On the evening of 8 November 1923, Adolph Hitler and a body of heavily armed stormtroopers broke into a meeting of Bavarian leaders at the Bürgerbräukelle, a beer cellar just outside Munich, and began a serious attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government and then march to Berlin to take over the country, as the Italian Benito Mussolini had done a year earlier in capturing Rome. Known as the Beer Hall Putsch, the coup attempt had not been thought out well and did not reckon with organized police who would counter it.
Overnight Hitler’s allies gathered about 2,000 armed supporters, to each of whom the Nazis paid 2 billion marks for signing up to revolt (because of Germany’s hyper-inflation, this was worth just over $3 on that day).
Early the next morning, Hitler and his rabble set off to capture the Ministry of War, but were met by a strong cordon of police. Nobody knows who fired first, but someone did, and for the next minute the air was full of smoke from all the bullets. Herman Göring was shot in the leg and fell.¹ Hitler was pushed down and dislocated his shoulder. When the fighting stopped, 14 of Hitler’s marchers were killed, along with four policemen.
The German government put Hitler on trial in early 1924, but, because everyone knew the Nazi leader could implicate many Bavarian politicians in the Putsch attempt, he was allowed wide latitude to bully and insult prosecution witnesses, as well as to speechify, which he did incessantly. He said he was “serving the interests of Germany,” which could never be judged treasonous. “The eternal court of history,” he declared, “will judge us as Germans who wanted the best for their people and their fatherland.”
Despite the undeniable fact that members of the putsch had killed four policemen and staged an armed and treasonable revolt, both offenses punishable by death, the court sentenced Hitler to five years in prison, and a cushy prison, at that — Landsberg am Lech, just west of Munich. This was a place that doled out “fortress incarceration,” a mild form of imprisonment for offenders thought to have acted from “honorable motives.” This is where Adolph Hitler and his factotum Rudolph Hess settled in to while away some time. And this is where Adolph Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle).
In My Struggle, Hitler wrote he’d learned from the failed Putsch. He now realized a violent attempt to take over the government would fail. Consequently, the Nazi Party would become political and would achieve its aims legally. Yes, there would be violence (and there certainly was), but the Party would act according to the law.
After 264 days of a five-year sentence, the German government freed Hitler.
The reason I bring up this history is because in My Struggle, written ten years before Hitler and the Nazis came to power, Hitler told everyone who could read exactly what he and the Nazis would do when they ultimately took control. A poorly written book (although, after 1933, if you didn’t have a copy prominently displayed in your home, a few Brownshirts might pay you a visit with unwelcome consequences), My Struggle lays out with precision the entire Nazi blueprint once in power, including the extermination of the Jews and other undesirables, the creation of the Concentration Camp society, and the invasion of the East to acquire Lebensraum, or the “Living Space” Hitler decided the German nation required to expand.
On 30 January 1933, the day Hitler took power, he began keeping every one of his promises first laid out ten years before. In late March of that year, the Nazis opened their first concentration camp — at Dachau, 12 miles northwest of Munich. They sent four busloads of political opponents and, yes, Jews, to the new facility while the citizens of Dachau, lining the streets, watched the parade go by. In early April, just to make sure everyone got the message, they walked four of the Jews outside and shot them each through the head.
Fanatical megalomaniacs tell you what they’re going to do, and if you let them, they do it. Adolph Hitler is not the only example I could cite.
Moving ahead 92 years, we see another megalomaniac who told us repeatedly what he intended to do if restored to power. Like Hitler before him, Donald Trump told all of us just what we could expect if he won the 2024 presidential election. It should have scared everyone. No one should have thought he was simply hyperbolizing and ,exaggerating to feed his MAGA base. The man is not that subtle. The nation yawned.
In the last three weeks, we have learned much we should have already known. We have watched Trump’s sycophantish acolytes, his Görings and Hesses, implement Project 2025 chapter and verse. This is the document Donald Trump disavowed during the campaign, claiming he didn’t even know the authors.
In 2023, on Veterans Day, the former president (at the time), in an authoritarian rant, wrote on his Truth Social platform, “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American dream.”
Adolph Hitler could have written those words about his Germany.
