Is Trump “America’s Hitler”?

Donald Trump is sometimes compared to Adolf Hitler in his narcissism and authoritarianism. Tom Zoellner looks at German history for parallels and contradictions.

By Tom ZoellnerOctober 11, 2024

• History

• Politics

WE ALL KNOW this story. A charismatic figure with no previous role in government and a narcissistic disposition builds a national audience by wrapping himself in the flag, creating a cult of personality around himself, holding emotional rallies, dehumanizing his opponents, empowering armed militias, threatening bloodbaths, attempting at least one coup, lying incessantly, and telling his working-class followers that ethnic minorities and urban elites are the source of all their problems.

The Donald Trump–Adolf Hitler comparison is unavoidable, even for a casual consumer of history, and one of the most sensitive rhetorical trip wires has become a component of interpreting American political news in the 2020s. When Donald Trump shares videos that call for a “unified Reich,” or is reported by former chief of staff John Kelly to have said that Hitler “did some good things,” or calls immigrants “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country,” or when leaked texts show that his own vice-presidential pick once feared that Trump would be “an American Hitler,” it calls the question to the forefront: just how deep or valid is the comparison?

Such a question demands not just that we study Trump and his methods but also that we reconsider how ordinary Germans of the 1930s viewed their rising prophet in the years leading up to World War II and the Nazi-run genocide. A review of books about the ascent of Germany’s Third Reich, including one published this year, yields a way to look at the question that goes beyond playground insults.

But first, a disclaimer. The ghosts of the past are always haunting the present—this is a given—but the trick also works backward. The conditions of the present will distort our view of the past. This is true of writer and reader alike; the slippage is helpless and inevitable. We cannot escape the oxygen of our own time. But this bias does not make history inaccurate in the literal sense of the word—primary documents back it all up. Rather, the historian’s art lies in the systematic arrangement of facts. The best version constructs general truths about humanity from the grab bag of billions of possible data points.

The way to read Peter Ross Range’s 2016 book 1924: The Year That Made Hitler in 2024 is to let the text fling out—without further commentary—the striking details of what happened before and after the attempted coup called the Beer Hall Putsch landed a young Hitler in a Munich courtroom and gave him the opportunity to paint himself as a patriotic martyr.

Germany was in a despairing moment. In the wreckage and humiliation of World War I, the four-century-old Hohenzollern monarchy had been replaced by a republic that lacked popular confidence. Extreme voices on the left and right—represented by communists and the conservative Völkisch movement, respectively—captured the imaginations of unemployed young men, many of them from demobilized army units. Adolf Hitler was one of these men, a draft dodger from Austria who was judged “too weak” for service in 1913 and “unfit to handle weapons.” But he went on to serve as a message runner on the western front. After the war, he found his calling as an orator charged with giving “citizenship training” to army veterans to persuade them against joining communist groups.

As a friend later recalled, Hitler “liked to talk, and talked without pause,” not really having conversations but engaging in “a monologue that soon tired and bored the listener,” as historian Joachim C. Fest described in The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (1963). Hitler’s bosses sent him as a spy to the German Workers Party, where he broke cover and spoke against Bavarian secession, turning a rival speaker, according to Range, into “a wet poodle” of humiliation under a stream of invective and half-truths. A party co-founder recognized Hitler’s polemical gift: “That guy has a mouth on him! We could really use him!”

Hitler’s audience grew. The proud nation of Germany needed a new foundation without the “racial tuberculosis” of Jews, he insisted, as he refashioned the German Workers’ Party into the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nazis) and turned it into his own personal concern, a Führerpartei, in which the only acceptable language was total agreement with Hitler. His aesthetic tastes ran to the garish and bold, even tacky, and his followers styled themselves as ultramasculine avatars, with flags and party uniforms inherited from the racist Thule Society.

But Hitler himself, a “volcanic store of nervous energy,” in the words of an acquaintance, was hardly an Übermensch in his personal habits. In fact, he was lazy, frequently sleeping until noon, missing appointments, poring over press clips about himself, and showing no patience for the details of governing. What he loved were the crowds and the bombastic speeches in which he fit everything into an explanatory framework: it was always someone else’s fault. “Hitler touches on many questions,” marveled his propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels. “But he makes the solution very simple.” That it did not conform to the reality of Germany’s situation did not seem to matter to his followers, who dismissed any attempt to fact-check him.

