Have you ever heard of Marinus van der Lubbe? Probably not, but were it not for this young, itinerant  Dutch construction worker with poor eyesight, the Second World War might never have happened. His is a story of a lone-wolf agitator. It is also a metaphor and a cautionary tale for our time. Let me tell you about it.

1933

Marinus van der Lubbe was born in 1909 and grew up in Leiden in utter poverty. His drunken father deserted the family, and, by the time he was 12, his mother had died. He trained as a mason, where he discovered the labour movement and joined the Communist Youth Party. By 1931, he was working his way across Europe towards the Soviet Union to be as close as possible to his communist idols.

But along the way, he became disillusioned with the communists’ strict code of discipline and authoritarian structure. He joined an anarchic-syndicalist group that advocated “propaganda of the deed, not the word.” Reaching Poland, he turned around and headed into Germany, reaching Berlin in mid-February 1933.

Two weeks before van der Lubbe arrived in Berlin, Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of the German Reich by President von Hindenburg.

The Nazi Party had grown enormously since its drubbing in the federal elections of 1928, in which it had won only 12 seats in a Reichstag of 491. Four years later, in the July 1932 elections, it won 230 seats, accounting for 37.3% of the total vote, the most of any of the numerous parties. However, without a positive plan for the country’s future,  and with a German unemployment rate of more than 30%, the Nazis could not capitalize on their new-found popularity.

The country descended into severe turmoil. In September, the Reichstag voted “no confidence” in the government of Franz von Papen and called for new elections in November, elections in which the Nazis lost 34 seats.

Nevertheless, with Joseph Goebbels’ brilliant propaganda and shrewd political maneuvering, Hitler managed to convince von Hindenburg to name him Chancellor on 30 January.

The only plan the Nazis had at that point was Brownshirt terrorism. Having achieved power, they had no idea what to do next. They needed something to energize their movement, and Marinus van der Lubbe, the dedicated and committed anarchist newly arrived in Berlin, was about to provide it.

He believed it would take a spectacular event to rouse the unemployed to break free from their chains and take spontaneous mass action themselves.

He decided to burn down the Reichstag.

On the 26th and 27th of February, he spent every Reichsmark he had on matches and firestarters. On the evening of the 28th, he hid in the Reichstag until everyone had left for the day, and at about 9:00 pm, set fire to the building. After lighting a number of fires throughout the building, he was apprehended by police.

He had done a superb job. The fire brigade did what it could, but the place was a tinderbox and burned brilliantly all night.

His interrogation made it perfectly clear he had acted alone. One of his questioners later said, “His eyes gleamed with fanaticism.”

Immediately after learning of the blaze, Hitler, Goebbels, and Hermann Göring met in the Party’s offices with a clear view of the conflagration. Hitler was excited, even ecstatic. Rudolf Diels, the non-Nazi head of the Prussian political police who had witnessed van der Lubbe’s interrogation, tried to tell Hitler that this was a one-person crime, and a crazy person at that, but Hitler wouldn’t listen. He blamed the Communists, an influential political party he hated, and the winner of 89 Reichstag seats in the recent elections.

Looking straight at Diels and the two others, Hitler set in motion the full power that was to become the Third Reich, saying, “There will be no more mercy now; anyone who stands in our way will be butchered. The German people won’t have any understanding for leniency. Every Communist functionary will be shot where he is found. The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night. Everybody in league with the Communists is to be arrested.”

A few hours later, police squads dug out lists of Communists prepared months, even years previously, for the coming ban on the party, and set off in cars and vans to haul them out of bed. There were thousands of them. The German police, however, were ever so efficient at finding them.

Meanwhile, Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the interior, saw an opportunity. He proposed suspending several sections of the Weimar constitution, particularly those governing freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly and association. He also proposed to Hitler allowing the police to detain people indefinitely without a court order.

At a meeting the following morning, the cabinet unanimously approved the proposal. Hitler made plain his intention of destroying the Communists and anyone else who dared defy his plans. He included the Jews, specifically. “Our struggle must not be made dependent on judicial considerations,” he said. Is that sounding familiar?

Marinus van der Lubbe was tried, found guilty, and executed the following January.

2025

The incompetence and gleeful brutality of the Trump Administration have been on full display for nearly 100 days. The American people are noticing and registering disapproval.