The Nazis did all they could to dehumanize Jews, Gypsies, and other groups they deemed inferior. Hitler and Goebbels, especially, called Jews and other undesirables “vermin.” In addition to Jews, Hitler’s bête noire were Communists and Bolsheviks. He went after them with nearly the same ferocity as he did the Jews. They were all in the Nazi crosshairs. They were all “vermin.”
History is rhyming now.
Donald Trump’s “vermin” is different. Trump’s vermin barrel is full of all those who have opposed or criticized him, particularly law enforcement, the judiciary, military officers who refused to do his bidding, and politicians, such as Liz Cheney, whom he has said should be tried for treason, which is punishable by death. No Republican will publicly criticize him. He has cowed them all.
In his first term, Donald Trump, the reality TV star and New York real estate developer, was new to the job and had no idea what he was doing. Frankly, he was surprised he’d won the election.
He was urged to appoint a number of people to his administration who were qualified to do the work required. But they kept pushing back on his wilder demands and kept him relatively tethered on many issues. He was inhibited by the likes of Reince Priebus and General John Kelly, his first two Chiefs of Staff, General James Mattis, his first Secretary of Defense, and Rex Tillerson, his first Secretary of State.
That tether, fragile as it was, is absent in his second term. We are now experiencing the complete and unhinged Trump, and only those fiercely loyal are allowed to serve. All others, he will kick aside, regardless of expertise or experience. That includes about 4,000 top-level federal service civilian employees who keep the federal machine running relatively smoothly.
Our nation has withstood many deeply troubling challenges, most notably a civil war and two World Wars, but those were long ago. We are now complacent and are demonstrating how completely unprepared we were for the second coming of Donald Trump. We have put on size-12 blinkers and no longer see, much less appreciate, the evil around us.
Witness the collective national shrug as we watched him stroll through 91 criminal charges and mock our judicial system in the process.
Witness his fond embrace of slash-and-burn Elon Musk and the ease with which he got America’s oligarchs to kneel and kiss the ring. Who saw that coming?
Witness his 24 January, Friday night purge of 17 Inspectors General, whose job it is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the agencies they represent. Congress passed the Inspector General Act long ago and strengthened it three years ago after Trump tried to dismantle the program in his first term. The Act requires a president to give a 30-day notification to Congress and provide specific reasons for terminations of an inspector general. That did not happen, and the IGs were fired by email in the Friday night purge. This is like getting rid of bank security and leaving the vault door open.
Witness his casual rejection of court rulings over the last two weeks. Yesterday, he said he would abide by the courts’ rulings, but, ominously, also said, “It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that.’ So maybe we have to look at the judges because that’s very serious, I think it’s a very serious violation.”
Witness the ease with which his unqualified and dangerous nominees for cabinet positions are sailing through to confirmation with no Republican pushback.
Witness the nonchalant manner in which he destroyed the 64-year-old USAID and cut off food and medical funding to the world’s neediest people with no more care than it would take to brush a piece of lint off his jacket. He and Musk are proud of that. They say it will save money.
Witness his cavalier decision to significantly reduce indirect payments to grantees of the National Institutes of Health. He tried exactly the same thing in 2018, which angered a more stouthearted Congress, which passed a law prohibiting such action. Yesterday, Judd Legum, of Popular Information scooped that yesterday morning NIH had written a memo to all grantees acknowledging that its funding freeze was illegal and directing staff to resume issuing grants.
And witness the hatred and bigotry he and his followers have shown to our fellow citizens who are outside the mainstream. Trump went out of his way to terrorize the transgender community in order to make his MAGA Christian nationalists happy. Well, he got trans women out of college sports, despite the NCAA reporting that out of 530,000 student-athletes, fewer than ten are transgender.
I can sum up the threat of Donald Trump by saying it is a short step from rounding up all undocumented aliens to rounding up legal immigrants you don’t like to rounding up political opponents who become a nuisance, to rounding up judges who don’t rule in your favor to rounding up…anyone.
Authoritarianism is alive and well at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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¹ The pain from this wound would bother Göring for the rest of his life and is the reason he became a lifelong opioid addict.