“Hitler’s talents were ideally suited for a visceral connection with mobs of people, who went home with an afterglow of political enthusiasm undiluted by a television or radio report,” writes Range. Hitler detested all forms of press or media not under his control, calling reporters Lügenpresse, the “lying press,” and denouncing the “poison kitchen” of the dissenting Münchener Post. Eventually, he ordered its staff arrested and its office trashed.

At this point, it would be instructive to pause to acknowledge the plain differences between 1920s Adolf Hitler and 2020s Donald Trump. The former enjoyed a high level of cooperation between his Brownshirt militias and the Bavarian state police, as well as the Reichswehr armed forces. The far-right militias and movements that Trump has praised—including the notorious Proud Boys—have no such level of dialogue with local police or US military, despite a few reported incidents and even though many members are veterans.

Some of the more esoteric movements like QAnon that fetishize Trump as a mystical savior bear a surface resemblance to the occult trappings of the Nazi Party: the fascination with symbolism, the nationalistic millennialism, the belief in shadowy “theys” who are always trying to harm you, the anti-intellectual style that author Jeff Sharlet has called the “gnosis” of Trumpism, “a form of secret knowledge reserved for the faithful, a ‘truth’ you must have the eyes to see in order to believe.” The difference here is that Hitler actively encouraged the occultism, attending to it with a loving artist’s care, whereas Trump has been a passive beneficiary of the strange folk beliefs that surround him.

Hitler’s relationships with women—a source of mystery for Allied intelligence agents and future biographers alike—also did not include the well-documented violence and boorishness of Trump’s prepolitical life. Women were drawn to Hitler, but he evinced almost no sexual desire. “Believe me, he is an absolute neuter,” an early admirer, Helene Hanfstaengl, assured her husband. He favored the adulation of crowds. “I will fight on and never lose sight of the goal I’ve set myself to be the pioneer of the great German liberation movement,” Hitler swore. But, like Trump, so much of what he tried to do was incompetent, vainglorious, and impulsive.

On the night of November 8, 1923, Hitler and his paramilitary allies surrounded the Bürgerbräukeller hall in Munich where the state commissioner was giving a speech. He burst into the hall, shot his pistol into the ceiling, and declared, “The national revolution has begun! The building is surrounded by six hundred heavily armed men! No one is allowed to leave.” But instead of a triumphant march on Berlin, Hitler inspired a police crackdown in which 20 were killed, and he was arrested on treason charges. In the midst of it all, he looked like “a forlorn little waiter” instead of a conquering hero. There were no detailed plans for a revolution. “[L]ike so much Hitler would do in his political career,” Range writes, “he painted the dream first, then tried to fill in the facts.” Within two months, he appeared before Judge Georg Neithardt at the Munich People’s Court, and the story took another turn.

Range describes a courtroom out of control, what Trump might have preferred over Judge Juan Merchan’s disciplined New York courtroom, where he was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump chose not to testify and could only glower from his table, occasionally even falling asleep. Hitler represented himself, and the conservative Neithardt—perhaps trying to protect friends in the Bavarian police who had gotten themselves caught up in the Beer Hall Putsch—praised the defendant as a patriot and allowed him to make a four-hour opening statement that was less a criminal defense than a diatribe against the corrupt Weimar Republic.

Newspapers lapped up Hitler’s invective. He framed his treason against the state as an honorable sacrifice, even as Neithardt proved incapable of corking the defendant. “It was impossible to block his flood of words,” he explained, an admission that television interviewers of the 45th president might well make. The rest of the five-week trial, writes Range, featured an aggrieved Hitler as the star of the show, “pouring forth a deluge of words, gestures, anecdotes, historical allusions, and personal biography that overwhelmed the courtroom and seemed to carry his audience along on resurgent waves of outrage, passion, and self-righteousness—the familiar Hitlerian torrent.”

