I. Introduction
Donald Trump’s actions, termed unprecedented here, are foreshadowed in the early period of the German National Socialist (NS) government called die Machtergreifung, the Seizure of Power. Salient comparative aspects follow.
II. Key Points of Comparison
Trump campaigned on the slogan “Make America Great Again,” received a plurality of the popular vote, and became president. He claimed that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” Hitler campaigned against the Treaty of Versailles, to make Germany great again. He received a plurality of the popular vote and became Chancellor. He claimed his government to be, as Dr. Josef Goebbels, Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda put it, “in the truest sense…a people’s government.” What ensued there resonates here.
A. The “Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”
Trump dismissed officials in justice, the security services, the inspectors general of sixteen executive departments, the general counsels of the military services, and has purged those whose prior conduct in office or whose political sentiments are inimical to him. He is seeking to replace them with political appointees demonstrably loyal to him. A March Executive Order delegated to OPM the authority “to make final suitability determinations [for continuance in service] and to take actions regarding employees in the executive branch based on post-appointment conduct”; i.e., on private off-duty speech or association.
The NS regime inherited a civil service animated by the Enlightenment ideal of a government of laws, not men, a Rechtsstaat. There was considerable effort by NS legal scholars to square the regime’s approach to law with a conception so deeply embedded in legal thought. On April 7, 1933, the regime passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It is remembered for the dismissed of all non-Aryans, but its full text anticipates Trump’s actions:
I. 1. In order to restore a national professional Civil Service and to simplify the administration, officials may be dismissed under the following regulations, even when the necessary conditions under the relevant law do not exist.
***
IV. Officials who because of their previous political activity do not offer security that they will act at all times and without reservation in the interests of the national state can be dismissed from the service
***
VI. Officials can be retired for the purpose of rationalizing the administration even if they are not yet unfit for service….
VII. 1. Dismissal from office, transfer to another office and retirement will be ordered by the highest Reich or federal state agency which will make the final decision without right of appeal against it.
The professional civil service included judges, lawyers, and university professors. The legal community came quickly to heel. At a convention in Leipzig, 1933, ten thousand lawyers stood before the Supreme Court building, raised their stiffened right arms and swore “by the soul of the German people” that they would “strive as German jurists to follow the course of our Führer to the end of our days.” The universities were not far behind.
Trump has: threatened judges, so far with no success; threatened law firms that have opposed him, with success; and threatened universities, to which resolute collective resistance has been slow to evolve (Columbia University capitulated; Harvard has not).
B. Polycratic Government
A January Executive Order created a “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) “dedicated to advancing” the President’s agenda by improving “quality and efficiency” under the leadership of Elon Musk. DOGE teams, lodged in the agencies, have played an aggressive role in the removal of personnel and programmatic discontinuance.
What DOGE is lies in a legal mist as an ad hoc entity extending presidential power. Musk directed federal employees to provide five bullet points explaining what they have “accomplished” in their last week’s work, on pain of discharge. Several heads of executive departments – Defense, the FBI, State – told their employees not to comply. Others have directed compliance or have remained mum. Musk then demanded weekly reports. When the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee sought to prevent the closure of a Social Security office in his district he reached out to Musk, not the Social Security Administration.
The Third Reich was also characterized by “polycracy,” fuzziness between the official organs of state power and institutions of the Party. As a result,
There increasingly emerged two coexistent but alternative spheres of authority—that of the normal State and legal system and the exceptional sphere of ‘Führer power’…. [T]here was a progressive seepage of Nazi ideology into more and more spheres of life, including the interpretation of the law, and an insistent claim by Nazi party organizations to take over more and more of the activities hitherto covered by the state….
C. “Coordination”
Nazi policy required all elements of society, public and private, to conform to the Party’s will. A catchword was borrowed from electrical engineering, Gleichschaltung – “coordination” – which meant that all the wires and circuits, all the element that connect society had to be brought into line, law in particular.
The nature of the law as a set of rules regulating human activities with the aim of introducing rationality and predictability into social relationships was totally incompatible with the Führerprinzip [the “leader principle”] which formed the basis of the Nazi concept of authority. For, since the Führer regarded himself and was regarded by his movement as a man of destiny, chosen to lead Germany and expressing the will of the nation, any body of laws was viewed with suspicion as a restriction on his freedom of action, particularly since their enforcement was the responsibility of a legal profession which was considered pedantic and tainted with liberalism.
Under the Leader Principle the will of the Leader is the law; it controls the reading of statutory and administrative texts. Lacking an order from the Führer on how to decide a matter the decision-maker was charged to intuit what the Führer would do. As Professor Dr. Eduard Kern of Freiburg put it of the judiciary:
The national socialist judge is twice bound: to the law and to the exercise of his judicial discretion in accordance with the goals of the state leadership. The inner attachment [of the judge] to the leadership of the state is the assumption on which judicial independence rests.
In February, Trump issued an Executive Order, “Ensuring Accountability For All Agencies.” All executive agencies, including “so–called ‘independent regulatory agencies’” (emphasis added), are accountable to the president. All agency actions have to be vetted with the Office of Management and Budget; the chair of independent regulatory agencies (“so-called”) are to “coordinate [emphasis added] their policies and priorities with the White House.” More than that,
The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch [including the “so-called” independent regulatory agencies]. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.