Trump’s job approval rating is 11 points underwater (44% approve, 55% disapprove) in a new Fox News survey. While 55% of registered voters approve of his handling of border security, that is “the only issue where his ratings are in positive territory.” He’s at -15 on taxes (38% approve, 53% disapprove), -18 on the economy (38% to 56%), -25 on tariffs (33% to 58%), and -26 on inflation (33% to 59%).

The Administration is flailing. Every day seems like the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, except those amateurs knew what they were doing.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before Watergate, Richard Nixon always seemed able to pull a surprise out of his presidential magic bag when he needed the country to look away from some current horrendoma. He would show us the bluebird of happiness had gone to some new and better place.

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to have a magic bag, much less a magical bluebird.

Right now, 96 days in, not much of Trumpism is resonating around the country. It doesn’t help that Trump changes his positions more often than weather changes in New England. What’s a punch-drunk president to do?

And that is the question.

He needs his own Reichstag Fire — a calamitous event that would galvanize the country around a strong leader who could demonstrate solid control. He’s looking, but hasn’t found it yet.

It could have been Ukraine. Ukraine is burning, but Trump is nowhere to be found. Vladimir Putin leads him around a circus ring by the nose. Trump’s “negotiators,” completely unprepared for the job, seem like kindly Mr. Chase, who would give us third-graders free candy on the way home from school, hoping our parents would come into his store later, which they never did. “Have another Babe Ruth, Tommie.”

He could have marshalled the skills on display at his rallies to mobilize the country for a noble cause — sending Russian troops back to Russia. His MAGA base would not have understood or appreciated that, but the non-MAGA two-thirds of the rest of the country would have. It would have ennobled him, elevated him in history. He didn’t do that, he couldn’t. Instead, he does his best to sell a brave country to a tyrant for a song. In return, he’ll steal some vague mineral rights and crow that he ended a war. Nobel Peace Prize stuff.

Meanwhile, he looks elsewhere for his Reichstag Fire.

Perhaps migrants? But migrants aren’t cooperating. Their numbers are down and, much to the Administration’s disappointment, they seem lawful.

We should all hope Trump is not handed his very own Reichstag Fire here in the U.S. We should all hope he doesn’t find a plausible excuse, as Hitler did, to suspend the freedoms we hold dear, the ones our ancestors fought and died for.

We should all hope.

Across America, we see groups and organizations, most of them small and local, that do what they can to demonstrate the respect we owe veterans. For example, here in Massachusetts, in Braintree, the home of John Adams, the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra is dedicating the final performance of its season this coming Saturday night to the 15.8 million veterans still with us. Although their numbers have been declining in recent years, falling 25% since 2010, the devotion to country of these men and women has never wavered.

I intend to be in that audience. Here’s why.

Very shortly after 1967 had become 1968, and after I had done everything I could to avoid anything to do with Vietnam, two friends arrived back in America. They had been killed in action. Now, like more than 50,000 others, they would forever be remembered as shrouded in military olive green.

I felt a sense of shame and, with the impetuosity of youth, visited an Army recruitment office in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and enlisted in the Army’s Officer Candidate School.

When I told my father what I had done that evening at dinner, he was horrified. The first thing he said was, “Tom, have you lost your mind?”

Maybe.

But I understood why he asked that question with such disgust. In mid-1943, he had been drafted for World War II. In January 1944, as a member of the 3rd Division, he had been in the first wave of the Battle of Anzio, the Allies’ Operation Shingle, launched amphibiously on the western edge of central Italy.

As my father and about thirty other soldiers dropped into the LST that would carry them to shore for the invasion, his Lieutenant handed him a box and told him to carry it — carefully — to shore. Asked what was in it that was so valuable, the Lieutenant replied, “Nitroglycerin bombs.”

When they exited the LST and hit the water, the first thing my father got rid of, pushing it as far as he could back out to sea, but ever so gently, were those bombs. Sometimes, war has its humorous, surreal moments.

He was among those who scaled the cliffs of Anzio. Then, after being held down by fierce German resistance for three months, the Americans broke through and, in May, captured and liberated Rome.

Anzio cost the lives of 5,538 Americans, with another 18,000 wounded. The dead are buried in the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery, just east of the town of Anzio. Like Normandy and Arlington National Cemetery, it consists of neatly lined-up white crosses with the names of the dead.

The 3rd Division then headed up and into France on their way to Germany.

