When at Times the Mob Is Swayed

by Burt Neuborne

  It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Trump is so adept at exploiting fear and inventing scapegoats. He studied at the feet of the master. We know from Ivana Trump’s now sealed testimony at Trump’s first divorce trial, backed up by her lawyer, Michael Kennedy, and from the president himself, that for years a younger Donald Trump slept with a book of Adolf Hitler’s collected political speeches, published in 1941 as My New Order, in a locked cabinet at his bedside. Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation.

  Give Trump credit. He did his homework well and became the twenty-first-century master of divisive rhetoric. We’re used to thinking of Hitler’s Third Reich as the incomparably evil tyranny that it undoubtedly was. But Hitler didn’t take power by force. He used a set of rhetorical tropes codified in Trump’s bedside reading that persuaded enough Germans to welcome Hitler as a populist leader. The Nazis did not overthrow the Weimar Republic. It fell into their hands as the fruit of Hitler’s satanic ability to mesmerize enough Germans to trade their democratic birthright for a pottage of scapegoating, short-term economic gain, xenophobia, and racism. It could happen here.

  I lived through McCarthyism. I passionately opposed the undeclared war in Vietnam. I was on Nixon’s enemies list. I served as national legal director of the ACLU during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, once described the ACLU under my leadership as “the criminals’ lobby.” But I have never experienced the sense of dread that Trump’s behavior as president has unleashed in my mind and heart.

  Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president? Partly it’s just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it’s hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln’s house. But that’s not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play.

  Partly it’s politics. Most of my career has been devoted to construing the Constitution to protect the most vulnerable among us: racial minorities, religious iconoclasts, political radicals, women, gays, trans people, the poor. Many of Trump’s policies threaten to unravel the safety net for the weak that the country has painstakingly woven over the past half century. But Trump’s signature political positions, whether taxation, immigration, market deregulation, the environment, or civil rights, are not fundamentally different from the right-wing policies I’ve struggled against for most of my career. I’ve always viewed winning and losing on policy—even constitutional policy—as part of a long-term democratic process that would continue no matter how a given skirmish turned out.

  Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches—spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy. You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric—as a candidate and in office—mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.

  Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not equating Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler. In fact, I’m reluctant to use the names Hitler and Trump in the same sentence. It trivializes Hitler’s obscene crimes to compare them with Donald Trump’s often pathetic foibles. It is also unfair to Trump to cast him as the epitome of evil rather than as the shallow blowhard he is. While our forty-fifth president loves to play at being the boss, I do not believe that Trump hopes or intends to morph into a dictator with an agenda of evil. What Trump does not appear to understand, though, is that the very act of letting Hitler’s genies out of the bottle is playing with the fate of the nation.

  Donald Trump’s channeling of Adolf Hitler’s rhetorical techniques is profoundly dangerous to American democracy not because of Trump’s ideas (wrongheaded as many may be), his ignorance (profound as it is), or his disdain for people who do not look or sound just like him (ugly as he makes it appear). It is dangerous because the forty-fifth president, by following Hitler’s playbook, risks unleashing forces of ignorance, anger, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, selfishness, bigotry, fear, and greed that, once set free, can unravel the social fabric of a nation.

  In January 1933, most Germans were sure that Hitler, an ignorant, loudmouthed, widely derided minority chancellor of the Weimar Republic, either would blow over or could be harnessed as a tool to advance their own self-interested policies. Today, too many Americans also dismiss Trump as an ignorant buffoon who will eventually self-destruct and disappear. Too many others, especially the congressional leadership of the Republican Party, are following the disastrous path set by the German center-right political establishment in its treatment of Hitler, disdaining Trump as an appalling man but viewing him as a useful path to power who can be controlled and then discarded. By the time the German political establishment woke up, Hitler had spread enough rhetorical poison to doom German democracy.

  Like Trump, Hitler never won a majority in a free and open election. Despite massive and unprecedented support from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Trump lost the 2016 popular election by approximately three million votes. Trump became president with only 46 percent of the vote, compared to the 48.2 percent share won by Hillary Clinton. He became legally entitled to the presidency only because a total of 77,774 voters spread over three crucial states—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—enabled him to assemble a majority in the Electoral College.

  Since the turnout in the 2016 presidential election was just under 55 percent of the eligible electorate, and since Trump received 46 percent of that vote, only about a quarter of eligible voters actually cast their ballots for Donald Trump (55 percent × 0.46 = 25.3 percent).

  That’s just a little less than the percentage of the German electorate that turned to the Nazi Party in 1932–33. Unlike the low turnouts in the United States, turnout in Weimar Germany averaged just over 80 percent of eligible voters. Thus, excluding the March 1933 elections, which were administered by the Nazis and badly marred by violence and fraud, in the last free Weimar election in July 1932 that brought the Nazis to power, only about 30 percent of the German electorate actually voted for Hitler (80 percent × 0.37 = 29.6 percent).