Just as Trump has thus far been able to dodge serious consequences from the remaining 54 felony counts against him—even staying out of jail after convictions on the 34 others—Hitler was given an astonishingly light sentence of five years. Though Neithardt was required to order Hitler deported to his native Austria, he allowed him to stay because of his “noble” intentions and his service in World War I. It certainly looked like selective justice for the privileged. “The trial has proved that a plot against the Constitution of the Reich is not considered a serious crime in Bavaria,” said The Times of London.

At Landsberg Prison, Hitler was treated more like a guest of honor than a convict. He was given access to a typewriter, permitted lavish gifts from the outside, served breakfast on a white tablecloth, and allowed plenty of garden walks with his fellow ideological prisoners. He also used the time to write his book-length rant, Mein Kampf, which made him famous throughout Germany. (Here is another difference from Trump, who did not actually write his name-making book, 1987’s Trump: The Art of the Deal, an honor that belongs to ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, who has since expressed profound remorse.) And it should be underlined that Hitler’s success in reaching a wide audience had as much to do with heaping scorn on his own adopted country as it did with praising its supposed lost greatness. “What a poor excuse of a nation!” he said about his fellow Germans. “[T]he coffers are empty.” When compared with Trump’s bombastic laments about “burning cities” awash in “bloodshed, chaos, and violent crime” run by “thugs and tyrants” determined to drive real Americans into “servitude and ruin,” it begins to take on the contours of a guessing game: which deranged politician said what? The historian Fritz Stern summed up the 1920s Kulturkampf—that is, “cultural struggle,” or in 21st-century American parlance, the “culture war”—as “the politics of cultural despair.” “Make America Great Again” has that same bleak and backward ring.

Range concludes his study of Hitler by calling him “a crisis junkie” who needed a whirlwind of activity, threats, and rhetoric surrounding him at all times. If it wasn’t there, he created it. “Action was his aphrodisiac, his catnip, his default,” he writes. “His impetuosity often overwhelmed all other considerations.” The parallels with impulsive Trumpian tweetstorms and verbal barrages are unavoidable here. Michael Gerson observed in 2017 that the 45th president requires drama the way alcoholics crave liquor. “Other presidents would be restrained by the prospect of social division and political chaos,” he wrote. “For Trump, these may be incentives. He seems to thrive in bedlam. But the anarchy that sustains him damages the institutions around him—a cost for which he cares nothing.”

Hitler’s own attack on the institutions of state receives detailed examination in Timothy W. Ryback’s new book Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power. After serving just nine months of his sentence for treason, Hitler began climbing toward ultimate power through direct mass media appeals. He released a two-disc recording of his speech Appeal to the Nation, suitable to be played on household gramophones and advertised as “The First Adolf Hitler Record!”

Hitler’s rallies became spectacles of nationalist frenzy, devoid of substance but heavy on symbolism and emotion. German elites thought him a clown and his followers deluded simpletons. Most failed to understand what was happening right underneath them. “They keep thinking they’ve hit on a crucial point when they say Hitler’s speeches are meaningless and empty,” observed psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn. “But intellectual judgments of the Hitler experience—Hitler-Erlebnis—miss the point entirely.”

The Führer persisted in saying asinine things that crumbled under fact-checking, yet the audience was responding not to any coherent policy but to the energy he embodied: those gut-level tropes that “the common man can comprehend and remember”—or, as would later be said of Trump supporters, “they take him seriously but not literally,” the source of much incomprehension among his skeptics. This mediumistic power to tap into the primitive mind of magical thinking, this totalizing faith in the power of oratory to create its own reality, that an Übermensch can end wars with a single phone call, make inflation go down by willing it away, build a massive border wall, deport every undocumented immigrant, have a “concept of a plan” for healthcare, win a lost election by a “sacred landslide victory,” make the country great again—it all feeds the pretense of “only I can fix it.”

After he made a failed bid for the Reich presidency, Hitler went to court in April 1932 to have the 5.9 million votes against him annulled on baseless allegations of fraud. “Hitler to Contest Validity of Election,” said the headline in The New York Times. He claimed his party got two million more votes than had been recorded. “That is a feat that has never been equaled,” he insisted, “and I have done this despite the unconstitutional ban placed on my broadcasting election appeals.”

