunged at once into all the depths of human enormity, threw off suddenly and openly all the restraints of morality, all sensation in character, and unblushingly avowed and acted on the principle that power was right? . . .Whatever it was, the close of the century saw the moral world thrown back again to the age of the Borgias, to the point from which it had departed 300 years before"--and, he might have added, with vastly greater forces at their disposal.  

Adams replied on February 2.  "I can only say it present, that it should seem that human Reason and human Conscience, though I believe there are such things, are not a Match, for human Passions, human Imaginations and human enthusiasm. . . .You ask, how it has happened that all Europe has acted on the Principle "that Power was right"  I know not what Answer to give you, but this, that Power always sincerely, conscientiously, de tres bon[sic] Foi, believes itself right.  Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God Service, when it is violating all his Laws."

My entire life as a student of history has taught me that Adams was right, and I have seen how power can persuade itself of the justice of its aims again and again in  my own country, first in Vietnam, then in the Middle East.  With war raging in Ukraine and the Middle East and threatening over Taiwan, the noble dream of a world ruled by law, as promoted by both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and embodied now for 80 years in the United Nations.  And a parallel drama has played itself out in our domestic affairs.  It has taken half a century since the Powell memorandum for corporate America to convince itself that its power must serve the interests of all, even as its insatiable greed drains more wealth and income from the mass of the people every year.  

Yet I believe that the conflict between reason and passion is more complicated than Adams made out.  Both have a profound appeal to human nature--but neither ever wins a final victory over the other.  Reason has now been retreating for more than half a century and passion may have more terrible victories yet to win.  Eventually, however, passion's excesses, I think, will lead to a new round of restraint based upon reason--domestically, in foreign affairs, and even personally.  This has happened many times before.  That eternal conflict remains the source of what progress we have been able to make, and ensures that every victory and every defeat will always be incomplete and only temporary.  That, I have decided, is where real hope for humanity and progress must come from.

A turning point

 The probable course of history under Trump's second term is becoming clear, and it could easily turn out to be the most significant turning point in our history since the time of Franklin Roosevelt.  The media remains largely focused upon Trump's personality, the  moral deficiencies of some of his appointees, and the failure of his supporters to understand what is good for them to understand what is going on.  Trump is truly a revolutionary figure in US politics.  No one from outside the political class has ever had comparable impact, and his rise, as I have said many times, reflects the collapse of the relationship between our political elite and much of the American people.  Yet he is only part of the story, because he leads a coalition with at least two other critical elements.  Most important of all, that coalition now knows exactly what it wants to do and has identified and recruited the personnel that will do it.

The most important element of Trump's coalition is itself a coalition:  the various Republican pressure groups and think tanks that have dreamed for decades of undoing the work of the Progressive Era and the New Deal and creating a free-market utopia with no obstacles to the growth of capital.  These include the American Enterprise Institute (which produced Project 2025), the Heritage Foundation, the Koch network, several other foundations such as the Bradley and Scaife foundations, the Federalist Society which has effectively taken over our judiciary, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, and a good many more.  Many of these groups had their doubts about Trump in 2015-16 but they all appear to be full-blown supporters now.  They will staff the upper levels of the federal government and try to prune the lower levels drastically.

The other new element in his coalition, however, may turn out to be the  most significant:  the small cadre of tech billionaires who have climbed on the bandwagon, led by Elon Musk and including Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel.  While the Silent and Boom generations developed the Republican pressure groups listed above in reaction to the New Deal liberalism of their parents, these Gen Xers have never known effective government management of the economy and apparently see no need for it at all.  They also include leading players in cryptocurrency.  They believe that technology--and in particular AI--can and should disrupt and remake all our major institutions, including education, health care, and finance, and they dispose of vast resources of their own.  While I have been writing this post, Musk has used X, which he owns, to force Republicans in Congress to abandon a spending deal that would have kept the government open.  He can never be president himself, having been born a South African, but he seems determined to eclipse Henry Kissinger as our most politically powerful foreign-born political figure.  Liberals are now eagerly awaiting a falling out between Musk and Trump, but I am not at all convinced that that will happen.  Trump has evidently fallen for Musk, who is relatively young, vigorous, innovative, and as rich as Trump has always dreamt of being, but never actually came close to.  Trump clearly has less energy than he used to have at 78, and Musk seems to be moving into an unprecedented role as prime minister to Trump's chief of state, with broad effective power to reshape the federal government.  