My father never made it to Germany. After every one of his squadmates had been killed or seriously wounded, he had his own meeting with a German bullet. He was shot through the shoulder by a round that ended up an eighth of an inch from his spine. He was left to die in a corridor of an Army MASH hospital in France.

He fooled everyone. He did not die, but he did spend eight months rehabbing in an Army hospital back in the U.S. The bullet that got him remained next to his spine the rest of his life. He never would raise his right arm above his shoulder again. However, this high school All-American football player did learn to throw a football, sidearm, to his sons with real snap to it.

He, like so many others, had become a living veteran.

I spent nearly two years in Vietnam, but I do not think a single moment of that experience could rival the horror of what my father and all the other members of the Greatest Generation went through on their way to saving humanity from the depravity and outright evil of the Third Reich.

To give “the last full measure” so that others may live in peace is often not appreciated by those who have never experienced the horror of war. I suppose that’s understandable. However, as that is the highest gift one person can give another, we need frequent reminding. We need to realize that warfare is to be avoided at all costs and never venerated, let alone glorified.

My father and the other 16.4 million Americans who fought to send Hitler to the fifth circle of Hell, as well as those who followed them through peace and battle, deserve the utmost respect from every American, regardless of ideology or political views.

Saturday night’s concert in Braintree will have the utmost meaning for me.

Donald Trump insanely pulls the country even deeper into the rabbit hole.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s two most significant and repeated promises to the American people were that he would cure the country’s economic problems and end the war in Ukraine immediately upon taking office. Actually, he said he would end the war “on day one.”

Earlier this week, 87 days into Trump 2.0, a Russian missile attack on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih killed at least 18 people and left dozens wounded, Ukrainian officials said. Nine of the dead were children, said President Volodymyr Zelensky, who grew up in Kryvyi Rih. And that, friends, probably explains the location of the attack.

Regarding President Trump’s promise to end the war “on day one,” no one can deny that after nearly three months, his stunningly persuasive diplomatic skills, as well as his close personal bromance with ex-KGB killer Vladimir Putin, have moved Russia to meaningful negotiations toward a just peace with only nine more kids murdered.

With respect to his pledge to end the country’s economic woes — the ones it didn’t have — on Wednesday of this week, the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq all continued their slide down negative alley after Fed Chairman Jerome Powell delivered a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in which he noted a potentially grim situation developing from Trump’s helter-skelter tariffs in which prices are pushed higher. At the same time, growth and a likely weakening in the labor market leave both inflation and employment further away from the Fed’s desired levels.

Powell called Trump’s tariff plans “fundamental changes” that don’t provide businesses and economists with any clear parallels to study. What they do provide is uncertainty, the one thing business leaders hate most.

And in a profoundly ironic note, Powell intimated that the U.S. began the year with the Biden administration handing off to Donald Trump nearly full employment with inflation expected to continue falling to the Fed’s target of 2%.

What was Donald Trump’s reaction to Powell’s speech? Three things. First, America’s self-appointed world’s greatest economist said the Chairman of the Fed didn’t know what he was talking about; second, he said Powell’s “termination couldn’t come soon enough.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has spoken with Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor, about potentially ousting Powell before his term ends next year and possibly selecting Warsh as his replacement, according to people familiar with the matter. Warsh’s advice? Let Powell be.

The third thing our president did was what he always does when faced with potential catastrophe. He changed the subject by launching a few hand grenades at enemies he’s worked hard to create: federal judges and elite universities. And one university in particular, one that has called his bluff — Harvard.

Trump is not the first wannabe dictator to try to emasculate Universities and their academic freedom. He could take lessons from Adolf Hitler. Within four months of assuming power, Hitler had successfully gone after every professor and university leader with whom he differed ideologically in his Aryan cultural revolution. In 1933 alone, the first year of Nazi power, Jews like Albert Einstein, Gustav Hertz, and Max Born, as well as 20 past or future Nobel Prize winners left the country. They became migrants to America.

With the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels and the Brownshirts led by Hermann Göring and Ernst Röhm, Hitler got his revolution, and America was gifted some astonishing brainpower that contributed significantly to creating the American Century.

Today, Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt provides the propaganda, migrants take the place of Jews, El Salvador delivers the concentration camps, and ICE stands in for the Brownshirts. It’s much more subtle this time; it’s been modernized. There’s less overt, blood-in-the-street violence, but it’s still the same old song.