On July 31, 1932, the Nazi Party won 37 percent of the Reichstag. “We have won a great victory!” exulted Hitler. “There has never been anything like this in the history of our people.” He was open about his desire for authoritarianism and the destruction of German democracy, even as he crowed about winning electoral pluralities.

“Without my party no one can rule Germany today,” he told Louis Lochner of the Associated Press on August 17, 1932. “Europe needs some form of authoritarian government. […] The authority can assume different forms. But parliamentarianism is not native to us and does not belong to our tradition.” He concluded that “the parliamentarian system has never functioned in Europe […] the people declare their confidence in one man and ask him to lead.”

In fact, the Nazi Party only stooped to the indignity of electoral politics in order to never hold elections again—or as Goebbels put it: “We enter the Reichstag to use the arsenal of democracy in order to assault it with its own weapons.” The masses would govern through their adulation of one man. When Hitler called for the dissolution of parliament on September 13, 1932, he said: “Das Volk wird in drei Wochen ‘wild werden,’” which means, “In three weeks, the people are going to ‘go wild.’”

Compare that, of course, with Trump’s tweet to his followers on December 19, 2020, preceding the attack on the United States Congress. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

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Once Hitler had bullied and connived his way toward making the outmatched elites Franz von Papen and Paul von Hindenburg hand him the chancellorship, he solidified the Führer myth around himself with quasi-religious trappings. No criticism of him was permitted, and he used the state security apparatuses to go after his opponents as “enemies of the people,” a phrase Trump has adopted when referring to journalists and stubborn election officials.

Even when dozens of his former allies wound up dead in the purge called the Night of the Long Knives on June 30, 1934, “the almost total absence of any criticism of Hitler was, in fact, already apparent even in the immediate aftermath of the events,” writes Ian Kershaw in The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (1987), which explores the strange euphoria that settled over the country after the Nazis seized power. The elites had not only bent to his will but also become necessary actors in dissolving constitutional democracy in service of one man’s fantasy. Fest, in The Face of the Third Reich, contrasts the image of a Schutzstaffel thug, “the muscular but frankly heartless and brainless hero forever tearing chains apart and smashing barriers on countless posters” with “the figure of the respected privy councillor of conservative stamp.”

The Nazis needed weak men, just like those later epitomized by senators such as Ted Cruz and Mario Rubio, who could only heap helpless praise on the 45th president after vociferous denunciations, lest they fall afoul of the committed MAGA hardcore always at his back. A QAnon true believer might have produced a glowing encomium similar to that written for Hitler by an admirer in 1933: “Now has us the Godhead a saviour sent, / Distress its end has passed. / To gladness and joy the land gives vent: / Springtime is here at last.”

Hitler could simply not be wrong, not even in the face of the most damning facts. When a listener dared break the customary sycophancy and pointed out that he had sounded a sour note in a ditty he was whistling, the Führer came back with: “It’s not I who am whistling it wrong, but the composer who made a blunder here.” As a friend named August Kubizek recalled in his 1953 memoir The Young Hitler I Knew, the future German chancellor was always complaining of the “traps skilfully laid by the world around him for the sole purpose of hindering his rise.”

One might recall Trump using a Sharpie to draw the fictional bulge of a hurricane’s trajectory on a map after it was pointed out that he had erred in stating that the storm might hit Alabama. Or his insistence that his inauguration crowd was the biggest in history, despite plain photographic evidence. The cries of “rigged” and “unfair” would all be a bad joke from a vain fool were it not for his followers’ insistence that he was always right, and it was the Lügenpresse, the “fake news media,” that had gotten it wrong and was only trying to make him look bad.

