The Grand Old Putsch

The Grand Old Putsch

A Century of Fascist Influence on the Republican Party
From the Klan’s ‘America First’ to Trump’s ‘Vermin’: How the Ideological Thread Never Broke

“We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.”

Mike Godwin, creator of Godwin’s Law, December 2023

Introduction: What We Mean by ‘Fascist Influence’

Let me be clear from the start: this is not an argument that the Republican Party is a fascist party the way Mussolini’s National Fascist Party was, or the way the NSDAP was before it seized complete control of Germany. The GOP still operates within democratic structures (albeit while systematically trying to rig them), and millions of Republican voters are conservative Americans who would be horrified by explicit fascism. If they recognized it.

Here’s the thing: fascism doesn’t arrive wearing a swastika armband and goose-stepping down Main Street. It arrives through currents. Ultra-nationalism that identifies the nation with a specific ethnic or religious identity. Authoritarian contempt for democratic checks on power. The cultivation of a cult of personality around a strongman leader. Systematic scapegoating of minorities. Glorification of violence as politically legitimate. Contempt for institutional democracy when it produces inconvenient results.

By these standards, the standards set by scholars like Robert O. Paxton, Roger Griffin, and Jason Stanley, the Republican Party has spent a century absorbing fascist currents, flirting with fascist movements, recruiting fascist-adjacent personnel, deploying fascist rhetoric, and culminating in a political movement that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, has called “fascist to the core.” His former White House Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, told The New York Times in October 2024 that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure” and had repeatedly praised Hitler, saying “Hitler did some good things” on multiple occasions.

This isn’t hyperbole from MSNBC pundits. These are four-star generals who served in Trump’s own administration, with access to the man himself, telling the American public in plain English that the likely next president of the United States is a fascist who admires Adolf Hitler. Kelly also reported that Trump asked “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Meaning Hitler’s generals. He said “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”

The question this essay answers is: how did we get here? How does a major American political party end up nominating, twice electing, someone his own senior officials describe as a Hitler-praising fascist? The answer is that we didn’t arrive suddenly. We arrived through a century of institutional decisions, ideological accommodations, strategic calculations, and moral compromises. The thread is traceable. The receipts exist.

What follows is that documentation. Primary sources, government records, investigative journalism, and the far-right’s own words, organized chronologically from the 1910s through the present day. The focus is on the GOP specifically because it’s the major right-wing party with continuous institutional history, and because it’s the party that currently controls state power while its leader quotes Mein Kampf at campaign rallies.

A note on methodology: I use primary sources wherever possible. Speeches preserved in presidential libraries, original newspaper archives, government documents, interview transcripts with audio available. When I cite Russ Bellant’s research documenting Nazi collaborators in Republican ethnic outreach organizations, it’s because his work draws from FBI documents, Library of Congress materials, and direct interviews that can be independently verified. When I cite the 1950 Displaced Persons Commission ruling, the original correspondence is preserved in national archives. When I cite Lee Atwater’s confession about the Southern Strategy, you can listen to the full 42-minute audio recording.

This isn’t speculation. This is documentation.

Part I: Before the GOP-American Proto-Fascism and the ‘America First’ Tradition

White Supremacy as the Founding Template

American fascism didn’t need to be imported from Europe. We had our own homegrown version, rooted in the ideology of white supremacy that was baked into the nation’s founding and institutionalized after the Civil War.

The post-Reconstruction period from 1877 onward saw the deliberate destruction of multiracial democracy in the South through a campaign of political violence, economic terrorism, and legal manipulation that any fascist movement would recognize. The “Redeemer” governments that overthrew Reconstruction used paramilitaries (the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, the White League) to murder Black voters, intimidate Republican officeholders, and establish one-party white supremacist rule across the former Confederacy.

This wasn’t merely racism; it was a systematic political project to ensure that democracy, rule by the people, couldn’t include Black people. When the federal government withdrew its troops and abandoned Reconstruction, it gave tacit permission for white supremacist violence to overturn democratic outcomes. The message was clear: democratic legitimacy matters less than racial hierarchy.

By the early 20th century, both major parties had largely accommodated themselves to this arrangement. The Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and Reconstruction, progressively abandoned its commitment to Black civil rights in favor of business interests and sectional reconciliation with white Southerners. This was the original sin that made everything else possible: the acceptance that white supremacy was negotiable, that democracy could be dispensed with for some Americans if it served political convenience.

The lessons of Reconstruction’s violent overthrow would echo across the century. Democracy could be destroyed if you organized enough violence. The federal government would eventually look away. Paramilitaries were effective political tools. Racial hierarchy was more important than electoral legitimacy. These weren’t abstract principles. They were demonstrated practice, a successful model waiting to be replicated.

The Ku Klux Klan’s Mass-Movement Moment (1915–1920s)

The Second Ku Klux Klan, revived in 1915 and active through the late 1920s, represented America’s first genuine mass fascist movement, though we didn’t call it that at the time. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the Klan claimed between 4 and 5 million members, roughly one in three or four white Protestant American men. This wasn’t a fringe movement; it was mainstream Protestant America.

The Second Klan was different from its Reconstruction-era predecessor in important ways. While the first Klan was primarily Southern and focused on terrorizing freed slaves, the Second Klan was a national movement strongest in the Midwest and West, targeting not just Black Americans but also Catholics, Jews, and immigrants. It presented itself as defending “100% Americanism” against all perceived threats to white Protestant hegemony.

And here’s where the genealogy gets specific. The Klan’s slogans included “America First,” “100% Americanism,” and “One God, One Country, One Flag.” Verified photographs in the Getty Images archive show 1920s Klan members marching with banners reading exactly that: “America First. One God. One Country. One Flag.” A 1921 KKK circular listed the organization’s “ABCs” as “America first, benevolence, clannishness.” The Klan advertised itself as “the only ‘America First’ society.”

Professor Sarah Churchwell of the University of London, whose book Behold, America (2018) traces the phrase’s history, documents: “The Klan instantly declared ‘America First’ one of its most prominent slogans. They would march with it on banners, they would carry it in parades.”

The Klan also produced commemorative medallions combining “America First” with “Ku Klux Klan” and “Preserve Racial Purity”: a direct through-line from white supremacist nativism to the “blood and soil” ideology of European fascism. When Trump adopted “America First” as his campaign slogan in 2016, he wasn’t just echoing Charles Lindbergh’s Nazi-sympathizing movement of 1940–41. He was reaching back to America’s own homegrown fascist tradition from the 1920s.

The ADL formally warned him about this. In April 2016, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt issued a statement urging Trump to “reconsider” the phrase, noting: “For many Americans, the term ‘America First’ will always be associated with and tainted by this history… choosing a call to action historically associated with incivility and intolerance seems ill-advised.”

Trump’s response when asked about the historical connections by the New York Times? “I like the expression. I’m ‘America First.’”

By 2025, Trump claimed: “Considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that.” This is demonstrably, verifiably, photographically false. The Klan was marching with “America First” banners when Trump’s father was a child.

