Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt

The fact is, however, that even the most hesitant and incredulous of them are - at last - beginning to admit this sad reality and talk about it. Better late than never, one can only say. However, the confusion persists: is Trump a fascist just because he strikes poses reminiscent of Mussolini? And Musk because he gives the Nazi salute? Of course, all these behaviors are not to be overlooked, but calling someone a fascist or a neo-Nazi is full of too many implications, and requires much more than references to the behaviors and outward signs of the person concerned.

So, it has to be said that the best proof of the fascism of Trump and his friends is that offered by their actions, by what they have been doing since they moved into the White House. And what the triumvirate of Trump, Musk and Vance has been doing for the past two months is reminiscent of what Hitler, Goering and Goebbels did during their first two months in power. And here’s what it’s all about, with the help of the excellent and very useful book “Le monde nazi 1919-1945” [1] , whose authors Johann Chapoutot, Christian Ingrao and Nicolas Patin opportunely warn us that the Nazis of 1933 were not yet the genocidal Nazis they later became, they were not yet “the organizers of Treblinka and Birkenau, the designers of Auschwitz...They are people to be reckoned with”. So, with that advance warning firmly in mind, let’s compare what’s comparable, Trump’s and Hitler’s first two months in power.

First of all, there’s the extreme eagerness, common to both Trump and Hitler, to strike simultaneously fast and hard on all fronts, in order to create faits accomplis and not give opponents time to organize. With Trump, we have an avalanche (several hundred) of executive orders signed and proudly displayed by himself. In Hitler’s case, we have “a rain of decree-laws descending on Germany”. In both cases, we see the same concern of autocrats to “bring their societies to heel”, to give them no time to understand what’s happening to them. And in both cases, there are the avalanches of decrees that are already radically transforming the two countries in the record time of two months (!), on the initiative of the leader alone, and without the Council of Ministers meeting more than once in 60 days! And all this in flagrant violation of the law, including the constitution...

But who are those who, first and foremost, are the target of these hundreds of decree-laws by both Trump and Hitler? It’s the State and its civil servants who need to be purged en masse, by the hundreds of thousands! Why is that? Well, to eliminate those who are “enemies” to the Nazis: Jews and “Marxists” and other leftists. Or those whose professional activity (climate change, gender, democratic rights and freedoms, social security, minorities, humanitarianism, etc.) is deemed incompatible with Trumpism. And also, to bring the rest into line, and above all to terrorize and paralyze all the others, by creating and propagating a climate of fear and general insecurity!

While this veritable purge of civil servants occupies a prominent place in the more-than-authoritarian project of the two autocrats, it has to be said that Trump and his followers are “innovating” and not following the example of the German Nazis to the letter when they attack not just teachers but education as such, even going so far as to do away with the Ministry of Education! The same goes for research and science in general, which are not to the taste of Trumpism, which ostensibly prefers...biblical references. It’s the obscurantist, boorish, antiscience and religiously fundamentalist side of Trumpism (and of Trump himself) that sets it apart from the Nazis, who preferred to indoctrinate and enlist rather than fire academics. That’s why the ranks of the SS were full, at least until 1943, of young lawyers, jurists, science graduates and even academics...

If Trump is as eager as Hitler to “normalize” the army, the services and the police, it has to be said that he does so much more brutally than the German dictator. Where the German Führer chose to soften up his generals, limiting himself to dismissing those in the police force who were very markedly left-wing, Trump prefers to purge the entire general staff and the entire Secret Service and FBI directorates right away!

On the other hand, at a distance of 90 years, both Trumpism and National Socialism have attacked their countries’ judges and justice systems with equal priority and brutality, trampling underfoot the separation of powers. But, where Hitler carried out a great purge eliminating “non-Aryan” judges in one fell swoop, Trump has so far limited himself to verbally attacking, albeit with rare violence, those judges who resist him, while dismissing or forcing to resign dozens of prosecutors and offering thousands of Justice Department employees compensation if they decide to resign.

Another priority of these two freedom-destroying regimes is their eagerness to withdraw from international organizations. Hitler did it right away by getting Nazi Germany out of the League of Nations, while, for the time being, Trump prefers to withdraw his country from several international treaties and organizations (climate, health, human rights...), while his right-hand man Elon Musk announces that the US is waiting for the right moment to withdraw from the UN and NATO NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO ensures US military protection for the Europeans in case of aggression, but above all it gives the USA supremacy over the Western Bloc. Western European countries agreed to place their armed forces within a defence system under US command, and thus recognize the preponderance of the USA. NATO was founded in 1949 in Washington, but became less prominent after the end of the Cold War. In 2002, it had 19 members: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, the USA, to which were added Greece and Turkey in 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955 (replaced by Unified Germany in 1990), Spain in 1982, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in 1999. ...

But even more revealing of the two regimes’ elective affinities is their shared visceral hatred for the most basic democratic rights and freedoms, including freedom of expression. Thus, once in power, Trump and Hitler attacked the media head-on and as a matter of priority, Hitler by occupying their premises, seizing their printing presses and firing their journalists, and Trump by denying several of them access to information and openly threatening to wipe out the others if they didn’t submit to his wishes.

All that said, what most unites Hitler, Trump and their acolytes is their common racist delusion! Mainly anti-Jewish and “incidentally” anti-gypsy and anti-gay racism for Hitler, and mainly anti-migrant and “incidentally” anti-gay, anti-trans and misogynist racism for Trump. Thus, Jews for one and migrants for the other serve as perfect scapegoats for all the ills, real or imagined, of our societies. This is to absolve the leaders and their regimes of their failures and responsibilities, but also to offer the Jewish or migrant victims of this state racism as fodder for the racist and supremacist base of these two regimes. An eloquent detail: our rulers, who condemn the racism of Trump and Hitler, refuse to welcome the Jews driven out by one and the migrants driven out by the other. Obviously, to the great satisfaction of two tyrants who, while denouncing, for once quite rightly, the hypocrisy of our Western liberals...feel they have a free hand to deport and lock up in camps formerly the Jews, and now the migrants.

And finally, how can we not think that Trump is inspired by Hitler’s example when we see him making Canada his... Austria, to which he wants to impose his... Anschluss, to annex it and transform it, “by all means”, into the 51^st state of the United States of America? Or when he replaces Hitler’s infamous lebensraum (living space) with his own U.S. “national security needs” to “justify” his claims on Panama or Greenland, which, by the way, are no match for Hitler’s claims on Czechoslovakia or Poland?

And finally, what can we say about the ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by Trump and Vance in the White House, which resembles the ambush of Czechoslovak President Emil Hacha by Hitler and Goering in the Berlin Chancellery in 1939? The only difference is that while Zelensky resisted the threats and humiliation, poor Hacha, terrorized and on the verge of a heart attack, gave in, signalling the end of his country...

Conclusion: For the past two months, everything has been happening in the White House as if Trump were following almost to the letter the advice of an action manual that Hitler himself had written. Which is why those who persist in denying that Trump, Vance, Musk and their friends are full-blooded fascists are more and more reminiscent of all those who, in 1939, persisted in saying that “His Excellency Chancellor Hitler” was perhaps a little too restless, but that he would calm down, because in reality, all he wanted was peace. The rest is history...