Defend our democracy now — or lose it.
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According to historians, it took Adolf Hitler 53 days to transform the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, replacing that feckless democracy with the mother of all modern dictatorships.
In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Timothy W. Ryback, director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, clocks it at “one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes.”
Ryback’s precision (leaving aside a minor quibble about the length of the month) put me in mind of the record books — Usain Bolt, Katie Ledecky, Joe DiMaggio — and the question of how long it may take Donald Trump.
Of course the historical record is teeming with dictators who, their coups having succeeded, crossed the Finish Line in hours, if not minutes.
Trump and Hitler were never going to catch up with, say, an Augusto Pinochet.
But these other champion athletes were competing in a sprint, generally a military takeover. Hitler and Trump entered a different event with different rules, more like a steeplechase — the challenge being to destroy a constitution and its accompanying democratic infrastructure by more or less legal means. To beat democracy at its own game.
What that seems to come down to is an Olympic-class talent for finding and exploiting every flaw and vulnerability in the architecture through which the aspiring dictator came legally to power, in order to keep those same pesky processes from constraining that power or prying loose the dictator’s hold on it.
In this endeavor, Trump is off to a great start. Less than three weeks from his inauguration, having handed the smarter and arguably more ruthless Elon Musk a carte blanche wrecking ball, his smashing of guardrails and purges of the uncooperative are going great guns. Resistance thus far has been token, the opposition party and the media mostly muted.
Parallels and Distinctions
While the Weimar constitution was hardly a fair copy of our own remarkable document, and while the Weimar Republic was a sapling compared to our full-grown (overgrown?) oak, Trump’s challenge has a great deal in common with Hitler’s.
Both came into office in a sharply divided country, with a “mandate” that existed in their own minds, not in reality. Both had essentially boundless ambitions, knew with a fair amount of precision what stood in their way, had plans in hand for neutering those impediments, and were gifted with an improvisatory flair for dealing with setbacks.
The machinations that took Hitler through the minefield of his 53 days are recounted in detail in a whole library shelf of books and articles; I highly recommend Ryback’s, cited above, for a relatively succinct summary.
There are a few key points of special relevance to the perils facing our own democracy.
There were those who — even in early 1933, when Hitler was still getting his ducks lined up — grasped the disaster to come, some with uncanny specificity. But the vast majority, not just in Germany but across the globe, continued to pursue normal, often enthusiastic, relations with the Third Reich. Hitler hosted the 1936 Olympics, the first instance of sportswashing, and still the most egregious.
When the president of the Weimar Republic, the aged war hero Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Hitler as chancellor on January 30, 1933, Hitler’s National Socialist (i.e., Nazi) Party controlled only 37 percent of the seats in the Reichstag, the republic’s legislature. The Nazis had, in fact, suffered significant losses in the preceding parliamentary elections in December 1932. Hitler further had all but two members of his cabinet chosen for him as part of the deal resulting in his appointment, so it contained only two of his own party loyalists. (Hitller made the most of that situation, choosing Wilhelm Frick and Hermann Göring — each found guilty and sentenced to death at the post-war Nuremberg trials — for the two posts and giving them missions that had much in common with Trump’s charge to Elon Musk.)
Thus boxed in, Hitler saw that his route to dictatorship would have several legs or tests:
New elections in which his party could beef up its Reichstag power;
Banning the Communist Party to remove its anti-Nazi Reichstag votes as an impediment;
Rapid appointment of fierce loyalists to whatever positions would give them power to remold federal and state governments to Hitler’s purpose;
Winning the public embrace of the increasingly frail Hindenburg, who regarded Hitler with great personal disdain, and who at any point was a threat to exercise his legal power to remove him as chancellor; and,
Ultimately, pushing through the post-election Reichstag — with the grudging support of enough non-Nazi parties to reach the two-thirds majority legally required for passage — an “Enabling Act” (Ermächtigungsgesetz) that would remove virtually all constitutional constraints from Nazi rule and, in short order, make Hitler Germany’s dictator.