Notably, in 1999–2000, when Trump briefly sought the Reform Party nomination against Pat Buchanan, he called Buchanan “a Hitler lover” for defending Nazi Germany’s interests. Buchanan’s slogan was “America First.” Trump knew what it meant then. He chose it anyway.

Interwar Nativism and Business Flirtations with Fascism

The 1924 Immigration Act embodied eugenic ideology in law, establishing quotas designed to preserve America’s “Nordic” character and exclude Southern and Eastern Europeans (particularly Jews and Italians). The law’s intellectual foundations came from Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), a book Adolf Hitler reportedly called “his Bible.”

Grant’s thesis was straightforward: the Nordic race was inherently superior, race-mixing led to civilizational decline, and America needed to preserve its “racial stock” through immigration restriction and (implicitly or explicitly) eugenic measures. The 1924 Act implemented this vision, dramatically reducing immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe while maintaining flows from Northern and Western Europe. It also completely barred Asian immigration.

Meanwhile, American business leaders openly admired European fascism. Henry Ford, whose Dearborn Independent published anti-Semitic screeds that later appeared in Nazi propaganda, accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the Third Reich in 1938. Hitler kept a portrait of Ford beside his desk and cited him in Mein Kampf. When American industrialists looked at Mussolini’s Italy, many saw a model of “efficient” capitalism freed from labor unrest and democratic inconveniences.

The American Legion, Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts, the Silver Shirts, and the German-American Bund all represented different strands of American fascism in the 1930s. The Bund, active from 1936–1941, had approximately 25,000 dues-paying members including 8,000 uniformed Storm Troopers. Their February 20, 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden drew 20,000 supporters-and afterward, Bund representatives met with two pro-Nazi congressmen: John C. Schafer (R-Wisconsin) and Fred C. Gartner (R-Pennsylvania).

There it is: documented Republican political connections to American Nazi organizations, eight decades before Trump.

Part II: The GOP and Fascism in the 1930s–1940s

The New Deal as “Creeping Socialism”

Before examining the America First Committee, it’s worth noting the business community’s response to the New Deal. The American Liberty League, founded in 1934 by corporate leaders including the Du Pont family, portrayed Franklin Roosevelt as a dictator imposing socialism on America. The irony (that they were comparing FDR to European dictators while many of the same industrialists expressed admiration for Mussolini) was apparently lost on them.

This pattern would repeat: corporate conservatives would accuse Democrats of fascism or totalitarianism while themselves flirting with actual fascist movements and policies. It’s a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that continues to this day.

The Original America First Committee

The America First Committee (1940–41) grew to 800,000 paying members-the largest anti-war organization in American history to that point. Its stated purpose was opposition to American entry into World War II, and it included a range of figures from sincere pacifists to Nazi sympathizers. But its most prominent spokesman revealed the movement’s true character.

Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero and national celebrity, had accepted a medal from Nazi Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring in 1938 and refused to return it after Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom that saw 91 Jews murdered, 30,000 arrested and sent to concentration camps, and over 7,000 Jewish businesses destroyed. Lindbergh’s response to this horror was to keep the medal.

In his infamous September 11, 1941 speech at Des Moines, Lindbergh blamed three groups for pushing America toward war: the British, the Roosevelt administration, and “the Jewish race,” whom he accused of exercising “outsized influence” over “our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer responded: “Place the most striking passages from Lindbergh’s and Hitler’s speeches side by side and they are as alike as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” The Detroit Free Press wrote: “He should not only keep that Nazi medal Goring pinned on him. He should use it as a decoration for a Ku Klux Klan nightshirt.”

The committee dissolved four days after Pearl Harbor. But its ideological DNA (nativist, isolationist, comfortable with fascist regimes abroad if they left America alone, willing to blame Jews for the world’s problems) didn’t disappear. It went underground and waited.

Republican Ambivalence Toward Fascism

The pre-war Republican Party was genuinely divided between internationalists who recognized the fascist threat and isolationists who preferred accommodation. Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican,” opposed American entry into World War II until Pearl Harbor. Much of the party’s business wing was more concerned with fighting the New Deal than fighting Hitler.

After Pearl Harbor, the isolationist bloc scrambled to bury its “America First” baggage. The war effort provided convenient cover: everyone was anti-Nazi now, at least nominally.

But the infrastructure remained. The ideological disposition remained. And within years of V-E Day, the Cold War would provide a new framework for rehabilitating exactly the kind of people who should have been permanently excluded from American political life.

Part III: The Cold War Opens America’s Doors to Nazi Collaborators

Operation Paperclip: The Template for Nazi Rehabilitation

Before the displaced persons controversy, Operation Paperclip (1945–1959) had already established the template for admitting Nazi-affiliated individuals when geopolitically convenient. The program brought over 1,600 German scientists to the United States, roughly half of whom were Nazi Party members. Several held SS or SA membership with extensive party records.

President Truman officially forbade recruiting Nazi Party members or active supporters, a directive systematically circumvented by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which whitewashed incriminating evidence from scientists’ records. The most famous recruit, Wernher von Braun, had been an SS officer who led V-2 rocket development using slave labor at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where an estimated 20,000 prisoners died. He later became director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and an American hero.

The logic was simple: these men had valuable skills, the Soviets wanted them too, and anti-communism trumped anti-fascism. This became the operative principle of Cold War immigration policy. If you were anti-communist, your Nazi past could be forgiven-or simply erased from the record.

The 1950 Ruling That Opened the Floodgates

On September 1, 1950, the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission issued a ruling that would shape American politics for decades. The Commission declared:

“That the Waffen SS Units (Baltic Legions) are to be considered as separate and distinct in purpose, ideology, activities, and qualifications for membership from the German SS, and therefore the Commission holds them not to be a movement hostile to the government of the United States.”

This was, to put it in technical terms, weapons-grade horseshit. The Baltic Waffen SS divisions were military units under direct Nazi command that participated in the Holocaust. But the ruling came through lobbying from Baltic diplomatic officials and Cold War strategic calculations. Commissioner Harry Rosenfield, the panel’s Jewish appointee for “religious balance,” was “repeatedly outvoted” by Commissioner Edward M. O’Connor when he argued members of pro-German fascist organizations should be barred.

This ruling reactivated thousands of previously suspended immigration cases. By June 30, 1952, 393,542 displaced persons had entered the United States; historians estimate between 3,000 and 10,000 were Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe.

The policy context was shaped by the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, sponsored by Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), which retained discriminatory national origins quotas while focusing screening on excluding perceived communists rather than former Nazis. McCarran blamed passage of earlier displaced persons legislation on “Jewish legislators and allied organizations.” Anti-communism, not anti-fascism, became the organizing principle of American immigration policy.

The message to Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe was clear: come to America, claim you were just anti-communist, and we’ll overlook your wartime activities. Thousands took up the invitation.