  Once installed as a minority chancellor in January 1933, Hitler set about demonizing his political opponents, and no one—not the vaunted, intellectually brilliant German judiciary; not the respected, well-trained German police; not the revered, aristocratic German military; not the widely admired, efficient German government bureaucracy; not the wealthy, immensely powerful leaders of German industry; and not the powerful center-right political leaders of the Reichstag—mounted a serious effort to stop him. By the time the Summer Olympics were held in Berlin in 1936, German democracy had been destroyed by a buffoonish laughingstock who had never commanded support from more than 30 percent of the electorate.

  How on earth did Hitler pull it off? What satanic magic did Trump find in Hitler’s speeches?

  An important part of the answer is on display at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, where two small green plastic cubes sit almost unnoticed on modest display tables, surviving examples of the many thousands of radios distributed by the Nazi Party during the early 1930s. The radios were free, but there was one catch: they could receive only a single frequency. And that frequency carried the undiluted voice of Adolf Hitler, speaking directly to the 30–40 percent of the German population frightened enough, angry enough, disaffected enough, and—let’s say it—bigoted enough to embrace the Nazi Party’s witches’ brew of
falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, national security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search for scapegoats.

  In the end, it was Hitler’s uncanny ability to exploit those cheap plastic radios to manipulate an adoring and disaffected base, never exceeding 30–40 percent of the population, that destroyed the Weimar Republic and eventually plunged the world into catastrophic war.

  Donald Trump’s tweets, often delivered between midnight and dawn, are the twenty-first century’s technological embodiment of Hitler’s free plastic radios. Trump’s Twitter account, like Hitler’s radios, enables a charismatic leader to establish and maintain a personal, unfiltered line of communication with an adoring political base of about 30–40 percent of the population, many (but not all) of whom are only too willing, even anxious, to swallow Trump’s witches’ brew of falsehoods, half-truths, personal invective, threats, xenophobia, national security scares, religious bigotry, white racism, exploitation of economic insecurity, and a never-ending search for scapegoats.

  The social and economic composition of Trump’s core political base eerily mirrors Hitler’s: both were (and are) relatively poorly educated; patronized, even disdained by smug, better-educated elites; taken for granted, ignored, or worse by the mainstream political parties; and threatened economically and socially by newcomers who do not look, speak, or believe as they do.

  By itself, of course, the fact that the social and economic characteristics of core supporters of both Trump and Hitler resemble each other doesn’t mean much. A substantial base of disaffected, insecure, relatively poorly educated citizens, angry at what they perceive as political betrayal and economic injustice, and fearful of losing what’s left of their political power, economic privilege, and social status to “others,” is a longtime staple of right-wing populist politics. But think of those cheap plastic radios broadcasting the unfiltered, deeply personal voice of an ego-driven, power-obsessed leader, spewing an uninterrupted stream of lies, half-truths, insults, vituperation, and innuendo designed to marginalize, demonize, and eventually destroy opponents. Then think of Donald Trump’s odd-hours tweets rattling around inside the heads of millions of his core supporters, spewing an unfiltered stream of racist dog whistles, xenophobic lies, political innuendos, and economic half-truths.

  That’s not just populist politics. That’s a proven recipe for the cult of personality and the specter of mobocracy that consumed German democracy.

  Hitler used his single-frequency radios to wax hysterical to his adoring base about his pathological racial and religious fantasies glorifying Aryans and demonizing Jews, blaming Jews (among other racial and religious scapegoats) for German society’s ills.

  Trump’s tweets and public statements, whether dealing with black-led demonstrations against police violence, white-led racist mob violence, threats posed by undocumented aliens, immigration policy generally, protests by black and white professional athletes, college admission policies, hate speech, even response to hurricane damage in Puerto Rico, also repeatedly carry racially tinged messages calculated to divide whites from people of color.

  Hitler’s radio rants blamed most of Germany’s problems on a worldwide conspiracy. He pledged to restore Germany’s greatness by redressing the claimed economic and territorial injustices imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I. Trump uses his tweets to mimic Hitler, promising to “make America great again” and conjuring a dark, conspiratorial world order where a naive, weakened America is being systematically victimized at every turn by shadowy international forces.

  Hitler unleashed, and Trump stridently echoes, warnings of an impending cultural Armageddon, in which the values of the (white) West will battle for survival against an onslaught of inferior, alien races from the (nonwhite) East.

  Hitler’s radio harangues demonized his domestic political opponents, calling them parasites, criminals, cockroaches, and various categories of leftist scum. Trump’s tweets and speeches similarly demonize his political opponents. Trump talks about the country being “infested” with dangerous aliens of color. He fantasizes about jailing Hillary Clinton, calls Mexicans rapists, refers to “shithole countries,” degrades anyone who disagrees with him, and dreams of uprooting thousands of allegedly disloyal bureaucrats in the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, who he calls “the deep state” and who, he claims, are sabotaging American greatness.