All of this took Hitler and his lieutenants 53 days and was touch-and-go at many points. In the event, it relied on the deus ex machina of the mysterious, and still not completely solved, Reichstag fire.
This dramatic act of sabotage, blamed by the Nazis on the Communists, was exploited — if not in fact commissioned — by the Nazis to justify a sweeping crackdown on civil liberties that included the long-sought banning of the Communist Party, which eventually resulted in the necessary two-thirds Reichstag majority for the Enabling Act.
It also served to swing millions of voters to Hitler’s side in the March election that took place just a week after the blaze, with the ruins still smoldering.
With the passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, 53 days after he took office, Hitler’s dictatorship and the Third Reich were airborne. Still to come:
The first night of massive book burning (May 10, 1933);
The bloody purge known as the “night of long knives” (July 1934);
The purging of Jews and other non-Nazi intellectuals from academic institutions, the sciences generally, the media, and a long list of other professions;
The mass anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass (Nov. 9, 1938);
An ever-more-brazen sequence of foreign invasions in search of lebensraum (living space) for the master race;
World War II with its tens of millions dead;
And, of course — the Holocaust.
There were those who — even in early 1933, when Hitler was still getting his ducks lined up — grasped the disaster to come, some with uncanny specificity. But the vast majority, not just in Germany but across the globe, continued to pursue normal, often enthusiastic, relations with the Third Reich. Few expressed serious qualms. Hitler hosted the 1936 Olympics, the first instance of sportswashing and still the most egregious.
I found it telling that nowhere in Ryback’s nearly 5,000-word account is there a single direct reference to our current situation, yet it was impossible to read it without a powerful sense of the present permeating the narrative and lurking in so many of its twists and turns.
In one sense, the parallels are there for the plucking and hardly need to be pointed out: the firehose of lies; the sneering, threatening, belligerent rhetoric; the false invocation of a mandate; the blitzkrieg of institutional gutting; the cowing of potential opposition, within and without the leader’s party; the speed of movement and the fierce, insistent, implacable will to power.
But there are differences: Our republic is far older than was Weimar; we are not a parliamentary system; the dates of our elections are, for better or worse, fixed; our courts wield greater power; the media environment and superconducting modes of information exchange are particular to our age; our economy, unlike 1933 Germany’s, is not mired in a punishing depression; Trump, unlike Hitler, appears to be on track to have his pick of Cabinet members and top advisers in virtually all posts; Trump’s party, unlike Hitler’s, begins with majority control of all branches of the federal government.
What impact, if any, will these and other distinctions have on the outcome of the Trump-Musk offensive? How much of our democracy will be left after 53 days of what we’re now witnessing? After a year? After four?
It’s safe to say that no one knows. This is genuinely uncharted territory.
Waking Up and Realizing It’s All Real
Those of us who predicted this onslaught — while the media was busy normalizing Trump and his intentions throughout 2024 — are seeing our worst fears realized. A sampler of this week’s headlines: “The Purge: Wrecking the Civil Service”; “Trump and Musk Are Strangling the Government”; “Where Will It End?”; “Reverse D-Day”; “Last Chance To Stop a Dictatorship”; “The Coup d’État Has Begun”; “Elon Musk Has Broken the Constitutional Order”; “Trump’s Gut-It-All Plan”; “Impeach Him: We Are Watching a Global Superpower Commit Suicide.”
You get the idea. One by one it has dawned on observers and handicappers that this is serious.
Unlike in 2017, when they hit the ground stumbling, this time Trump and his minions have done their homework, having written much of it down in the menacing Project 2025, and have come roaring out of the gate with a terrifying, flood-the-zone intensity.
Musk boasts that he sleeps in his office, Trump (before playing a round of golf) claims that he is too busy to play golf.
Globally, Trump instantly pulled out of the Paris Accords and the World Health Organization; levied sanctions, soon after, on the International Criminal Court; threw tariff grenades at our neighbors.