Part IV: Nixon Creates the Institutional Vehicle

The Republican Heritage Groups Council

The National Republican Heritage Groups Council, founded in 1969, became the durable institutional mechanism connecting fascist-adjacent ethnic nationalists to Republican politics. And its founding tells you everything you need to know.

Its founding chairman, Laszlo Pasztor, was a documented member of Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party, the fascist movement allied with the Nazis that ruled Hungary from October 1944 to March 1945. During Arrow Cross rule, ten to fifteen thousand civilians were murdered outright, including many Jews and Romani, and 80,000 people were deported to concentration camps in Austria.

Pasztor served at the Hungarian Arrow Cross embassy in Berlin during World War II. He was prosecuted by Hungary’s non-Communist postwar government-this is important, because it means his prosecution wasn’t Soviet propaganda, receiving a prison sentence for his wartime activities. He served five years for crimes against humanity.

According to investigative journalist Russ Bellant, whose book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party (1991) documented the Council’s membership, Nixon made a direct promise to Pasztor during the 1968 campaign: if elected, he would make the ethnic council a permanent feature of the Republican Party, not just a quadrennial campaign apparatus.

Nixon won. Nixon kept his promise. And Pasztor got to work.

The Nazi Network Inside the GOP

Bellant’s research identified several dozen alleged Nazis, fascists, and anti-Semites in Council leadership positions across three decades. Here are some highlights:

Nicholas Nazarenko headed a Cossack-American unit. Bellant reported that Nazarenko showed him his German SS officer’s ID and photos featuring swastikas on uniforms, declaring that “Jews are our ideological enemy.”

Ivan Docheff founded the pro-Hitler Bulgarian Legion in the 1930s after meeting personally with Adolf Hitler and Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg in 1934. He published a newspaper with a swastika in its masthead featuring headlines like “Long live the sacred struggle against the Jews.”

Florian Galdau headed the Romanian Republican unit and was identified in FBI documents as an Iron Guard member.

Method Balco organized annual commemorations of the Slovak Nazi regime under Joseph Tiso.

These weren’t fringe figures who slipped through the cracks. These were the people who led ethnic outreach for the Republican National Committee.

Jack Anderson Blows the Whistle

Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson exposed these backgrounds in a September 25, 1971 column titled “Ex-Nazi in GOP Post.” Anderson wrote:

“A former Nazi editor, who was Adolf Hitler’s leading propagandist in occupied Slovakia during the 1940s, has now become a power on the Republican National Committee. He is Dr. Joseph Pauco, who trumpeted the Nazi line throughout Slovakia and hailed the Nazi persecution of the Jews. As late as 1957, he defended his past Nazi activities as ‘the cause of great and sacred truth.’ Yet this notorious ex-Nazi was invited by President Nixon to attend a White House prayer service on Sept. 12.”

Anderson noted that Kansas Senator Bob Dole had appointed Pauco comptroller of the committee’s ethnic council. The Anti-Defamation League called for Pauco’s “immediate removal.” Pauco resigned. Pasztor did not.

The Nazi collaborator who founded the organization and recruited the other Nazis stayed in place. In fact, when President George W. Bush hosted a 2006 White House screening of the film “Children of Glory,” his guest list included one Laszlo Pasztor. Thirty-five years after Jack Anderson exposed the Nazi backgrounds of Heritage Groups Council leadership, the man who founded that organization and recruited the Nazis into it was still being invited to White House events.

The 1988 Bush Campaign Scandal

The pattern continued into the George H.W. Bush campaign. Washington Jewish Week disclosed in 1988 that seven members of the Bush campaign’s Coalition of American Nationalities had Nazi or fascist ties. According to Bellant and The Nation, “Bellant’s exposure of émigré Nazi leaders from Germany’s World War II allies in the 1988 Bush presidential campaign was the driving force in the announced resignation of nine individuals, two of them from Ukraine.”

They resigned. But the institutional structure that had recruited them in the first place. The Heritage Groups Council Pasztor had built, remained.

Part V: McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and the Seeds of the Modern Right

McCarthy as Proto-Trump

Before we get to the Southern Strategy, we need to understand the ground it was planted in. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) anticipated many of the techniques Trump would later deploy: paranoid accusations of internal enemies, loyalty purges, show trials, and the relentless attack on institutions that might check his power.

McCarthy’s claim that the State Department was riddled with communists (claims that shifted constantly in their specifics but remained constant in their emotional charge) established a template for political demagoguery. The actual facts didn’t matter; what mattered was the accusation, the spectacle, the sense of crisis that only he could resolve. Sound familiar?

The Republican Party’s response to McCarthy was revealing. They opportunistically embraced him when he was useful, then distanced themselves only when he went too far-when he started attacking the Army and threatening Republican power structures. The infamous “Have you no sense of decency?” moment came not when McCarthy was destroying the lives of innocent people, but when he threatened people the establishment cared about.

McCarthy eventually fell, but his techniques didn’t die. They went into storage, waiting for someone else to use them.

The John Birch Society and Conspiratorial Conservatism

The John Birch Society, founded in 1958, represented the institutionalization of paranoid conservatism. Its founder, Robert Welch, famously claimed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who led D-Day, was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” If that sounds insane, well, it was. But the organizational infrastructure the JBS built would outlast its most absurd claims.

The Birch Society’s worldview was conspiratorial to its core: a shadowy elite was orchestrating America’s decline through the United Nations, civil rights movement, fluoridation of water, and anything else that upset the existing social hierarchy. The civil rights movement, in Bircher telling, wasn’t a genuine struggle for human dignity. It was a communist plot to destabilize America.

This conspiratorial framework would prove durable. Replace “communists” with “globalists,” swap the UN for the “deep state,” update the specific targets while keeping the paranoid structure, and you’ve got Alex Jones. Or Tucker Carlson. Or QAnon.

Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign had to navigate the Bircher question. He couldn’t entirely repudiate them without losing their organizational muscle, but he couldn’t fully embrace them without alienating moderates. His famous line “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” was partly an attempt to thread this needle. The alliance between respectable conservatism and the conspiratorial right was established, and it has never been broken.

The Goldwater Campaign and the Hard Right Capture

Goldwater’s 1964 campaign represented the hard right’s capture of the Republican presidential nomination for the first time since the 1920s. His vote against the Civil Rights Act (justified through “constitutional” objections to federal power) signaled clearly to Southern segregationists that the Republican Party was open for business.

Goldwater lost in a landslide, but the loss was deceptive. The organizational infrastructure built for his campaign (Young Americans for Freedom, the network of conservative intellectuals around National Review, the direct mail fundraising operations) all survived and became the foundation for future victories. The defeat was strategic positioning, not a final verdict.

The violent fringe that attached itself to the Goldwater movement also deserves attention. The overlap between anti-civil-rights vigilantes and Republican activists was substantial. When civil rights workers were murdered, the local power structures that enabled that violence were often aligned with the Republican Party’s emerging Southern coalition.

