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WHAT (REALLY) HAPPENS IF TRUMP WINS? – HITLER – THEN AND NOW  
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Heather Cox Richardson
October 22, 2024
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_ Three months after Hitler promised to uphold the German
Constitution, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first
prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political
opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, _

Credit: Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer / The Cycle // Washington Post,

 

On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people
currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also
promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote,
lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election
officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told
journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the
most dangerous person to this country.” 

On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that
he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than
foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those
“radical left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been
talking a lot about “the enemy from within,” specifically naming
Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both
Democrats from California, as “bad people.” Schiff was the chair
of the House Intelligence Committee that broke the 2019 story of
Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s
first impeachment. 

Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so
frequent that former White House press secretary turned political
analyst Jen Psaki has called them his closing argument for the 2024
election, and she warned that his construction of those who oppose him
as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.

In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer
of _The Cycle_ explored exactly what that means in a piece titled
“What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf
Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised
Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took
to dismantle that constitution.

By March, she notes,  the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its
first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent
political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil
service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor
unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the
year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and
denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.

Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he
cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal
law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the
merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him
rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political
opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged,
Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and
others.

Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast
at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s
secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and
requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said,
“But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her
that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she
was being expelled from Germany.

She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and
that expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in
1920 to become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in
Berlin. In 1924 she moved to the city to head the Central European
Bureau for the _New York Evening Post_ and the _Philadelphia Public
Ledger_. From there, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She
left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the
two settled in Vermont.

When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the
Nobel Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the
growing strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the
Nazi’s opponents to come together to stand against them. She
continued to visit the country in the following years, reporting on
the rise of fascism there, and elsewhere. 

In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than
“the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was
a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would
“abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered:
“I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the
parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from
the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be
responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.”
She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator
setting out to _persuade a sovereign people to vote away their
rights_,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.

Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of
the _Saturday Evening Post_ when she received the news that she had
24 hours to leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in
Berlin saw her off at the railway station with “great sheaves of
American Beauty roses.” 

Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she
had gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and
that when she had left to marry Lewis, they offered “many
expressions of friendship and gratitude.” But times had changed.
“I thought of them sadly as my train pulled out,” she said,
“carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those officials still are in
the service of the German Government, some of them are émigrés and
some of them are dead.” 

Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses
were simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following
her. She lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then
began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners.
Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for
the _New York Herald Tribune_, she became a leading voice in print,
too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in
America. 

In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel _It Can’t Happen
Here_, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their
dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument
for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of
dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up
here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and
shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that
he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything
traditionally American.” 

In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to
reach between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter
wrote: “She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who
used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them
from [political commentator] Walter Lippmann.” The reporter likened
Thompson to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two
“most influential women in the U.S.”

When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison
Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on
February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box,
where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at
the stage, illustrating that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After
being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers
surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a
duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened
to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.” 

Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had
raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone
from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for _Harper’s
Magazine_ titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an
interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large
gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown
would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone
through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in
France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom
democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And
I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances,
would become Nazis.”

Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line
between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race,
or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure
people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good
natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the
promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their
lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But
the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared
speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has
achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all
go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in
them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is
breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or
however modern, go Nazi.”

In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter
for the _Associated Press_ that the reason she had been attacked was
the same reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor
Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said.

Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging
Hitler, in her own article about her expulsion she noted: “My
offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all.
That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr.
Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To
question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German,
you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely
was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….” 

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“Ousting Mystifies Dorothy Thompson,” _New York Times_, August
27, 1934, p. 8,
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Dorothy Thompson, “Dorothy Thompson Tells of Nazi Ban,” _New York
Times_, August 27, 1934, p. 8,
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* Fascism
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* Adolf Hitler
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* Nazi Germany
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* Dorothy Thompson
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