This pursues the theory of a “unitary executive.” All those employed in the executive branch are the president’s underlings; they serve at his pleasure and are to do his bidding. He cannot violate any law because he has reserved to himself the power to declare what the law is. Both the justification and the result, ideologically and practically, are indistinguishable from Nazi doctrine.
III. Sympathetic Resonance
The NS regime pursued its vision of a Volksgemeinschaft, a racial community of the people, not only in government but in music, art, the sciences. All of civil society was to be “coordinated.” Most of these measures bear no strong resemblance to the Trump administration’s course of conduct, thus far, though there are indications, apart from the use of threat, that the regime will seek a wider ideological impress, currently on agencies that fund or conduct research in public health, where it has placed vaccination under a cloud, and in the social sciences and education. Some additional characteristics do bear comparison.
1. The personal loyalty of the military. In 1938, the Minster of Defense and the Chief of the Army Command were dismissed. The command was restructured and staffed by chiefs loyal to the Leader. Trump has dismissed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations to be replaced by officers loyal to him.
2. Denial of citizenship on the basis of reviled parentage. The Fourteenth Amendment provides that, “All persons born…in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.” Over a hundred years ago the United States Supreme Court held that a child born in the United States of immigrants ineligible for citizenship was a citizen. Trump has issued an Executive Order denying citizenship to any person whose mother at the time of birth is either “unlawfully present in the United States” or whose presence is “lawful but temporary.”
The Reich Citizenship Law of 15 September 1935 provided that, “A citizen of the Reich is that subject only who is of German or kindred blood and who, through his conduct, shows that he is both desirous and fit to serve the German people and Reich faithfully.” As Jews were not “of German blood,” as their parentage was reviled, they could not be citizens.
3. Anschluss and Lebensraum. The NS state sought to acquire Austria and the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. In 1938, Austria was annexed (Anschluss); the Sudetenland was shortly unified into Germany (Lebensraum). Trump has expressed the desire to annex Canada and to extend American territorial control to Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone, and the Gaza Strip.
4. Politicization of language. The Nazis manufactured usage and censored that which was discordant with Nazi ideology. The Trump administration has erased almost 200 politically unacceptable words from government websites and documents; e.g., “clean energy,” “climate science,” “disability,” “polarization,” “race,” “socioeconomic.” It has renamed geographical features: Gulf of America, Mount McKinley.
IV. Limits?
Where this leads is beclouded. When the Chancellor was elected in 1933 he was a convicted felon. When the President was elected in 2024 he was a convicted felon. But the differences between them could be instructive. The Chancellor had committed a serious political crime; the President had committed sordid financial ones. The former had a political vision: of a racially determined population acting in lockstep to carry out the Party’s ideology on a global stage in a Reich that was to last a thousand years. The latter seems driven by nothing more than retribution, transactional advantage, and power as an end in itself even as scientific research, social programs, and the nation’s role in the world are systematically dismantled.
Thus far, the major obstacle to a seizure of total power has been the judiciary. Whether that will continue rests in the Supreme Court. Whence speculation about Trump’s refusal to accede to Court decisions that thwart him. In that event, resort would reside in an incensed public opinion. Here, too, is an echo of the NS state.
The Nazi regime was intensely concerned about public opinion; it closely monitored and strove to mold it. Opposition triggered suppression; but, were the opposition sufficiently deep and persistent the government saw the better course to relent. The prime example is the successful campaign Bishop Clemens von Galen mounted against the regime’s euthanasia policy, the killing of racial Germans who were determined to be “unproductive.”
If the German comparison is apt, were the president to defy the Court the vitality of the American experiment would hinge on two imponderables: the extent and depth of public objection to the president’s disregard of the judiciary; and whether the Republicans in power will be as sensitive to public opinion as the Nazis were.
Editor’s Note: This text is adapted from a lecture the author gave at Mander Hall, London, March 18, 2025. For purposes of publication in this medium, numerous print references were omitted, including:
- Nazism 1919-1945: Vol. 2 State, Economy and Society 1933-1939, A Documentary Reader (J. Noakes & G. Pridham eds. 1984).
- Carl Schmitt, Nationalsozialismus und Rechtsstaat, 63 Juristische Wochenschrift 713 (1934).
- Michael Stolleis, The Law Under the Swastika (Thomas Dunlap trans. 1998).
- Ingo Müller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Deborah Lucas Schneider trans. 1991).
- Paul Ritterbusch, Idee und Aufgabe der Reichsuniversität (1935).
- Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors (1946).
- Diemut Majer, Grundlagen des Nationalsozialistischen Rechtssystems: Führerprinzip, Sonderrecht, Einheitspartei (1987).
- Eduard Kern, Zur Unabhängigkeit des Richters, 28 Archiv für Rechts-und Sozialphilosophie 424 (1934/35) (translation by the author).
- Werner Klemper, LTI: Notizbuch Eines Philogen (1947).
- Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion & Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945 (1983).
- Nathan Stoltzfus, Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany (2016).
The more comprehensively footnoted article is on file with the author.