Part VI: The Southern Strategy-Racism Goes from Explicit to Encoded

Lee Atwater Explains the Playbook

If you want to understand how the modern Republican Party absorbed and deployed racial politics, you don’t need to speculate. You can listen to Lee Atwater explain it in his own words.

In 1981, Atwater, who would later manage George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign and become RNC Chairman-gave an interview to political scientist Alexander Lamis that was recorded and has since been made available in full. Here’s what he said:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N****r, n****r, n****r.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘n****r.’ That hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other.”

That’s the chief Republican strategist of his era explaining, in plain English, that the party deliberately developed coded language to appeal to racist voters while maintaining plausible deniability. “States’ rights,” “law and order,” “welfare reform”: all of it was designed to activate racial resentment without saying the quiet part loud.

This wasn’t a secret discovered by hostile journalists. This was the strategy. In 2010, then-RNC Chairman Michael Steele, the party’s first Black chairman-publicly admitted the Southern Strategy was real and represented a historical wrong: “For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.”

Nixon’s “Law and Order” as Racial Control

Nixon’s “law and order” campaign in 1968 wasn’t about crime in any neutral sense. It was about the civil rights movement, urban unrest, and white backlash against Black political power. The “silent majority” Nixon invoked was white suburbanites fearful of Black protestors, student radicals, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights.

Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the media and “effete snobs” prefigured decades of culture-war rhetoric about “liberal elites,” “fake news,” and the “deep state.” The playbook wasn’t invented by Trump; Trump just inherited it and stripped away the remaining pretense.

Part VI: Reagan-Neoliberalism, Christian Right, and Nazi Rehabilitation

The 1980 Campaign Signals

Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 general election campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi-the town where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Klan in 1964. The choice of location was not subtle. It didn’t need to be.

Reagan’s campaign deployed racially coded stereotypes like the “welfare queen” and “strapping young buck”: images designed to activate white racial resentment while maintaining deniability about explicit racism. The Southern Strategy continued; it just got a friendlier face.

The Bitburg Affair: Reagan Rehabilitates Nazi Memory

On May 5, 1985, President Reagan visited Kolmeshöhe Military Cemetery near Bitburg, West Germany, where 49 Waffen-SS members were among approximately 2,000 buried German soldiers.

The visit proceeded despite objections from 53 Senators (including 11 Republicans) and 257 Representatives (including 84 Republicans). Two weeks earlier, at the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel had confronted Reagan directly: “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.”

Reagan proceeded anyway, having previously called the SS soldiers “victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform.”

Twelve days after Bitburg, on May 17, 1985, Reagan spoke at the National Republican Heritage Groups Council convention at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel. He greeted executive director Radi Slavoff, who, according to Bellant, served in a Bulgarian fascist organization and later arranged a White House invitation for Ivan Docheff while Docheff was under war crimes investigation.

Reagan told the assembled members: “The work of all of you has meant a very great deal to me personally and to our party and to our cause.”

The transcript is preserved at the Reagan Presidential Library. The American president, fresh from laying a wreath at an SS cemetery, thanking an organization founded by a convicted Nazi collaborator for their loyal service to the Republican Party.

Part VII: Pat Buchanan and the Bridge to Contemporary Fascism

The Paleoconservative Prophet

Pat Buchanan (Nixon speechwriter, Reagan communications director, three-time presidential (three-time presidential candidate) served as the ideological bridge between Cold War conservatism and contemporary white Christian nationalism. His 1992 Republican National Convention speech declaring a “cultural war” for “the soul of America” is often cited as a watershed moment, but his actual record is far darker.

In March 1990, Buchanan wrote that diesel engines used at Treblinka “do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody,” adding that “Holocaust Survivor Syndrome” involves “group fantasies of martyrdom.” He defended Nazi war criminals Klaus Barbie, Karl Linnas, Kurt Waldheim, and John Demjanjuk, comparing the latter to Jesus Christ as recently as 2009.

His books articulated demographic anxiety in explicitly racial terms. The Death of the West (2002) warned of “the vanishing white race” and “uncontrolled immigration of peoples of different colors, creed, and cultures.” The book was edited by Sam Francis, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center documents wanted to title it “The Death of Whitey.”

Sam Francis: The Rosetta Stone for Trumpism

Sam Francis, fired from The Washington Times in 1995 for racist remarks at a white nationalist conference, became the intellectual architect of what would become Trumpism. He advocated “ending all immigration, deploying the armed forces at the border, deporting all illegal immigrants, ending all state subsidies for the ‘nonwhite birth rate,’ and encouraging ‘white fertility.’”

In 2016, The Week’s Michael Brendan Dougherty called Francis’s writings “the Rosetta Stone for Trumpism.” At the February 2025 National Conservatism Conference, the Heritage Foundation urged Trump to award Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) declaring Buchanan “was right about pretty much everything 20 years before most people realized it.”

The ideological thread from Buchanan and Francis to Trump isn’t speculation. It’s explicit. The people who shaped contemporary Republican ideology openly acknowledge their intellectual debts to men who denied the Holocaust and advocated for white nationalism.

From “Birth Dearth” to “Great Replacement”

Ben Wattenberg’s The Birth Dearth (1987) articulated demographic anxiety in Cold War terms-the idea that declining Western birth rates represented a strategic threat. While Wattenberg remained pro-immigration, his framing was racialized by paleoconservatives.

French author Renaud Camus codified this into conspiracy theory with his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement, claiming European elites were orchestrating “genocide by substitution” through immigration. The theory drew on Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), Hitler’s “Bible”-and Jean Raspail’s racist novel The Camp of the Saints (1973), which depicts Europe’s destruction by immigrant “hordes.” Stephen Miller reportedly recommended The Camp of the Saints in emails to Breitbart.

According to a New York Times analysis, Tucker Carlson “amplified the idea that Democratic politicians and others want to force demographic change through immigration” in over 400 episodes totaling more than 50 hours. Multiple Republican congressmembers including Matt Gaetz and Elise Stefanik have referenced replacement rhetoric.

By May 2022, an AP-NORC poll found 47% of Republicans believed “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.”

Part VIII: The 1990s-Militias, Talk Radio, and the Mainstreaming of Paranoid Politics

Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Militia Boom

The early 1990s saw the emergence of a new armed right-wing movement that would eventually flow into Trumpism. The Ruby Ridge standoff (1992) and the Waco siege (1993) became foundational myths for militia culture-evidence that the federal government was at war with ordinary Americans.

The actual facts of these incidents-Randy Weaver’s ties to white supremacist organizations, David Koresh’s messianic cult-were less important than the narrative: armed federal agents attacking American families. The militia movement that emerged in response was explicitly anti-government, steeped in conspiracy theory, and increasingly tied to white nationalist ideology.

The Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995-timed for the second anniversary of the Waco fire-killed 168 people, including 19 children. Timothy McVeigh was directly influenced by The Turner Diaries, a white supremacist novel depicting a race war and the violent overthrow of the federal government. The book ends with nuclear attacks on American cities followed by the extermination of non-white populations.