Visitors who pay calls on Trump have described a man whose thoughts can be difficult to follow but always revert to a simple topic: the tremendous accomplishments of the speaker himself (“Nobody’s ever seen anything like it!”) and his persistent feelings of persecution. Hitler sucked even more oxygen from every room he occupied. Fest provides a vivid picture of what it was like to be sitting at the table with both the Führer and Il Duce in September 1937:

On the occasion of Mussolini’s state visit, after a meal Hitler addressed his anguished visitor uninterruptedly for an hour and a half, without giving him the opportunity, which he strenuously sought, to reply. Almost all his visitors or colleagues had similar experiences, especially during the war, when the restless man’s flood of words grew ever more excessive. The generals of the Führer’s headquarters found themselves forced to listen in helpless deference, fighting back sleep, night after night and mostly till early morning, to endless tirades on art, philosophy, race, technology, or history. He always needed listeners, receivers, never interlocutors, and any occasional objection that might be raised merely incited him to further wildly proliferating digressions, without bounds, without order, and without end.

Within both Hitler’s and Trump’s administrations, there was only one sure way to proceed, one decision to make. Said Bavarian Minister of Education Hans Schemm: “In the personality of Hitler, a million-fold longing of the German people has become reality.” Goebbels wrote in his diary: “When the Fuhrer speaks, it is like a religious service.” An ordinary party member volunteered: “There was only one thing for me, either to win with Adolf Hitler or to die for him.” A former staff member said: “He wanted believers, who obeyed without asking questions. Independent minds were anathema to him.”

Such spiritually bleak outpourings inevitably helped the Nazis co-opt churches, as a significant number of Lutherans and Catholics began to see Hitler as “the last hope of protecting Christianity from godless Bolshevism,” in Kershaw’s words. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Ludwig Müller led a movement within the German Evangelical Church Confederation to discard traditional grace-based theology in favor of Völkisch racial goals. Pastors were encouraged to emphasize the idea that Jews killed Jesus, discourage any talk of sin, and excise the Old Testament and other Jewish influences from their preaching. Though there were plenty of dissenters, the generally irreligious Nazi Party built a base of support within churches, especially among congregants who bought into the romantic idea of a lost Christian fatherland. Hitler’s lack of personal faith did not seem to matter.

Likewise, from the moment on January 16, 2016, when Trump promised his audience at a Christian college in Sioux Center that “Christianity will have power,” he solidified a bloc of support among evangelicals that helped deliver the Electoral College and has led to effusive demonstrations of love for a casino magnate and walking epitome of greed that many consider outright blasphemous. “God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump,” intoned one video circulated on Trump’s Truth Social platform, describing the 45th president as “a shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave nor forsake them.”

While seemingly over-the-top, the messianic rhetoric is not completely out of line with the adulation given to Trump by abortion-hating MAGA members that has split many churches wide open. Trump and his vulgar manner seem to have given his conservative Christian followers permission to rail against the societal forces that ostensibly threaten them: feminism, racial diversity, gun control, clean energy. His road to the White House was paved through the 11:30 a.m. Sunday coffee hour in the multipurpose room.

“Many American evangelicals have become so frightened, have become so panicked, have become so fearful, that they have reached for the sword. And the sword is Donald Trump,” observed Tim Alberta, author of The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (2023). “And at some level Trump promises them a protection and a safety that justifies that transaction in their minds.”

Those who capture institutions like this often look to mythic models. American evangelicals like to compare Trump to King Cyrus in the Book of Ezra, a figure of Babylonian history who—while not Jewish himself—allowed the Jews to resettle in the Levant and build their temple, a strongman nonpareil who fell on the right side of things. This is how an unrighteous man can do righteous things. Hitler plucked a different chord in the German collective consciousness. The kind of heroic leadership exemplified in medieval folk strongmen, like Siegfried, Theodoric the Great, and the doomed swordsmen of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, danced just within the frame of national longing during the nation’s grinding defeat in World War I and its messy adoption of democracy. To certain thirsty Germans, Hitler seemed to step out of the pages of a storybook. And so too has Trump, draped in all-American bunting and lots of hypocritical blather about the “rule of law” and lost masculine values.

The national costumes differ, but the core idealism is consistent. Both men have the same civic theologies. After studying Hitler’s speeches, Fest concluded that strength was his primary avatar, with morality barely registering. “The central idea, around which all the other conceptions were grouped, is a vulgar Darwinism which sees the fundamental law of life as a merciless struggle of each against all, as the victory of the strong over the weak,” he writes. “Throughout, there is a fundamental inability to respect or even to grasp the rights of others and their claim to happiness.”