He threatened NATO ally Denmark with the military invasion of its territory, Panama with repossession of its canal, Canada with outright annexation, and now has cheerfully floated, and doubled down on, a reenactment of the Nakba via US ownership of Gaza and forced relocation (aka, ethnic cleansing) of its beleaguered Palestinian residents while the casinos, golf courses, and all-inclusives go up on “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
It might be noted that it took Hitler more than five years to begin his expansionist conquests.
On the home front, it’s worse. The general idea seems to be to take away benefits, rights, and protections — not just from especially vulnerable populations, but from a couple hundred million ordinary Americans — for no particularly good reason unless it is to add another feather to the plush, downy nests of the morbidly rich.
One of Trump’s first executive orders, for just one example, reversed the Biden administration’s initiative to lower drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid enrollees.
Presumably the millions of such enrollees who voted for Trump may at some point wonder how his reverse Robin Hood act is helping them or making America great again.
They may wonder, if we are visited by another pandemic, where our public health infrastructure has disappeared to.
If they live in a red state, they may wonder why there are no accessible OB-GYN practitioners, why it has become a crime to seek such care out of state.
They may wonder, the next time a natural disaster strikes them, why there’s no FEMA, no federal assistance to help them dig out and rebuild.
They may wonder why there are no Pell grants to help them afford college. Why their waterways have started once again to turn brown and smell of chemicals, why their ponds have eutrophied. Why bank and credit card fees have skyrocketed. Why eggs and just about everything else cost more, not less.
Why, in other words, they got just about the opposite of what they thought they’d voted for. Why they’ve gotten screwed.
But those are mainly just policies — the kind of things that voters get mad about, throw the bums out over, and reverse.
That’s not really what these first three weeks, like Hitler’s first 53 days, have been about.
It has been about firebombing the federal government, treating it quite openly as an enemy to be conquered.
No other president in history has done this; Ronald Reagan, who claimed “government is the problem,” did not even come close.
There have been some specific targets for demolition: so far the Department of Education, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and others more obscure.
Even more troubling have been the wholesale purges across the spectrum of the federal workforce, as career civil servants are forced out, to be replaced by stringently vetted Trump loyalists (many subject to actual loyalty pledges) or by no one, their posts left empty on the theory that much of the government is useless, if not outright subversive. You know, the far-left Marxist lunatics that constitute the “deep state.”
The purpose of these data grabs — executed mainly by a cadre of unvetted, barely post-adolescent male techies picked by Musk himself — remains unclear. But as anyone subjected to Nazi rule, or any authoritarian regime, could testify, knowledge is power, particularly when Dossier Road is a one-way street.
Most of this ax-wielding has been the work of the woolgathered Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk’s unvetted, unaccountable, rogue fiefdom and toy.
When it’s not busy shuttering whole programs and departments, or sending email pink slips to millions of unsuspecting federal employees, DOGE — with the cooperation of newly appointed MAGA headmen and over the professionally dead bodies of career civil servants — has started drilling into databases in the military, the Treasury, Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Department of Justice (DOJ), inter alia.
These forays open vaults of sensitive information — such as tax returns, Social Security numbers, and other highly confidential records — not only of government employees but of just about every American.
The purpose of the data grabs — executed mainly by a cadre of unvetted, barely post-adolescent male techies picked by Musk himself — remains unclear. But as anyone subjected to Nazi rule, or any authoritarian regime, could testify, knowledge is power, particularly when Dossier Road is a one-way street.
Of course, most of these gambits have run into some resistance. Suits have been filed, injunctions sought. Courts have stepped in to block, temporarily, some of the more egregious moves: Trump’s abrogation of constitutionally guaranteed birthright citizenship; DOGE’s access to certain troves of highly sensitive information; the freezes in foreign aid and all federal grants, loans, and other financial assistance, etc.
It took Trump until yesterday to win a single court battle — a George W. Bush-appointed federal district judge permitted DOGE access to the Labor Department’s systems — over his various power plays.
Congress, securely in Republican hands until 2026, albeit by slim margins in both the House and Senate, seems less inclined to push back on the Trump-Musk blitz.