I see some possibility that Trump might surprise us on the foreign front.  I watched his entire press conference the other day.  His affect is very different from what it was four or eight years ago, even when the words are the same.  He is a bit quieter and more relaxed, or perhaps, just worn out.  Meanwhile, he gives the strong impression that he wants to win a Nobel Peace Prize.  Stopping the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East seems much more important to him than heaping fire and brimstone on foreign enemies.  This could change, and he is certainly leaving the door open to military action against Iran together with Israel as well,  but I think it bears watching.

The domestic changes Trump plans seem most unlikely to help anyone but billionaires, particularly the young ones from the world of Silicon Valley.  Yet his appeal will remain, I think, for one simple reason that hearkens back to a brilliant line from the Showtime series Homeland.  Late in its run, as I recall it, Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) was talking to President Elizabeth Keane, whose character was evidently designed on the assumption that Hillary Clinton would be president in 2017.  After surviving an assassination attempt carried out by rogue intelligence agents, Keane has locked up more than 200 intelligence operatives, including Berenson.  Now, having released them, she expresses surprise that the move seems to have been popular. "It showed balls," Berenson replies.  "They like a president with balls."

I have said many times that Trump has triumphed in two elections out of three because he understood how disaffected tens of millions of Americans were from our political establishment, which the Democrats could not face.  He shared their contempt for the old order.  In addition, he has shown again and again that he will not allow anything to get in the way of changing it.   This is not unprecedented, and the fury and frustration that it has provoked among Trump's opponents isn't either.  Southerners and some northern Democrats during the Civil War and Republicans in the 1930s felt exactly the same way about Lincoln and FDR as Democrats feel about Trump today, but those presidents had coalitions of their own that enabled them to transform the country.  I think that he will too.

Lifelong Democrats like myself now face a great challenge: to accept a very uncomfortable reality.  Most of them share a sense of their own righteousness and a feeling that somehow their side must prevail because it is right.  That is why the mainstream media write endlessly about how Trump's policies will not help his supporters, or how he will not be able to get along with Musk or other leading figures in his administration.  To anyone who dislikes posts like this one, let me simply say once again that I am simply trying to record what is happening, and that I am sure that some day, long after we are all gone, things will go in a different direction again.

An American Story

 Some weeks ago I finally got around to reading a book I learned about relatively recently--The Autobiography of John Roy Lynch.  Born a slave in Mississippi in 1847, Lynch had finished the draft of this book shortly before his death in 1939, but it was not published until the great historian John Hope Franklin brought it out in 1970.  It exceeded my expectations.  I expected it to be about slavery and the difficulty of living in the Deep South during Reconstruction.  Those topics came up, but it turns out that Lynch became one of the leading black Republicans in the South during the 1870s and remained so well into the twentieth century.  He knew all the major Republican political figures of that era, including Presidents Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley, and he describes conversations with them in great detail.  Again and again he provided perspectives on the history of the era with which I was unfamiliar.

Lynch's father  Patrick Lynch was an Irish immigrant who settled in Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from Mississippi.  His mother, one Catherine White, a relatively light-skinned beauty, was more than half white.  Their marriage was not recognized, and according to their son John, Patrick Lynch decided to normalize their status by buying his wife, a slave, and her children.  He had managed to do when he became gravely ill.  He turned their care over to a friend who promised not to sell them back into slavery with someone else, but eventually reneged in that promise and took title to them himself.  Lynch as a child spent some years as a house servant, in which he tried to navigate between a friendly master and a very sensitive mistress.  The war and emancipation freed  him.  It emerges from some anecdotes later in the book that Lynch himself was often mistaken for a white man--not surprisingly, since the majority of his ancestry was white.  Writing decades after the fact, Lynch insisted that most southern white men who had founded colored families took care of them and tried to make sure that they would inherit property from him, and left behind large numbers of mixed-race property owners.  This would come as quite a shock to those who have now concluded without evidence that every mixed-race child from slavery days was a product of rape with no rights or prospects whatsoever. Eugene Genovese--still probably our greatest historian of slavery--confirmed the genuine affection and care in many mixed-race antebellum relationships in his classic, Roll, Jordan, Roll.

