Is it alarmist to point out the parallels?View this email in your browser [link removed]

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**JULY 23, 2025**

**On the

**Prospect **website**

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First-Ever Ban on Surveillance Pricing Introduced in Congress [link removed]

A bill authored by Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) would stop companies from setting individualized prices and wages based on spy dossiers they assemble on Americans.

**BY DAVID DAYEN** [link removed]

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Can the American Battery Industry Survive Trump? [link removed]

For solar and grid storage, it’s a race between technological progress and Republican malice.

**BY RYAN COOPER** [link removed]

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Canceling Colbert Begins the End of Television [link removed]

Did Paramount suck up to Trump by ending its late-night show? Sure. Will there be any television networks to throw people off in ten years? Probably not.

**BY DAVID DAYEN** [link removed]

****Kuttner on TAP****

**American fascism**

**Is it alarmist to point out the parallels?**

A couple of weeks ago, there was a brief dustup when Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok started spewing out antisemitic riffs and praising Hitler. Musk apologized. In the ongoing discussions about how far down the path to fascism is the U.S. under Trump, Hitler is often invoked as a dark symbol. But it is important to remember the real Hitler and the real parallels.

In the Hitler timeline, he was appointed Germany’s chancellor on January 30, 1933. That’s ten days later than U.S. Inauguration Day. The Reichstag fire of February 27 gave him a pretext to consolidate absolute power. The next day, he issued a decree suspending civil liberties and allowing the arrest of parliamentary opposition deputies. There followed the Enabling Act of March 23 allowing Hitler to govern by decree. And on July 14, all parties other than the Nazis were banned, completing the dictatorship.

Trump is only slightly behind schedule. The Democrats haven’t been banned; they have just been rendered irrelevant in Washington by a cultish Republican Party spellbound by Donald Trump, and put under siege in the states.

More chilling are the parallels when it comes to sheer cruelty. You wonder why Trump would take away medical care, break up immigrant families, ruin careers in the sciences, deport people to be tortured—until you realize that cruelty is the whole point.

For my light summer reading, I’ve been engrossed in a biographical novel,

**The Magician**, that improbably combines two of my favorite writers, Thomas Mann and Colm Tóibín. In this lightly fictionalized 2021 book, Tóibín recounts the story of Mann’s life, drawing on diaries, letters, papers, and previous biographies.

In 1933, Mann, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, was 57 and living comfortably in Munich when Hitler took power. Like a lot of Germans who didn’t believe this could happen, Mann didn’t see Hitler’s dictatorship coming. (“He did not think for a moment that the Nazis would ever take power. Some days, they were merely a nuisance, representing a coarseness that was entering every aspect of life.”)

The following passage literally sent chills down my spine: “The Nazis,” he belatedly realized “were street fighters who had taken power without losing their sway over the streets. They managed to be both government and opposition. They thrived on the idea of enemies, including enemies within. They did not fear bad publicity—rather, they actually wanted the worst of their actions to become widely known, all the better to make everyone, even those loyal to them, afraid.”

Has anyone ever written a better description of Trump?

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The two great dictators also shared something else—being energized by resentments. Hitler of course resented the Jews, and the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles; and he resented the nine months he spent in prison after his failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Trump seems to be driven by nothing else. As Heather Cox Richardson reported this morning, “Last night at 9:03 p.m., the White House account posted on X an image of Trump in front of American flags, eagles, and fireworks with the caption: ‘I was the hunted—NOW I’M THE HUNTER. President Donald J. Trump.’”

And speaking of the Jews, Thomas Mann was married to a Jew, Katia Pringsheim. Her father, Alfred, was a distinguished professor of mathematics and heir to a wealthy banking family. Her grandmother, Hedwig Dohm, was a pioneering German feminist.

In the late 19th century, when Mann was born, German Jews were as well assimilated into the elite professions and cultural life in Germany as they are in the United States today. The Pringsheim family were proud patrons of Wagner, no less. It took the span of one lifetime for Hitler to wipe all that out.

For now, Trump finds it convenient to pose as a philo-semite. If he found it expedient to flip, that could turn around on a dime.

This is not to say that we have reached full-on fascism, yet. For now, the government is building camps to house deportees, not other enemies of the state.

 A free press still functions, though it is steadily bring undermined by the conflicts of interest of its owners. There is an opposition in power at the local and state level, though Trump has just begun to use the might of the national government to supplant it.

American democracy, far more deeply rooted than the fragile Weimar democracy that Hitler overthrew, still has some remaining guardrails. But they are being weakened almost daily. For us to survive Trump, the Supreme Court would have to decide that enough is enough; and Trump would have to fail in his increasingly crude efforts to pre-annul the 2026 midterm election.

This may yet happen. Trump could drown in his own bile. But this descent into fascism is coming on faster and more flagrantly than almost anyone would have foreseen.

**~ ROBERT KUTTNER**

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