With clear admiration for autocrats, his use of “strong” as a compliment to describe the iron-fisted actions of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping, and his stated wish to govern like a dictator, Trump has little use for traditional American nods to fair play or the rights of others. A former Reagan administration official, Peter Wehner, had his number before the election in 2016:

Whether or not he has read a word of Nietzsche (I’m guessing not), Mr. Trump embodies a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one. It is characterized by indifference to objective truth (there are no facts, only interpretations), the repudiation of Christian concern for the poor and the weak, and disdain for the powerless. It celebrates the “Übermensch,” or Superman, who rejects Christian morality in favor of his own. For Nietzsche, strength was intrinsically good and weakness was intrinsically bad. So, too, for Donald Trump.

Narcissism, verbosity, laziness, impulsivity, dishonesty, lawbreaking, a streak of sociopathy, contempt for collective decision-making, a childhood spent under a tyrannical father, hatred of immigrants, a keen instinct for crowds—the points of commonality between the personalities of Hitler and Trump are hard to miss. But just as important are the differences, especially in personal backgrounds. Hitler was a small-town son of a civil servant; Trump grew up wealthy in the biggest American city. Hitler fought in a war; Trump dodged the draft five times. Hitler fancied himself a patron of high culture and loved opera; Trump’s tastes are decidedly campy and lowbrow. Hitler spent lonely years wandering, painting, and reading books; Trump went to Manhattan discos and tried to bed supermodels. Hitler made dramatic threats of suicide in his low moments and died by his own hand; Trump has shown no such inclinations.

Perhaps most significantly for the global community, Hitler was obsessed with military conquest, putting it at the center of his government’s aims. Trump has displayed no stomach for foreign adventurism and has sought to avoid getting the United States entangled in wars of aggression. But even if Trump’s ego led him into some grinding and pointless overseas conflict, one gets the sense that his most devoted fans would support a draft and equate domestic resistance with treason. The diarist Victor Klemperer recounted the story of a badly wounded German soldier in the final days of World War II proclaiming that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”

Reading German history in the age of Trump has invariable field distortions because most history is a double document—a view of the past in which views of the contemporary era hang over the narrative like a cloudy sky. Edward Gibbon famously blamed Christianity for the withering and collapse of Rome, and it is impossible to read him today without accounting for his enthusiasm for the 18th-century Enlightenment and its religion of rationalism. He wrote of Tacitus as he might have of George Washington. Is it possible to read about Hitler in a vacuum, as an isolated and sui generis figure in a time when authoritarianism is once again on the rise and even coming home to threaten the United States from within?

In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, the main character, Jack Gladney, teaches Hitler studies at a Midwestern college. He makes himself a national expert in the subject, absorbing himself in it. A friend of his—a New York sportswriter named Murray Jay Siskind—suggests that studying such overwhelming evil is a sly psychological way of avoiding the horror of death. “It’s totally obvious,” he says to Gladney. “You wanted to be helped and sheltered. The overwhelming horror would leave no room for your own death. ‘Submerge me,’ you said. ‘Absorb my fear.’”

Perhaps one day an American college will host an Institute of Trump Studies to get to the bottom of how a stable democracy like the United States could have flirted with such self-destruction. It is also possible that making the Trump-Hitler comparison is an easy way out of a more difficult dilemma. Trump echoes aspects of Hitler in tone, personality, and style—there is no question. Yet the parallels break down as often as they line up. The United States in 2016 was not Germany in 1933; the challenges and sociologies were too dissimilar. The one-to-one comparison feels too glib on the surface, even histrionic. Yet reaching for Hitler lets us off the hook the same way that it lets Jack Gladney build a defense against a question that cuts too close to home. Trump may not be “the American Hitler,” but how could an American president like him have been plausible in the first place?

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Featured image: Still from “March of Time—outtakes—Hitler in Sudetenland,” 1938. Accessed at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives & Records Administration. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (200 MTT 667 WW). CC0, ushmm.org. Accessed October 9, 2024. Image has been modified.