The Republican response was revealing. Some condemned the violence. But the party’s rhetoric about federal tyranny, about jack-booted government thugs, about the existential threat posed by the Clinton administration-that continued. The gun lobby, increasingly allied with the GOP, fought any regulation that might have prevented future attacks. The logic of anti-government extremism was too useful to abandon just because someone had actually followed it to its conclusion.

Talk Radio and the Fox Effect

Rush Limbaugh, whose radio show launched nationally in 1988, pioneered the rhetoric of eliminationist contempt that would define conservative media. “Feminazis,” “environmental wackos,” liberals as enemies of civilization rather than fellow citizens with different views-this was the grammar that made Trump possible.

Limbaugh’s audience learned to see politics not as a competition among legitimate interests but as an existential struggle against evil. Compromise was betrayal. Democrats weren’t opponents but enemies. The media that reported unfavorably on conservatives wasn’t biased but actively treasonous. This was the soil in which “enemy of the people” would eventually take root.

Fox News, launched in 1996, institutionalized this approach at the national level. “Fair and balanced” was always a lie-the network was founded explicitly to provide Republican-aligned news coverage, to create an alternative reality where conservative beliefs were always vindicated and liberal perfidy was always exposed. The information ecosystem that made Trump’s rise possible was deliberately constructed.

Immigration Politics and Proposition 187

California’s Proposition 187 (1994), which sought to deny public services to undocumented immigrants, represented an early trial run for the nativist politics Trump would later nationalize. The Republican Party’s embrace of anti-immigrant sentiment-despite the long-term electoral consequences in California-showed that racial resentment could still be mobilized even as the country became more diverse.

Pat Buchanan’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns brought paleoconservative nationalism into the Republican primaries. His “peasants with pitchforks” rhetoric anticipated Trump’s populism. His “America First” slogan was explicitly borrowed from the 1940s movement. His warnings about demographic change and immigration presaged the “Great Replacement” theory that would later become Republican orthodoxy.

Buchanan lost the primaries, but his ideas didn’t disappear. They went into circulation, were refined and radicalized over the next two decades, and eventually found their avatar in a reality TV star who understood how to package them for mass consumption.

The Bush Administration and the Post-9/11 Shift

The George W. Bush administration represented a complex moment for Republican extremism. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” rhetoric and his explicit rejection of anti-Muslim bigotry after 9/11 (“Islam is peace”) seemed to represent a moderating tendency. But the administration’s policies-the Iraq War based on false pretenses, the torture program, Guantanamo, the surveillance state-normalized authoritarian practices that would be expanded under future administrations.

The “with us or against us” framing, the demonization of war critics as unpatriotic, the manufactured evidence for invasion-these were dress rehearsals for post-truth politics. If the government could lie the nation into war and face no consequences, what couldn’t it do?

Part VIII-B: The Obama Era-Tea Party, Birtherism, and Online Radicalization

The Election of a Black President as Trigger

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 triggered a reaction that revealed how thin the veneer of racial progress actually was. Within weeks, the Tea Party movement emerged, ostensibly focused on fiscal conservatism but steeped in imagery and rhetoric that made its racial anxieties unmistakable.

Tea Party signs depicted Obama as an African witch doctor. Attendees carried Confederate flags and signs demanding their “country back.” The movement’s obsession with Obama’s “otherness”-his alleged foreignness, his Muslim father, his Kenyan roots-was not about policy. It was about the illegitimacy of Black political power.

Academic studies later confirmed what was obvious at the time: Tea Party support correlated strongly with racial resentment, not with opposition to government spending as such. Medicare and Social Security remained popular among Tea Partiers; what they opposed was spending that might benefit those people.

Birtherism and Trump’s Trial Run

Donald Trump’s entry into national politics came through birtherism-the conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore an illegitimate president. Trump became the movement’s most prominent promoter, demanding Obama’s birth certificate and claiming to have investigators in Hawaii discovering “amazing” things.

This was the tell. Trump didn’t break into politics through economic policy or foreign affairs expertise. He broke in by questioning whether the first Black president was really American. Birtherism was always racism barely disguised, and Trump rode it to political relevance.

The Republican establishment’s response was revealing. Most mainstream Republicans knew birtherism was nonsense. But very few were willing to forcefully repudiate it, because the base loved it. The pattern that would define Trump’s rise-Republican elites knowing better but refusing to say so-was already established.

The Alt-Right and Online Radicalization

The Obama years also saw the emergence of the “alt-right”-a collection of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and assorted extremists who used online platforms to recruit and radicalize. Sites like 4chan and Reddit became pipelines moving young men from edgy humor to explicit white supremacy.

The alt-right’s innovation was aesthetic: they made racism funny, ironic, memeable. Pepe the Frog became a symbol precisely because it seemed absurd-who could be offended by a cartoon frog? But the absurdity was the point. It provided cover for the transmission of genuinely hateful ideology.

When Trump announced his campaign in 2015, the alt-right recognized one of their own. His rhetoric about Mexican “rapists,” his willingness to say what respectable politicians wouldn’t, his contempt for political correctness-this was what they had been waiting for. They threw themselves into his campaign with enthusiasm, and Trump did nothing to discourage them.

Part IX: The Trump Era-From Dog Whistles to Bullhorns

2015–2016: The Campaign That Said the Quiet Parts Loud

Donald Trump’s June 2015 campaign announcement-with its vilification of Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists”-drew immediate comparisons to historical scapegoating. By December, he was calling for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S. When pressed on parallels to Hitler, Trump shrugged off the comparison and instead cited President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s WWII internment of Japanese-Americans as precedent.

That’s the tell: when accused of sounding like Hitler, his defense was that FDR did something similar. He wasn’t denying the fascist parallel; he was arguing that America has done this before.

At a March 2016 rally in Florida, Trump asked supporters to raise their right hands in a pledge to vote for him. Photographs of the crowd with outstretched arms prompted outcry over the gesture’s resemblance to the Nazi salute. Trump dismissed comparisons as “ridiculous.” That October, supporters at his rallies began shouting “Lügenpresse”-the Nazi-era slur for “lying press”-at journalists. Time magazine documented Trump fans in Cleveland taunting reporters with the term that had been named Germany’s “non-word of the year” in 2015 for its toxic history.

Upon Trump’s victory, white nationalist leader Richard Spencer and 200 followers gathered in Washington, D.C., to celebrate with Nazi salutes and cries of “Hail Trump! Heil victory!” Spencer referred to the mainstream media as “Lügenpresse,” proudly “borrowing from the original German” used by Hitler’s regime. As Spencer declared America “a white country… it belongs to us,” many in the audience responded with stiff-arm Nazi salutes.

Richard Spencer was doing literal Nazi salutes celebrating Trump’s election. This is not a metaphor.