Still a teenager when the war ended, Lynch secured employment as a cook and then as a photographer and printer.  Then he learned to read and write at night school, and became what we would now call a political junkie.  In 1869 the military governor of Reconstruction Mississippi, General Adelbert Ames, appointed him as a justice of the peace, the beginning of a long career in public service under the aegis of the state and later the national Republican Party.  Eventually he educated himself as a lawyer and passed the bar.

I cannot possibly go into all the details of Mississippi Reconstruction politics from this book, which would once again shock a great many people.  Beginning in 1869, when a new constitution was first adopted, the Mississippi Republican Party, Lynch shows, included a great many white men, including former Confederate officers like General James L. Alcorn, and leading businessmen and cotton planters. Alcorn became the first Republican governor in a Republican sweep.  Mississippi, along with Louisiana and South Carolina, were the only southern states with majority black populations, initially giving the Republican party a big edge. Lynch himself, while still in his twenties, was elected to the state house of representatives and became its speaker.  He defends the Reconstruction administration and insists that Mississippi politics appeared to be heading in an excellent direction, until national events changed most white attitudes.

Ulysses S. Grant had been elected--albeit with a relatively narrow popular majority--in 1868, and re-elected by a much larger majority in 1872.  The nation and the state appeared to be embarked on an era of Republican dominance and Lynch explains that an alliance of black voters and white aristocrats dominated Mississippi politics. That alliance in 1872 elected Republicans in all but one of the state's six districts for the US Congress--including Lynch himself.  In 1873, however, a great panic swept the nation, and in the following year the Democratic Party actually regained control of the national House of Representatives, winning 92 seats and emerging with a majority of 180-103, together with a significant victory in the national congressional popular vote.  As it happened, however, Lynch was re-elected to Congress as a Mississippi Republican in the same year.   In early 1875, during a lame duck session of the Republican Congress elected in 1872, some Republicans brought forth a federal elections bill designed to ensure fair balloting in 1876, but it failed, Lynch explains, due to the opposition of James G. Blaine, the Speaker of the House and a leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 1876.  Blaine replied that the passage of the bill would have led to a great Democratic victory all over the north.  The Democrats seemed certain to win the White House in 1876--as they might have done, but for Republican skullduggery--and white Mississippians, Lynch says, concluded that the future did not belong to them after all.  Helped by terrorism and the Ku Klux Klan, the Democrats won a majority of the Mississippi legislature in elections in 1875, by which time Lynch was in Washington.

Meeting with President Grant to discuss a patronage matter in November 1875, Lynch mentioned that the incumbent Republican governor, knowing that the violent Democratic campaign would probably carry the day in the state, had asked the federal government for assistance in order to safeguard the election, but that the request had been refused. Grant explained that he initially told the War and Justice Departments to intervene, but that he had reversed himself at the behest of a Republican delegation from Ohio that said that that critical state would be lost to the Democrats in the election taking place there if he went through with intervention.  He had yielded, he said, because of party obligation, and because he was also persuaded that he could not have saved Mississippi from a Democratic victory anyway.  Thus Lynch heard from the only Republican president who had taken Reconstruction and black rights in the south seriously that The attempt to guarantee those rights in the South was on the point of failure.  The compromise of 1876-7 a year later, in which Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the victor in a hotly disputed election over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, guaranteed that result.  Hayes explained that when the proposal to create a 15-menber commission to decide four disputed southern states came before the House, he opposed it, understanding what it would lead to. Meanwhile, the Democrats swept all the House seats in Mississippi. 

James A. Garfield eventually defeated Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock for the presidency in 1880, and the Republicans gained control of Congress. Fraudulent vote counting initially defeated Lynch when he ran for Congress again in 1882, but the Republican House majority seated him based on the fraud.  Unfortunately a Democrat defeated him that fall.   In the most extraordinary incident of his political career, in 1884, on the eve of the Republican convention, two very young and destined to be famous Republicans--Theodore Roosevelt of New York and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts--decided to put Lynch forward as a candidate for temporary chairman of the convention in order to embarrass the favored candidacy of James G. Blaine, which they opposed. Lynch writes that he had mixed feelings about his candidacy, but that two leading Ohio Republicans, Mark Hanna and William McKinley, convinced him to let it go forward.  Lynch was elected temporary chair, but Blaine won the nomination anyway.  He lost the election by the narrowest of margins to Grover Cleveland, who became the first Democrat elected to the White House since the Civil War. Blaine had a real national following, and Lynch recounts how one white Mississippi businessman, a Democrat named Joseph Carpenter, initially agreed to serve as one of his electors in the state.  He changed his mind when he realized that he and his whole family would be socially ostracized for the rest of his life if he went ahead.

