We’ve seen this kind of behavior before — and we’d better find ways to combat it before it’s too late.
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A few weeks ago, I wrote a column headlined:
Trump and Hitler: The Headline That Dare Not Speak Its Name
The echoes are growing stronger — but who is listening?
I feel it’s urgent, given that things have only gotten gob-smackingly worse since then, to continue examining the direct parallels.
In the late 1920s into the 1930s, before most people fell into line, Germans, like Americans, were divided, with decent and educated people trying to understand what was happening.
And trying to decide how (and whether) to respond, first to the extreme rhetoric, and then to the extreme measures by key figures in Adolf Hitler’s movement — which evolved before their eyes into the regime in power.
Hitler both created and exploited grievances against the Allies for imposing measures against Germany post World War I. This far preceded the collapse of the international economy in 1929.
Donald Trump and his people created and exploited grievances around the theft of an election and subsequently raged over the course taken by the supposed thief of that election and “illegitimate” president, Joe Biden — as well as the impeachments and legal actions against the “victim,” Trump.
Hitler’s rhetoric was about the “evil” and “dangerous” and “inferior” people responsible for the country’s overwhelming woes — all of which compelled “urgently needed” actions.
These included assembling cadres of extreme and violent individuals to gain control of the government and harass, attack, and intimidate critics and political opponents. Once control was attained, unqualified ultra-loyalists were put into positions of great power.
Much of the strategy and tactical planning came from the secondary players, who manipulated or persuaded the charismatic “visionary” man in charge to greenlight their initiatives, while typically pursuing their own competitive agendas and wild schemes.
The explanations and justifications frequently shifted. The leadership often denied certain things, harms done, laws broken, before changing tack and implicitly owning the original allegation — without acknowledging they had previously lied, much less confessing to the shift.
Position B was denounced as “fake news” promulgated by their opponents until Position A was simply abandoned and replaced by B, which was now embraced as the truth.
Hitler and his acolytes went viciously after media of all kinds — and created their own alternative means of distributing and amplifying their message.
Waves of functionaries, too, were replaced by technocrats.
The Nazis’ original core group — the Brown Shirts of the Sturmabteilung, or Storm Troopers — were common, vulgar, odious, and openly violent.
Their utility was eventually eclipsed by Heinrich Himmler’s precise and impeccable SS officers who stealthily undertook a sweeping savagery, later known as the “night of the long knives” — getting rid of the crude human tools Hitler no longer needed and settling a slew of internecine scores into the bargain.
The Nazi path to power was in direct violation of existing German law, to say nothing of the canon of morality and human decency.
Today, we can see how Trump built his movement to regain power on the backs of the MAGA Red-Hat ruffians and via the raw violence of January 6.
Now he, in his clearly fragile and covertly adversarial alliance of convenience with Elon Musk (a big supporter of the new far-Right party in Germany — and an enthusiastic seig-heiler), appoints department heads with no relevant experience and empowers software engineers, some as young as 19 years old, without a day of instruction in management or governing or finance or law to come in, demand, investigate, shut down, purge, replace, and trample. (One DOGE intern resigned after being exposed for believing in eugenics and white power — but, with JD Vance’s encouragement, Musk reinstated him.)
The potion of unlimited power — handed to an unformed adult who has barely obtained the right to vote — to rifle through classified software, Social Security files, and the like must be highly intoxicating.
And so Musk and his small army of barely post-adolescent IT engineers go roaming the deep and loamy terrain of government, pushing here and there to see what pours out? Did anyone actually vote for this?
Interviews with people who work with or have worked for Musk in his companies indicate this kind of rashness, brinkmanship, and mendacity is nothing new.
Everywhere he has gone (especially at Twitter) before “entering politics,” he moved fast to generate fear and chaos, broadly and wildly accusing everyone in sight of incompetence and waste amid warnings of how replaceable they were. He then slashed the corporate workforce to the bone. (A departing manager described Musk as a “pigeon CEO” who “comes in, shits all over us, and goes.”)
Then, at Twitter, he discovered that — hey, a lot of those people actually were needed, actually were good, and gosh darn it, get them back in here. Musk himself admitted that this kind of zeroing everything out normally requires a “correction.”