“Enemy of the People” and Other Totalitarian Classics

Trump first called the media “enemy of the American People” on February 17, 2017-one month after inauguration. From then through October 2019, he used the phrase 36 times on Twitter alone, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The phrase “enemy of the people” is steeped in totalitarian history, used by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels to label Jews as enemies of Germany and by Stalin to justify purges. When Business Insider traced the history, they found Trump was invoking “the autocratic language of Hitler and Stalin.”

When journalist Jonathan Karl asked if he feared supporters would interpret this as justification for violence, Trump replied: “I hope they take my words to heart. I believe the press is the enemy of the people.”

The Visual Symbols They Claim “Nobody Noticed”

On June 17, 2020, the Trump campaign ran 88 paid advertisements across Facebook featuring an inverted red triangle-the identical symbol Nazis used to mark political prisoners in concentration camps. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, red triangles identified Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political enemies at Auschwitz, where 95% of prisoners wore them.

Facebook removed the ads within 24 hours, confirming the company banned them for violating policies against “organized hate.” The hate group Facebook referenced was the Nazis.

The campaign claimed the triangle was “an antifa symbol.” Historians called bullshit. Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, stated flatly that the symbol “is no longer widely used by the movement nor by U.S. antifa groups.” Media Matters noted the campaign ran exactly 88 ads-a white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler” (H being the 8th letter). The campaign declined to comment on this detail.

Just two weeks later, the campaign began selling a $30 “America First” T-shirt featuring an eagle with wings spread, clutching a circular American flag. The design was astonishingly similar to the Nazi Reichsadler (Imperial Eagle), which clutched a swastika in an identical pose. The ADL’s Hate Symbols Database confirms neo-Nazis frequently use the Nazi eagle, sometimes “leaving the circle blank where the swastika normally would appear.”

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden responded to a side-by-side comparison: “Holy sh*t.” The campaign called comparisons “moronic” but did not remove the merchandise.

At the February 2021 CPAC conference, the main stage was shaped like an Odal rune with serifs-a symbol used by Nazi SS divisions and classified by the ADL as a hate symbol commonly used by white supremacists “in tattoo form, on flags or banners, as part of group logos.” The design firm claimed ignorance. Snopes rated the claim of intentional design as “Unproven.” The Hyatt hotel chain, which hosted the conference, called hate symbols “abhorrent.”

Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt captured the dynamic: “I am sure the shape is inadvertent… But the fact that nobody noticed is a very big oops.”

“Poisoning the Blood” and “Vermin”-Textbook Mein Kampf

At a December 16, 2023 rally in New Hampshire, Trump declared of immigrants: “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

Hitler used nearly identical language in Mein Kampf: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” He wrote that Jews “poison the blood of others but preserve their own blood unadulterated.”

When confronted, Trump claimed: “I never knew that Hitler said it, either, by the way. And I never read Mein Kampf.” After being informed of the parallel, he repeated the phrase anyway, saying: “They said Hitler used it in a much different way.”

Jason Stanley of Yale, author of How Fascism Works, responded: “It doesn’t echo Mein Kampf. This is textbook Mein Kampf. He’s becoming as explicit as it’s possible to be rhetorically.”

A 2024 PRRI/Brookings survey found 34% of Americans agreed immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”-including 61% of Republicans and 70% of those who primarily trust far-right news sources.

At a Veterans Day rally in November 2023, Trump branded his opponents “communists, Marxists, fascists… the radical left thugs that live like vermin within our country.” He vowed: “We will root them out.” The statement was simultaneously posted to Truth Social, confirming it was scripted rather than improvised.

Hitler in Mein Kampf repeatedly called Jews and political opponents “vermin” (Ungeziefer) to dehumanize them and justify their elimination. The Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude juxtaposed images of Jews with rats while narration called them “the vermin of the human race.”

Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded to historians’ criticism by calling critics “snowflakes” and threatening that their “sad and miserable existence will be crushed” if Trump wins.

“They’re Eating the Dogs”: The Ancient Weapon of Disgust

In the September 2024 presidential debate, Trump claimed that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants “are eating the dogs… They’re eating the cats… They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Local police, the Republican mayor, and Ohio’s Republican governor all confirmed there were no credible reports of pets being harmed. The claim originated from a secondhand Facebook post; the poster later admitted she had “no firsthand knowledge of any such incident.” PolitiFact named it 2024’s “Lie of the Year.”

But accuracy wasn’t the point. The claim deployed the same psychological mechanism as the medieval blood libel: false accusations that Jews kidnapped Christian children for ritual murder. Both templates share essential features: minority groups engaging in disgusting practices against innocent victims, accusations that are unfalsifiable, and rhetoric designed to trigger visceral disgust that bypasses rational evaluation. (For a deeper dive into how disgust has been weaponized throughout history, see my previous essay “They’re Eating the Dogs: How the Far Right Turned Disgust Into a Thousand-Year Weapon.”)

When Senator JD Vance admitted on CNN that he would “create stories” to draw media attention, he articulated the strategy explicitly: fabricate disgusting accusations because disgust short-circuits analysis.

As Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher understood when he devoted Der Stürmer’s May 1934 issue to blood libel with the headline “Jewish Murder Plan against Gentile Humanity Revealed,” disgust works. It bypasses the rational brain and goes straight to the limbic system. Trump knew the crowd would imagine immigrants crouched over a barbecue with a golden retriever. That image does its work before anyone fact-checks.

The “Groomer” Panic: A Nazi Template

In March 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw tweeted that opponents of the “Parental Rights in Education” bill were “probably groomers.” Volume of “grooming” tweets increased 406% after the law passed, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate; the 500 most-viewed tweets advancing the narrative were seen at least 72 million times.

The accusation structure mirrors Nazi terminology: “Jugendverderber” (youth corrupters) and “Jugendverführer” (youth seducers) were applied to Jews, homosexuals, and political opponents. As historian Stefan Micheler documented, the “stereotype of the ‘seducer’ and ‘corrupter’ of youth… a uniquely dangerous figure who lured ‘normal’ young men into depravity” was central to Nazi persecution of gay men.

The playbook is identical: accuse the out-group of preying on children, trigger the protective parental instinct, and justify any cruelty as “protecting kids.” It worked in 1930s Germany. It’s working now.

QAnon and the Revival of Blood Libel

QAnon represents the most successful integration of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory into mainstream Republican politics since Father Coughlin’s radio broadcasts in the 1930s. The theory (that a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controls the world, that they kidnap children for blood rituals, that only Trump can stop them) is a direct update of the medieval blood libel.

The specifics change. Instead of Jews explicitly, it’s “globalists” and “elites.” Instead of Christian children, it’s generally children. Instead of religious ritual, it’s “adrenochrome” harvesting. But the structure is identical: a secret, powerful, corrupt group is preying on innocent children, and extraordinary measures are justified to stop them.

When asked about QAnon at an August 2020 press conference, Trump’s response was revealing. Rather than condemn the conspiracy theory, he said: “I don’t know much about it… except I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate… and I hear these are people that love our country.” Pressed that QAnon followers believe he is fighting a secret Satanic cult, Trump said “Is that supposed to be a bad thing? If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it.”