Cleveland's election led to a remarkable conversation between Lynch and Lucius Q. C. Lamar, a distinguished Mississippi Democrat and Senator whom Cleveland had just appointed Secretary of the Interior.  Recognizing that the two of them had managed to work together across party lines at times in Mississippi, Lamar offered him a position as special agent of the public lands--not in the South, where "you may have some unpleasant and embarrassing experiences," but in Dakota territory.  Lynch declined on the basis that he must remain a loyal Republican, but asked Lamar to retain some black men for whom he had secured appointments in the Pension Bureau, which was part of his department.  This Lamar agreed to do, but he added that he had a problem with two other men whom Lynch recommended, a black doctor with a white wife, and a white lawyer with a black wife. "Amalgamation" was such a hot-button issue that he could not retain the white lawyer, who was better known, and would also have to let the black doctor go if his case became controversial.  As it turned out, it never did.  Lynch pleaded for both at great length and pointed out that Lamar had defied public opinion on sensitive issues before, most notably when he eulogized the Massachusetts abolitionist Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate.  Lamar acknowledged the strength of his arguments, but declined. 

Republican Benjamin Harrison defeated Cleveland narrowly in 1888, and promptly appointed Lynch an auditor of the Treasury Department.  During that Administration Harrison and young Senator Henry Cabot Lodge tried to pass an early version of the Voting Rights Act, to try to re-enfranchise southern black voters,  It failed because free-silver Republicans from the west, who were working with free-silver Democrats to try to increase silver coinage, would not break with their Democratic allies on this issue. Lynch had to leave the Treasury Department when Cleveland beat Harrison handily in 1892, but not before he had an interesting talk with Cleveland, who said that he wanted to appoint "colored" Democrats to office to promote the equal treatment of all. The new secretary of the Treasury offered Lynch the chance to remain in his job, but he refused out of party loyalty. After six years of Law practice, when he was still only 50 years old, President McKinley chose Lynch to be commissioned an Army major and serve as Paymaster of the Forces during the Spanish-American War.  He held that position for ten years, during which it took him around the country and the world, serving in Cuba, Hawaii, Nebraska, San Francisco, and the Philippines, all of which he describes in great detail.  He eventually retired in 1910 and lived out the remaining 28 years of his life in Chicago, where his second wife came from.

This summary will I hope convince readers that the race question in the United States was never frozen in stone and has in fact been controversial and complex from the beginning of the republic to the present day.  Lynch in his last few pages notes three other twists and turns.  First, when President Taft was inaugurated in 1909, he specifically promised not to appoint any black officials in parts of the country where they would be unwelcome.  (I had already discovered this writing States of the Union.)  Second, when the Democrats returned to power under Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson, they not only segregated the federal office buildings in Washington for the first time, but also tried to persuade northern Democrats to institute strict segregation in northern states.  That initiative, I am happy to say, got nowhere. And lastly, he noted that a substantial portion of the black vote had abandoned the Republican Party and voted for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.  This meant, he thought, that in the future black voters would be able to vote for the man, not the party, and the race question would fade in American politics.

Lynch on that point, in my opinion, was more right than he knew.  From 1936 until 1964 the black vote was genuinely in play in the North, the West, and the border states. Candidates of either party ignored it at their peril, and it was no accident, I think, that those were the greatest years of progress for black Americans and the civil rights movement.  Unfortunately the successes of the movement remade the politics of many southern states along racial lines once again, and the black vote has been overwhelmingly Democratic from then until now.  Now, however, that may be changing.  Donald Trump made measurable gains among black voters in the last election.  I learned a great deal from Lynch's book.  I think there are many fascinating books waiting to be written on the politics of race from the end of Reconstruction until the Truman administration.  There may already be some, but I am not aware of them, and I hope that some day historians will fill this gap.

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.