Just as Hitler’s Enabling Act sailed through the Reichstag — following impassioned speeches warning of its dangers by Reichstag deputies and party leaders who then ignored their own words and voted for it — it’s likely that nearly all of Trump’s nominees, no matter how unqualified or dangerous, will be confirmed — after the requisite expressions of deep concern.
The vast majority of media outlets are cowed, calculating, or cheerleading. Ditto business titans like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and even Jamie Dimon. The parade of knee-benders and ring-kissers would have made der Führer green with envy.
So where does all this place Trump as he starts down the backstretch of this race? Will American democracy be done in 53 days, fittingly on the Ides of March?
Or perhaps American democracy is already done and just doesn’t know it yet?
I think a good argument can be made that when and if our democracy is dead, we the people will be the last to know. For one thing, the “it can never happen here” blinders are likely to remain on most eyes until the bitter end.
For another, unlike in the Hitler/Stalin era, managed democracy is all the rage these days, with dictators like Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recip Tayyip Erdogan, and Hungary’s Victor Orban savvy enough to go by a humbler title and hold “elections” right on schedule — having taken sufficient control of the various ingredients of electoral politics to make them and their parties the “popular choice” ad infinitum.
Decades ago, Republican operative extraordinaire Karl Rove talked up a “permanent Republican majority” and “perpetual rule.” A few weeks ago, Trump appeared to attribute his Pennsylvania “landslide” to the fact that Musk “knows those computers better than anybody, all those computers, those vote counting computers.”
I’ll have a good deal more on that in a soon-to-be-published forensic analysis of Election 2024, but suffice it to say that current levels of security fall far short of guaranteeing legitimate elections going forward, and there is no sign of that changing for the better.
In fact, with both CISA and the Federal Elections Commission among Trump/Musk’s targets — and with Republicans continuing to ramp up their assault on voting rights in Congress, state legislatures, and the courts — there will very likely be more room for GOP thumbs on the electoral scales in 2026 and 2028.
And of course the onboarding of Tech Bros like Zuckerberg, along with Musk’s own control of X, will translate to an even wilder disinformation free-for-all between now and the next time Americans get to vote.
Needless to say, much can and will happen before Decision 2026. Little of it is apt to be normal. You can, if you wish, keep a running scorecard of wins and losses, but that risks missing the big-picture sweep and the moments, or moment, of truth. The progress of this Brueghelian donnybrook is not likely to be linear.
But amidst the apparent chaos, what is perfectly clear is that Trump, Musk, MAGA, and the GOP are all-in, playing for keeps.
They may get lucky: The economy may defy expectations and thrive; gutting the federal government and wrenching it to the execution of a far-right, anti-science, anti-environment, anti-diversity, anti-decency, anti-compassion agenda may work out somehow, at least in the short run; grabbing Greenland and Gaza may prove popular. Never underestimate the American voter!
But in the far more likely event that the chaos that Trump, Musk, and minions are generating leads to — surprise! — more chaos and a great deal of widespread pain and suffering, the kinds of takeovers and makeovers that the new regime is now pursuing at breakneck speed raise a great danger that the mechanisms of democracy themselves will be so corrupted that even mass public disapproval of the course the regime has taken won’t matter.
Signs of a Pulse?
We have just begun to see some response from a part of the public shocked and awed out of its post-election despondency and paralysis. Though MAGA voters seem to be with the program and Trump’s approval has actually risen somewhat — “Look, he’s doing things! That’s all I need to see!” — there have been anti-DOGE, anti-Trump demonstrations at the capitols of every state.
Perhaps the most important determinant of where this all winds up will be what happens if those demonstrations spread, get bigger and angrier, perhaps even violent.
How will Trump — who in 2020 was itching to shoot Black Lives Matter demonstrators “in the legs” — respond? Will he invoke the Insurrection Act, turn the military on protesters? Will the troops so deployed shoot if provoked? Will someone die? Will that lead to bigger, angrier demonstrations, more shooting, more deaths? Where will that escalation end up? Will we enter into what, a year ago, I first referred to as “the dictator’s doom loop?”
These should be ridiculous questions. I’m afraid they are not.