QAnon adherents were overrepresented among January 6th participants. The “QAnon Shaman” with his horned headdress became one of the iconic images of the insurrection. Trump subsequently praised the rioters and promised pardons, which he delivered in January 2025.

Nick Fuentes and the Dinner That Wasn’t Disavowed

On November 22, 2022, one week after announcing his 2024 candidacy, Trump dined with Ye (Kanye West) and white nationalist Nick Fuentes for nearly two hours at Mar-a-Lago.

Fuentes is labeled a “white supremacist” by the Justice Department, is a documented Holocaust denier (“What’s the big deal about the Holocaust? I don’t care”), attended the 2017 Charlottesville rally, and has been banned from all major social media platforms. He leads the “America First” (groyper) movement, which explicitly seeks to move the Republican Party toward white nationalism. Fuentes has also popularized “Castizo Futurism”, a white nationalist ideology that attempts to rebrand itself for a multiracial coalition by selectively absorbing “acceptable” Latinos into whiteness, essentially updating Spanish colonial racial hierarchies for the MAGA era.

Trump claimed he “didn’t know” Fuentes. A source told Axios that Trump “seemed very taken” with the 24-year-old and “liked” him. Trump never explicitly condemned Fuentes’s views. He never said Holocaust denial was wrong. He never said white nationalism was wrong. He simply claimed ignorance of who was at his own dinner table.

The pattern of “plausible deniability” that Cambridge scholars identified was in full operation: have dinner with a Nazi, claim you didn’t know he was a Nazi, and never actually say Nazis are bad.

The International Far-Right Network

Trump’s movement is not uniquely American. It is part of a transnational far-right network that includes Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, France’s Marine Le Pen, and Germany’s AfD. These movements share rhetoric, strategy, and personnel.

Trump has praised Orbán repeatedly, calling him “a tough and smart man” who has “done a tremendous job.” Orbán has systematically dismantled Hungary’s free press and independent judiciary while maintaining the formal structures of democracy, what scholars call “electoral autocracy” or “illiberal democracy.” Trump’s advisors have explicitly cited Hungary as a model.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, attempted to build a formal international movement connecting these parties. While “The Movement” never fully materialized as an organization, the coordination continued informally. American conservative conferences host European far-right figures. European far-right parties deploy American-style rhetoric about “cultural Marxism” and “globalists.”

The AfD (Alternative for Germany) represents a particularly telling case. AfD politicians have deployed “Lügenpresse” at rallies, the same Nazi-era slur Trump supporters chanted in 2016. AfD leaders have called the Holocaust “a speck of bird shit” in German history. Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, told Breitbart in 2018 that he wanted to “empower” European conservatives, explicitly naming Austria’s hard-right chancellor as an example. German leaders interpreted this as unprecedented American support for extremist parties.

The thread connecting American and European fascism that began with the America First Committee and Charles Lindbergh never broke. It just went underground, built new institutions, and re-emerged when the conditions were right.

Part X: January 6-The Putsch That Failed

Trump’s propaganda culminated in the most direct echo of fascism yet: the attempted putsch at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Incited by Trump’s speech urging them to “fight like hell” and march on Congress, thousands of his supporters, a jarring mix of the “normal” MAGA base and hardcore extremist factions, stormed the Capitol to overturn the election.

The crowd carried an astonishing array of fascist and white supremacist symbols: Confederate battle flags (never before flown inside the Capitol) and neo-Nazi imagery like “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts, Holocaust references, and Norse runes used by the SS. One rioter waved a flag of the neo-Nazi group Vanguard America; others wore the “6MWE” slogan shirt (code for “6 Million Wasn’t Enough,” a Holocaust joke). QAnon slogans abounded alongside Trump flags.

As one expert noted, “your bread-and-butter GOP supporter” was now intermingled with neo-Nazis and accelerationist militants. The “soft barriers” between the Republican base and the violent far-right had collapsed entirely.

Trump’s response, even as the Capitol was under siege, was to praise the rioters as “very special” and tell them “we love you.”

During the September 2020 debate, when asked to condemn white supremacists like the Proud Boys militia, Trump had responded: “Proud Boys-stand back and stand by.” The neo-fascist Proud Boys took this as a rallying cry, immediately printing “Stand Back, Stand By” on shirts.

Both Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders were subsequently convicted of seditious conspiracy for January 6th. Stewart Rhodes received 18 years, Enrique Tarrio 22 years. On January 20, 2025, Trump pardoned approximately 1,500 January 6th defendants and commuted sentences for the 14 convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Upon release, Stewart Rhodes called for Trump to “seek revenge” on his behalf.

Part XI: 2025-The Orbánization of America

Upon returning to office in January 2025, Trump immediately moved to consolidate power in ways critics compare to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. He signed executive orders to fire thousands of civil servants deemed disloyal, installed loyalists and conspiracy theorists into key roles, and systematically dismantled independent oversight.

In October 2024, Trump had told Fox News: “The enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries.” He suggested using “National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military” against American citizens he identified as the internal enemy.

On September 30, 2025, addressing 800 generals at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Trump escalated: “We’re under invasion from within… No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms. At least when they’re wearing a uniform you can take them out.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added: “We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.”

“In a real sense, US democracy has died,” wrote one Guardian columnist, as Trump’s moves began to gut the federal government, punish media, reward cronies, and neuter checks and balances.

NPR, PBS, and SPLC have documented white nationalist connections among current administration personnel:

Paul Ingrassia (DHS liaison) attended a Nick Fuentes rally and advocated for his social media reinstatement.

Rachel Cauley (OMB communications) served on a board supporting Nazi sympathizer Timothy Hale-Cusanelli and attended his trial.

Jon Feere (ICE chief of staff) previously promoted VDare content.

Ed Martin (DOJ pardon attorney) wrote a book citing VDare and promoted “great replacement” theory.

The administration has adopted “remigration” terminology-a term NPR reports has explicit white nationalist origins meaning pressuring immigrants to leave. SPLC’s Hatewatch documented DHS social media reposting anti-immigrant propaganda from explicitly racist accounts.

Conclusion: The Thread Was Never Broken

The evidence compiled here spans more than a century-from the Klan’s “America First” banners in the 1920s through the 1950 ruling admitting Nazi collaborators, through Nixon’s Heritage Groups Council staffed with Arrow Cross and Iron Guard veterans, through Reagan’s Bitburg visit and his warm embrace of an organization founded by a convicted Nazi collaborator, through the paleoconservative bridge of Buchanan and Francis, through the Tea Party and birtherism, through Trump’s campaign rallies where supporters chanted “Lügenpresse” and celebrated with Nazi salutes, through 88 Facebook ads featuring concentration camp symbols, through “poisoning the blood” and “vermin” rhetoric that historians confirm is “textbook Mein Kampf,” through an attempted putsch at the Capitol, through a second administration staffed with personnel who have documented white nationalist connections.

