Trump 2.0 Unleashed

For my mental health, I’ve been purposely avoiding the news since the 2024 presidential election. I mean, I haven’t been trying hard, but I’m certainly no longer the political news junkie I was leading up to November 5. However, I get exposed via two vectors: headlines in the New York Times app on my way to the Wordle and Connections, and on social media, specifically Threads and Bluesky. So, I’m not entirely oblivious.

As I slowly dip my toe into the news cycle, I have been reading and listening to a few long-form pieces. The first is the story of how Hitler destroyed the German democracy legally using the constitution in just 53 days.

Historian Timothy W. Ryback, writing for The Atlantic:

By January 1933, the fallibilities of the Weimar Republic—whose 181-article constitution framed the structures and processes for its 18 federated states—were as obvious as they were abundant. Having spent a decade in opposition politics, Hitler knew firsthand how easily an ambitious political agenda could be scuttled. He had been co-opting or crushing right-wing competitors and paralyzing legislative processes for years, and for the previous eight months, he had played obstructionist politics, helping to bring down three chancellors and twice forcing the president to dissolve the Reichstag and call for new elections. When he became chancellor himself, Hitler wanted to prevent others from doing unto him what he had done unto them.

That sets the scene. Rereading the article today, at the start of February, and at the end of Trump’s first two weeks in his second term, I find the similarities striking.

Ryback:

Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists.

Trump won the 2024 election by just 1.5% in the popular vote. It is the “fifth smallest margin of victory in the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Within days of taking office, Trump is already remaking the Justice Department to his liking and installing loyalists.

Hitler appointed Hermann Göring to his cabinet and made him Prussia’s acting state interior minister.

“I cannot rely on police to go after the red mob if they have to worry about facing disciplinary action when they are simply doing their job,” Göring explained. He accorded them his personal backing to shoot with impunity. “When they shoot, it is me shooting,” Göring said. “When someone is lying there dead, it is I who shot them.”

Then, later in March, Hitler wiped the slates of his National Socialist supporters clean:

…an Article 48 decree was issued amnestying National Socialists convicted of crimes, including murder, perpetrated “in the battle for national renewal.” Men convicted of treason were now national heroes.

Upon taking office, Trump signed an executive order granting pardons and commutations for the January 6th rioters and murderers.

The similarities are uncanny.

A large part of what made Hitler’s dismantling of the Weimar Republic possible was because of the German Reichstag—their legislature. In a high-turnout election, Hitler’s Nazi party received 44 percent of the vote.

Although the National Socialists fell short of Hitler’s promised 51 percent, managing only 44 percent of the electorate—despite massive suppression, the Social Democrats lost just a single Reichstag seat—the banning of the Communist Party positioned Hitler to form a coalition with the two-thirds Reichstag majority necessary to pass the empowering law.

They took this as a mandate to storm government offices across the country, causing their political opponents to flee.

While Trump and his cronies haven’t exactly dissolved our Congress yet, it has already happened on the Republican side in a radical MAGA makeover.

Many Republican politicians have been primaried to their right and have lost. And now, with the wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, on Trump’s side, he has vowed to fund a primary challenge against any Republican who dares defy Trump’s agenda.

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of Ezra Klein’s columns and podcasts. In a recent episode of his show, he dissects the first few days of the new administration. On the emerging oligarchy:

The thing that has most got me thinking about oligarchy is Elon Musk, who in putting his money and his money is astonishing in its size and his attentional power because he used that money to take control of X. Yes. The means of communication. The means of communication in putting that in service of Trump to a very large degree. And then being at the Trump rallies, he has become clearly the most influential other figure in the Trump administration. The deal has not just been that maybe Trump listens to him a bit on policy, it’s that he becomes a kind of co-ruler.

In his closing for that episode, Klein leaves us with a very pessimistic diagnosis:

in many ways, Donald Trump was saved in his first term by all the people who did not allow him to do things that he otherwise wanted to do, like shoot missiles into Mexico or unleash the National Guard to begin shooting on protesters en masse. Now he is unleashed, and not just to make policy or make foreign policy decisions, but to enrich himself. And understanding a popular vote victory of a point and a half, where you end up with the smallest House majority since the Great Depression, where you lose half of the Senate races in battleground states, and where not a single governor’s mansion changes hands as a kind of victory that is blessed by God for unsparing ambition and greatness, that’s the kind of mismatch between public mood and presidential energy that can, I guess it could create greatness. It seems also like it can create catastrophe.

I, for one, will be hopeful but realistic that America will end up in catastrophe and our fears of democracy dying will come to fruition.

P.S. I didn’t have a good spot to include Ezra Klein’s January 28, 2025 episode, but it’s a very good listen to understand where the larger MAGA movement is headed.