Seven million Americans took part in the “No Kings” demonstration. Satire ruled the day, but the damage Trump has already caused the US is not funny.
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It’s hardly a secret that Hitler hated a significant percentage of Germany’s citizens simply because they were Jewish. For Donald Trump and his MAGA followers, it’s skin color and ancestry south of the Rio Grande that’s a problem.
By singling out undocumented immigrants — whom he frequently dismisses as rapists and murderers, while lumping them together with anyone who has less than lily-white skin — Trump is able to move a significant segment of America’s population into a separate zone that seems somehow less American and less qualified to receive protection of the law than “real” Americans.
That’s what Hitler did with Jews. Creating that separation is often followed by the next step, which in Hitler’s case was deportation, followed by physical elimination in gas chambers and death camps. We know how Hitler’s vision ended. The future under Trump is less clear, but it does not look promising.
Trump isn’t Hitler, at least not yet, but then neither was Hitler when he was just getting started. The evolution from elected politician to tyrant is a gradual process.
When Trump posted a video in which he pilots an F-16 dropping excrement on protesters marching in the “No Kings” protests, he made it pretty clear where he stands. It may be the first time in American history that a president boasted about sh*tting on the American public.
An estimated 7 million Americans marched in 2,600 protests across the country. Trump clearly wasn’t listening. To make his point, the video, constructed with AI, shows Trump placing a crown on his own head.
Trump posts AI video showing him literally dumping shit on America
Given that Trump now has total control over compliant majorities in Congress and backing by a conservative-packed Supreme Court as well as the Justice Department and FBI, and with the midterm elections still more than a year away, protests are the only option left to those Americans who disagree with what Trump is doing.
Hitler violently repressed dissent with the Waffen-SS, a secretive, violence-prone, private militia that answered to him and the Nazi elite alone. Trump has ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) — which he now plans to finance, under his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” with a whopping $75 billion over the next four years — to give disobedient Americans the shivers.
As with the Waffen-SS, ICE ultimately answers to one man. Its troops owe their position, pay, and privileges to Trump, not the Pentagon or Congress.
The $75 billion used to finance ICE will apparently be taken from funds currently used to finance Medicaid and school lunches for children. Without Trump, most of ICE would be back on the street, looking for work. That’s a powerful incentive to follow orders even if they are technically illegal or unconstitutional.
Trump isn’t Hitler, at least not yet, but then neither was Hitler when he was just getting started. The evolution from elected politician to tyrant is a gradual process.
The incident that enabled Hitler to move from elected official to open tyranny was the 1933 Reichstag fire, which burned Germany’s parliament building to the ground. No one knows who set the blaze, but it provided the excuse that Hitler needed to declare martial law, and that enabled him to use military force against the entire country.
Trump has been toying with invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, which has been interpreted as providing an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal troops from being used for domestic policing actions.
Historically, such actions have been fittingly very rare and, as with the violent refusal of certain states to abide by federal racial integration mandates, responsive to genuine emergencies and instances of rebellion. Were Trump — who has demonstrated little concern for either legal or historical precedent — to use that option, in response to minor conflicts he himself provoked or manufactured, the US would effectively make the transition from democracy to dictatorship.
With Congress and the Supreme Court neutralized, there is really nothing to stop Trump now except for public opinion. To swing opinion in his favor, Trump needs his own version of the Reichstag fire.
For a while, it looked as though sending ICE and the Texas National Guard into urban centers might provide the pretext that Trump needed. The use of an “agent provocateur” — inciting violence to justify a crackdown on any opposition — is an old trick that comes in handy when a potential tyrant needs to masquerade as a national savior. Hitler’s crackdown was presented as a necessary action to prevent terrorism by left-wing fanatics. Trump has used similar language, denouncing Democrats as “the enemy within.”
The strategy might have worked if the protests last weekend had turned violent.
As it turned out, they didn’t. Instead, the protesters relied on satire. Taking a hint from protests in Portland, OR, many demonstrators showed up wearing inflatable frog costumes or dressed as chickens, roosters, or rabbits. In most cases, the atmosphere was jubilant. Who is going to shoot an inflatable chicken? Even the few ICE agents who watched the demonstration saw the humor in it.
Yet, while the satire avoided giving Trump the excuse he needed to deploy military force against America’s cities, the current situation is anything but funny.
A divided US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — with the case assigned to a three-judge panel that included two Trump appointees — overturned a lower court’s ban on deploying National Guard troops to Portland, even though the Posse Comitatus Act makes the legality of that deployment highly questionable.
If Trump gets too preoccupied with using the presidency to enrich himself and the Trump family, his acolytes, waiting in the wings, will likely use the precedents that Trump has created to seize power for themselves.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Budget Director Russell Vought, and Vice President JD Vance — the last clearly hoping to replace Trump someday — have left no doubt that they intend to end the vision of America as a country run by the people, for the people, and change it into one that responds to only some of the people.
If it takes armed troops to impose that vision, well, the chances are that ICE will be there to “obey orders.”