The thread was never broken. The ideological continuity is documented. The institutional connections are traceable. The language evolved from explicit to encoded and back to explicit. The personnel network persisted across decades.

This isn’t about “both sides” or political polarization. This is about a specific political party that has spent a century making room for fascist currents, fascist-adjacent personnel, and fascist rhetoric-until the distinction between “fascist-adjacent” and simply “fascist” collapsed entirely.

General John Kelly, Trump’s own former chief of staff, told the New York Times that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.” General Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called Trump “fascist to the core.”

Mike Godwin, creator of Godwin’s Law-the internet principle warning against casual Nazi comparisons-explicitly endorsed Trump-Hitler comparisons in December 2023: “When people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking.”

Timothy Snyder, Yale historian and author of On Tyranny, left the United States for Canada in March 2025, explaining that “conversations about freedom and unfreedom” have become harder in America.

The question is no longer whether the Republican Party has a fascism problem. Four-star generals and the man who invented the rule against Hitler comparisons have answered that question.

The question is what Americans are going to do about it.

A Note on Sources and Contested Claims

This essay relies primarily on documented sources: government records, preserved speeches, contemporaneous journalism, and scholarly research. Where claims are disputed, I have noted the disputes.

The 1950 Displaced Persons Commission determination is documented through preserved correspondence at the National Archives and reproduced at holocaustinlatvia.org. Russ Bellant’s research draws from direct interviews, FBI documents, and Library of Congress materials; his book includes extensive footnotes and citations that can be independently verified.

The Lee Atwater interview exists in full audio form; you can listen to it yourself. The John Kelly interviews were conducted on the record with multiple news organizations; the Trump campaign’s denial is noted but Kelly’s statements are his own on-record testimony.

Several claims frequently made about Trump’s fascism are fabricated or exaggerated. Snopes has debunked manipulated photos purporting to show Trump in Nazi regalia or making explicit Nazi salutes. These false claims exist alongside the documented incidents and complicate analysis-they allow defenders to dismiss all criticism by pointing to the fakes.

The question of “intent” with respect to the visual symbols-the 88 red triangle ads, the eagle merchandise, the CPAC stage-cannot be definitively resolved without internal documents or confessions. Snopes rated the CPAC stage claim as “Unproven.” What can be said is that the pattern of coincidences is extensive, that the campaign declined to comment on the “88” detail, and that the merchandise was not withdrawn.

Holocaust survivors are themselves divided. Some, like Ruth Nussbaum, say “When I hear Trump speak, I hear Hitler again.” Others, like Jerry Wartski, appeared in Trump campaign videos. The comparison to Nazism is not made lightly and is contested by reasonable people.

What is not reasonably contested is the documented record: the words Trump has used, the symbols his campaign has deployed, the people he has dined with and pardoned, the assessments of his own former generals. Whether this constitutes “fascism” depends on your definition. What it constitutes, at minimum, is a pattern that demands documentation and serious analysis.

This essay is that documentation.

The historical parallels are real. The institutional connections are traceable. The rhetoric is documented. The choices-to use “America First” despite warnings, to repeat “poisoning the blood” after being informed of its origins, to dine with Holocaust deniers and pardon seditious conspirators-were deliberate.

History does not repeat, but it rhymes. The rhythms of the 1920s and 1930s are unmistakable in the 2020s. Whether America follows the same trajectory depends on whether enough Americans recognize the pattern and act accordingly.

The documentation is now in your hands.

Bibliography

Primary Sources and Government Documents

U.S. Displaced Persons Commission. “Ruling on Baltic Waffen SS Units.” September 1, 1950. Documentation available at holocaustinlatvia.org.

Reagan, Ronald. “Remarks at the Convention of the National Republican Heritage Groups Council.” May 17, 1985. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-convention-national-republican-heritage-groups-council

Atwater, Lee. Interview with Alexander Lamis. 1981. Full audio available at The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/

Books and Investigative Works

Bellant, Russ. Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party. Boston: South End Press, 1991. Full text available at Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/russ-bellant-old-nazis-the-new-right-and-the-republican-party-domestic-fascist-n

Buchanan, Patrick J. The Death of the West. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

Camus, Renaud. Le Grand Remplacement. Paris: David Reinharc, 2011.

Churchwell, Sarah. Behold, America. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Jacobsen, Annie. Operation Paperclip. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works. New York: Random House, 2018.

Journalism and News Sources

Anderson, Jack. “Ex-Nazi in GOP Post.” Syndicated column, September 25, 1971. Archived at Newspapers.com. https://www.newspapers.com/article/582820/pauco/

“Ex-Nazis Among Leadership Ranks of Republican Outreach Groups.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 26, 1988. https://www.jta.org/1988/09/26/archive/ex-nazis-among-leadership-ranks-of-republican-outreach-groups

Kelly, John. Interviews with New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC News, CNN, and Axios. October 2024.

“Donald Trump Supporters Are Using Nazi Word Lügenpresse.” Time, October 2016. https://time.com/4544562/donald-trump-supporters-lugenpresse/

“White Nationalists Salute the President-Elect: Hail Trump!” The Atlantic, November 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/

“Facebook removes Trump ads with Nazi symbols.” PBS, CBS, NPR. June 2020. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/facebook-removes-trump-ads-with-symbols-once-used-by-nazis

“Trump campaign T-shirts condemned for Nazi-inspired symbol.” Newsweek, Global News, Fast Company. July 2020.

“CPAC stage Nazi symbol controversy.” Times of Israel, Forward, Reuters, Snopes. February-March 2021.

“Trump compares political opponents to vermin.” ABC News, November 2023. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-compares-political-opponents-vermin-root-alarming-historians/story?id=104847748

“Trump repeats poisoning the blood anti-immigrant remark.” Reuters, December 2023. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-repeats-poisoning-blood-anti-immigrant-remark-2023-12-16/

“They’re eating the pets: Trump, Vance earn PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year.” PolitiFact, December 2024. https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/dec/17/theyre-eating-the-pets-trump-vance-earn-politifact/

“In a real sense, US democracy has died: how Trump is emulating Hungary’s Orbán.” The Guardian, February 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/07/trump-viktor-orban-electoral-autocracy

Research Organizations

Anti-Defamation League. Hate Symbols Database. https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbols

Southern Poverty Law Center. Extremist Files and Hatewatch. https://www.splcenter.org

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org

Author’s Previous Work

Ragle, Brian. “They’re Eating the Dogs: How the Far Right Turned Disgust Into a Thousand-Year Weapon.” Medium, 2024. https://medium.com/@brian.ragle/theyre-eating-the-dogs-how-the-far-right-turned-disgust-into-a-thousand-year-weapon-e187ba1b4323

Ragle, Brian. “Castizo Futurism and the New Conquistadors, Part 2.” Medium, October 2025. https://medium.com/@brian.ragle/castizo-futurism-and-the-new-conquistadors-part-2-0463720b990d