Liz Cheney, former Republican U.S. Representative from Wyoming, is not mincing words. She has been ramping up the frequency of her public appearances in recent days, just as Donald Trump’s path to the Republican presidential nomination looks increasingly certain. In a December interview with ABC’s This Week, she cautioned, “I think we have to take everything that Donald Trump says literally and seriously.”
As I wrote in Madison, Wisconsin’s The Capital Times in March 2016, when Trump was touring the nearby city of Janesville during his first run for the White House, a look at history is in order. Doing so reveals striking parallels between Trump’s rise and that of other authoritarian figures. The New York Times’s first mention of a German politician named Adolf Hitler, in 1922, included a quote that sounds eerily prescient: “You must feed the masses with cruder morsels . . . . It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them.”
In the past few months, however, Trump has been quite clear about where he hopes to lead our country. In a campaign document titled “Agenda 47,” Trump lays out plans for a second term in the White House—including “Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions,” a “Day One Executive Order Ending Citizenship for Children of Illegals and Outlawing Birth Tourism,” a “Plan to End Crime and Restore Law and Order,” “Firing the Radical Marxist Prosecutors Destroying America,” and a “Plan to Dismantle the Deep State and Return Power to the American People.”
Trump is proposing a simultaneous onslaught against education, the courts, key initiatives of the Biden Administration, and the very institutions of government itself. In their 2018, book How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer a list of things to watch out for in an endangered democracy; any one, they say, is a sign of creeping authoritarianism. Tendencies to “reject democratic rules of the game,” deny “the legitimacy of political opponents,” the “toleration or encouragement of violence,” and the “readiness to curtail civil liberties of opponents, including media,” are all red flags. Trump ticked every box during his first term in office and promises to pursue all of these with renewed vigor in a second term. “I am your retribution,” he told attendees at a rally in Waco, Texas, in March of last year. At a town hall in early December, Trump assured Fox News personality Sean Hannity that he planned to be a dictator only on “day one.”
New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, told The Washington Post that, once Trump had tasted that power, it is unlikely he would give it up easily. “I know of zero dictators who became more democratic,” she explained. “That’s not how autocrats behave.”
Trump is proposing a simultaneous onslaught against education, the courts, key initiatives of the Biden Administration, and the very institutions of government itself.
In fact, the Trump team is devising plans for a framework that would undergird that retention of power. A blueprint drafted by the rightwing Heritage Foundation known as the “2025 Presidential Transition Project,” or “Project 2025,” has been in the works for a while. Subtitled “Building now for a conservative victory through policy, personnel, and training,” the project lays out plans for “an effective conservative administration: a policy agenda, personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.” And, as if echoing Trump’s comment to Hannity, it states: “[W]e need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration” [emphasis added]. The group’s 180-day Transition Playbook consists of a “comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency” so that no stone is left unturned. The stated intent is to “take back our government.”
Trump continues to “feed the masses with cruder morsels.” His recent speeches not only have drawn from statements in Hitler’s 1925 manifesto Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), but have also quoted from it nearly verbatim (albeit not in German). A November post on X (formerly Twitter) by Trump critics the Meidas Touch Network pointed out many of the overlaps with the ominous words. “This is not merely a coincidence. It is deliberate,” they wrote.
Newsweek fact-checked Trump’s quotations and prepared a useful report. When the former President calls his political opponents “Communist . . . vermin,” it is indeed an exact quote from Hitler’s 1933 speech following the infamous Reichstag fire. When Trump says the “threat is from within,” he sounds ominously like Der Führer in 1941 denouncing “the greater enemy within.” Trump’s cautions against those who are “poisoning the blood of our country,” draw on “blood poisoning,” a phrase regularly used by Hitler in Mein Kampf and elsewhere.
According to a 1990 interview in Vanity Fair, Trump’s first ex-wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer that Trump kept My New Order, a book of Hitler’s speeches, by his bed. When questioned about it, Trump acknowledged receiving such a book from a friend, but told journalist Marie Brenner, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Trump, who is not known for his reading habits, also apparently admired the words of Hitler contemporary Benito Mussolini. In 2016, the website Gawker tricked Trump into retweeting a quote from the Italian dictator. When questioned about it on NBC’s Meet The Press, Trump seemed to double-down, saying, “What difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else? It’s certainly a very interesting quote.” Now that Trump has been reinstated on X, the quote is still available online and may presage future retweets.
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Bertolt Brecht
All of this is no laughing matter. In a December 2022 post on Truth Social, the social media platform launched by Trump, he called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Cheney immediately took to X to reply, “No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution.”
In 1947, German antifascist cultural activist Bertolt Brecht was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (also known as HUAC). In a prepared statement the committee would not allow him to read, the poet and playwright wrote, “At the beginning, only a very few people were capable of seeing the connection between the reactionary restrictions in the field of culture and the ultimate assaults upon the physical life of a people itself.”