  Both Trump and Hitler maintained a relentless assault on the very idea of objective truth. Each began the assault by seeking to delegitimize the mainstream press. Hitler quickly coined the epithet Lügenpresse (literally “lying press”) to denigrate the mainstream press. Trump uses a paraphrase of Hitler’s lying press epithet—“fake news”—cribbed, no doubt, from one of Hitler’s speeches. For Trump, the mainstream press is a “lying press” that publishes “fake news.”

  Hitler labeled his press opponents as socialist, Jewish, or internationalist, bent on spreading false information to undercut Hitler’s positions. Trump’s tweets fulminate about an allegedly fraudulent mainstream press in the service of the “elites,” a press bent on disseminating “fake news” about him, especially his possible links to the Kremlin.

  Trump repeatedly attacks the “failing New York Times,” leads crowds in chanting “CNN sucks,” is personally hostile to most reporters (he initially refused to fly the White House flag at half-mast to mourn the murder of five journalists in Annapolis, Maryland, in late June 2018), and may even have sought to punish CNN by trying to block a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, CNN’s parent. Trump’s hatred of the Washington Post translates into fulminations against Amazon (owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Post) and efforts to undermine Amazon’s use of the U.S. Postal Service to deliver packages.

  Both Trump and Hitler intensified their assault on objective truth by deriding scientific experts, especially academics who questioned Hitler’s views on race or Trump’s views on climate change, immigration, or economics. For both Trump and Hitler, the goal is (and was) to eviscerate the very idea of objective truth, turning everything into grist for a populist jury subject to manipulation by a master puppeteer. In both Trump’s and Hitler’s worlds, public opinion ultimately defines what is true and what is false. Trump’s pathological penchant for repeatedly lying about his behavior can succeed only in a world where his supporters feel free to embrace Trump’s “alternative facts” and treat his hyperbolic exaggerations as the gospel truth.

  Once Hitler had delegitimized the mainstream media by a series of systematic attacks on its integrity, he constructed a fawning alternative mass media designed to reinforce his direct radio messages and enhance his personal power. Trump is following the same path, simultaneously launching bitter attacks on the mainstream press while embracing the so-called alt-right media, co-opting both Sinclair Broadcasting and the Rupert Murdoch—owned Fox Broadcasting Company as, essentially, a Trump Broadcasting Network.

  Once Hitler had cemented his personal communications link with his base via free radios and a fawning media and had badly eroded the idea of objective truth, he reinforced his emotional bond with his base by holding a series of carefully orchestrated mass meetings dedicated to cementing his status as a charismatic leader, or Führer. The powerful personal bond nurtured by Trump’s tweets and Fox’s fawning is also systematically reinforced by periodic, carefully orchestrated mass rallies (even going so far as to co-opt a Boy Scout Jamboree in 2017), reinforcing Trump’s insatiable narcissism and his status as a charismatic leader.

  Hitler’s strident appeals to the base invoked an extreme version of German nationalism, extolling a brilliant Germanic past and promising to restore Germany to its rightful place as a preeminent nation. Trump echoes Hitler’s jingoistic appeal to ultranationalist fervor, extolling American exceptionalism right down to the slogan “Make America Great Again,” a paraphrase of Hitler’s promise to r
estore German greatness

  Hitler all but closed Germany’s borders, freezing non-Aryan migration into the country and rendering it impossible for Germans to escape without official permission. Like Hitler, Trump has also made closed borders a centerpiece of his administration. Hitler barred Jews. Trump bars Muslims and seekers of sanctuary from Central America. When the lower courts blocked Trump’s Muslim travel ban, he unilaterally issued executive orders replacing it with a thinly disguised substitute that ultimately narrowly won Supreme Court approval under a theory of extreme deference to the president.

  Like Hitler, Trump has presided over mass deportations, promising to rid the nation of millions of undocumented aliens who “infest” the country, most of whom are nonwhite. He promises to build a wall on the border with Mexico to stop Latino migration; has reversed decades of immigration policy aimed at reuniting families; sought to end protection of the “Dreamers,” young people brought unlawfully into the country as small children by their parents; objected to allowing immigration from Haiti and African countries; and, until forced to change course, stooped to tearing children from their parents to punish desperate efforts by migrants to find a better life in the United States. Thousands of children taken from their parents remain missing today.

  Hitler promised to make Germany free from Jews and Slavs. Trump promises to slow, stop, and even reverse the flow of non-white immigrants, substituting Muslims, Africans, Mexicans, and Central Americans of color for Jews and Slavs as scapegoats for the nation’s ills. Trump’s efforts to cast dragnets to arrest undocumented aliens where they work, live, and worship, followed by mass deportation to rid the country of alleged “Mexican rapists” and other nonwhite immigrants whom Trump characterizes as “thieves and murderers” who bring “death and destruction,” echo Hitler’s promise to defend Germany’s racial identity.

  Like Hitler, Trump seeks to use national borders to protect his favored national industrial interests, threatening to ignite protectionist trade wars with Europe, China, and Japan similar to the trade wars that, in earlier incarnations, helped to ignite World War I and World War II.