Right on cue, in a letter sent to Harvard a week ago, the Trump administration outlined demands that Harvard would have to satisfy to maintain its funding relationship with the federal government. These demands include audits of academic programs and departments, as well as of students, faculty, and staff, and require changes to the University’s governance structure and hiring practices — all familiar from 90 years ago.

Unlike Columbia, Harvard said “No” to Trump’s demands that threaten $9 billion in research funding, arguing that the changes pushed by the government exceed its lawful authority and infringe on both the University’s freedom of thought and its educational mission.

“The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote in a message to the community.

He added: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” In other words, if the University went along with the regime’s demands, it would still be Harvard, but in name only.

And then Trump brought out the big guns. He gleefully assigned his wolfpack of ruthless public policy vampires the task of bringing Harvard to its knees, which is his one-and-only modus operandi for dealing with anyone or anything that pushes back against him. Retribution has been the fingerprint of his life.

Last Monday night, the Trump administration’s Antisemitism Task Force said it was stripping more than $2 billion in research funding from Harvard and cutting more than $60 million in contracts. These funds had already been awarded, but not yet conveyed. This is precisely what Trump’s DOGE has done with every agency it has done its best to eviscerate on the way to our own cultural revolution.

Next, through Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Trump ordered the IRS to investigate whether Harvard has abused its non-profit tax status. Federal law prohibits the president from “directly or indirectly” telling the Internal Revenue Service to conduct specific tax investigations. Nonetheless, the I.R.S. is still weighing whether to revoke the exemption, according to people familiar with the matter.  It would not strain credulity to assume that the IRS, like every government agency, has been brought to heel by Trump and his MAGA sycophants.

This morning, the Boston Globe reported the Trump Administration is now reviewing foreign gifts and donations to the university. It demanded that Harvard’s leaders turn over records.

As if all this weren’t enough, the Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday it may shut down Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. Harvard has a higher percentage of international students than the average American college. About a quarter of its roughly 25,000 students, both graduate and undergraduate, are foreign.

If the IRS strips Harvard of its tax-exempt status, and an appeal by the University fails, it would cost the largest endowment in the nation dearly. It would also cost the world, as Harvard would be less able to conduct its medical and scientific research with the same vigor it has since the end of World War II, when the highly successful partnership between university research and the federal government began.

If the Trump Administration succeeds in prohibiting international students from enrolling, the University, the countries from which students matriculate, and America, itself, will suffer a crippling body blow, and all because of spite.

This week, George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, said that biomedicine has long depended on the over 75-year partnership between the federal government and America’s universities, a partnership that has paid off for Americans in life-saving advances. “Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere,” he said. “All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom.”

True, but apparently not all of us care.

Let’s give a cheer for Harvard.

Lest we not grasp the enormity of the stakes in Trump’s infantile battle with Harvard, perhaps a quick review is in order, just like in a college classroom.

It was 28 October 1636, nearly 389 years ago. On that day, a vote by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony approved the founding of America’s first college, Harvard.

John Adams was a distinguished Harvard graduate, prominent American founder, second U.S. President, and principal author of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution  — the first state constitution in the nation and ultimately the model for the Constitution Donald Trump is now doing all he can to blow up. Adams included in his State Constitution a recognition of Harvard’s role in educating its citizens for public service.

Harvard has produced eight U.S. presidents, the most of any college or university in the United States. It has more Nobel laureates among its alumni, faculty, and affiliated researchers than any other school — 161. The next closest is MIT with 97. The University is responsible for more medical and scientific breakthroughs than any other institution, beginning with Benjamin Waterhouse’s introduction of the smallpox vaccine to the United States in 1799. Harvard researchers invented anesthesia, the electrocardiograph, heart valve surgery, the iron lung, the Pap smear, and many other groundbreaking medical advancements.

Its critics decry Harvard as an “elite” institution. It is. It is the most elite educational institution in America for all the right reasons.

Yes, it is wealthy with an endowment of $53 billion. But with that endowment, it has done much good in the world, saving millions of lives.

And yes, its faculty can be smarmy and often act like the smartest people in the room, which, in most cases, they are. I admit that Harvard could do with a little more humility and a lot less pride.

Still, since 1636, Harvard has set the standard for education in America. What a cataclysmic tragedy if Trump succeeds in hollowing out the soul of this great University.

I would note here that Donald Trump is not among its graduates.