Solace in Shoddiness?
Quite a few Trump/Musk critics have taken solace in the supposed incompetence of those who are or will be executing Project 2025, the purges, the data grabs, and the general campaign to give Trump dictatorial powers.
They point knowingly to such blunders as falsely alleging massive USAID funding for Politico; the CIA’s sending, in response to a White House demand, of an email containing readily identifiable agents’ names and information, thereby exposing them to deadly violence by hostile foreign powers; the sloppy OMB order halting federal funding, which could not begin to pass judicial muster; the cadre of twentysomethings (and a 19-year-old) tasked by Musk with rooting around in highly sensitive government databases; the willy-nilly mass takedowns of government websites, jeopardizing years of carefully collected and organized data and information, and crippling the collection of such data and information going forward.
Surely such a shoddy operation will, in the view of these optimists, trip over its own feet and wind up, at worst, ineffectual? Perhaps, but I wouldn’t count on it.
While there is little question that much of MAGA governance oozes shoddiness, the conclusion that that makes it somehow less dangerous derives, I’m afraid, from a solidly meritocratic world view.
And that world view is precisely what the MAGAs have set out to smash.
Competence, long years of devotion, study, training are, in their view, not merely unnecessary, but dangerous hallmarks of the far-left lunatic deep state. “Move fast and break things” is, with the merger of Tech Bro and MAGA, the new modus operandi, to be prized and flaunted in Washington and beyond. Who needs an advanced degree in bioengineering or theoretical physics when you can just do your own research by checking out podcasts, websites, and influencers your Uncle MAGA recommends?
Unfortunately for the rest of us, it turns out that breaking things is a lot easier than running them — and that, sadly, includes democracy.
The spectacularly unqualified Pete Hegseth should, as secretary of defense, have little trouble breaking the military, and/or bending it to meet Trump’s dictatorial needs. The anti-qualified Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should, as secretary of HHS, have little trouble breaking our public health system. It won’t take a whole lot of competence for Attorney General Pam Bondi to weaponize the DOJ against Trump’s enemies, real and perceived; or Kash Patel to turn the FBI into a political attack machine; or Tulsi Gabbard, as director of national intelligence, to sell out whatever parts of the nation’s security apparatus need to be sold out for Trump to prosper.
Even manipulation or falsification of data requires far less expertise and acumen than is needed to generate accurate data and analysis. And bear in mind that the heavy lifting can, if absolutely necessary, generally be assigned to a handful of semi-competent loyalist underlings.
Chaos and ruin turn out to be easy — just as easy as successful governing is hard — especially if you’re willing to turn to force when the wheels start coming off.
The Courts and Then Us
Right now, there are just two forces with the realistic potential to hold America’s forced march into the Fourth Reich in check: mass public resistance and the courts. Both are problematic.
The courts are at best an even bet because our justice system is the very antithesis of “move fast and break things.” The legal efforts to block Trump and Musk’s unconstitutional and law-breaking moves are absolutely necessary, but most are likely to drag on… and on — for months, if not years.
Meanwhile — injunctions, many fear, notwithstanding — grave damage can be done, some of it very difficult if not impossible to reverse. And that is assuming that Trump ultimately bats zero before a Supreme Court that has thus far been highly deferential to his contentions. Even a low batting average would suffice to legally smash numerous taken-for-granted pillars of our democracy.
It remains to be seen whether our courts, stronger than Weimar Germany’s, will prove an effective guardrail, and what will happen if and when Trump routinely ignores judicial rulings, as he has already started doing. In his mind, why shouldn’t a tactic that famously worked for one of his role models, Andrew Jackson, work for him?
If the courts fail, it’s up to the public — or rather that segment of the public not belonging to the Trump cult and willing to put everything, from their convenience to their lives, on the line to save our democracy.
Those patriots ready and able to do so should expect to be met with force.
At one point, voting would have been enough. One way or another, America failed that test. Now it’s likely to take more, much more. It will take all of us.
A Fourth Reich beckons. And there are no guarantees. This is not a movie.