Bottom line: Past experience provides clear guidance for dealing with Musk: Don’t cave, don’t fold, and be ready to play the long game. A couple million federal workers are scrambling to figure this out.
Above all, we need to recognize that Musk’s behavior is not that of a man, but a man-child. You can see it in his juvenile proclivity to accept as true something that random people say on social media, and then repeat it to 600 million active monthly Twitter/X users.
Of course, if he actually knows better, if he knows the harmful things he broadcasts are untrue and still puts them out there, it can only be because he has contempt for the masses and believes they will buy anything he offers. And because he couldn’t care less how he gets to where he wants to go.
For example, he pushed out a posting someone made on X, part of a broad assault on USAID and on journalists.
Please take a look at that. Musk didn’t summon the patience to… read a few words in the thing he was reposting.
He acts like this young journalist did something nefarious and almost as if he thinks she was working for USAID while working as a journalist. Yet right there it says she worked overseas for USAID projects, came home to go to journalism school — and only after that became a journalist.
There is nothing there. Yet the armies of stupidity and rage gave this 10.9 million views, 148,000 “liked” his comment, and 35,000 shared it. Apparently, for these purposes, lazy, shoddy, and/or evil work just fine.
A Disinformation Addiction
Speaking of this problem of viral disinfo, the other day I reached out to an old buddy who had some years ago gone deep into “deep state” theory, questioned “whether Sandy Hook happened,” and more recently embraced the RFK Jr. presidential cause.
Despite sadness at what seemed like his descent into rank nuttery, I like this fellow (he’d been a supporter too, at times, and I’d even spent time with him and his family at their vacation home) and I wondered how he was processing what he saw unfolding in Washington under Trump II.
After saying with apparent satisfaction that he thought Trump seemed to be, as advertised, taking on the “deep state,” he then asked me if WhoWhatWhy was one of those news organizations that had taken funding from USAID. Not knowing what he was even referring to, I asked him for details on what he meant.
He sent me a link to a social media posting. It contained a claim (a “fun fact”) that Politico had accepted support from USAID and commented, “now everything makes sense.”
He also sent me several other links. Those led to an explanation that Politico actually did not receive USAID support (merely that government agencies instead had subscriptions to a premium Politico product that covers government. One link led to a Columbia Journalism Review article that dealt with USAID’s assistance to independent foreign news organizations in a fair and nuanced manner.
And yet there was no sign he’d read or processed the explanatory material. He was solely focused on the wrong idea that domestic American news organizations are on the USAID dole.
One thing he apparently did read said:
According to the Columbia Journalism Review, USAID supported 6,200 journalists, 707 news outlets and 279 media sector civil society organizations in 30 different countries.
No wonder the news all sounds the same.
And then this from CJR itself, which led to an article in the magazine.
The CJR social posting said:
USAID and the Media in a ‘Time of Monsters’: What the aid funding freeze means for independent journalism around the world, by @Jon_Allsop.
Which, I suppose, did imply that there was a connection between USAID and “independent journalism” — hence explaining why he wondered if his old friend, now having sold out to the deep state, was in the pocket of a nefarious agency.
However, if you read the CJR article itself, support from USAID hardly involved telling struggling outlets what to do or what to write, and was often essential to them surviving to offer accurate journalism in the face of authoritarian regimes. That is, it didn’t shape their stories or perspective, but simply gave them an operational lifeline.
News outlets that have been exiled from Iran and Belarus did tell RSF [Reporters Without Borders], under the cover of anonymity, that the freeze has forced them to take drastic measures just to survive, while DataCameroon, an investigative site, said that it had to suspend projects linked to journalist safety and upcoming elections in the country.
RSF also noted the harsh effect on journalism in Ukraine, where 90 percent of news organizations rely on USAID funding, some very heavily; writing last week, Olga Rudenko, the editor in chief of the Kyiv Independent (which has received USAID grants in the past but doesn’t currently), claimed that the freeze “has caused harm to independent Ukrainian journalism on par with the COVID-19 pandemic and the onset of Russia’s full-scale war,” and could soon surpass both in severity if not reversed.
There have been reports, too, of concrete effects on journalism from Moldova, Cambodia, and Myanmar; writing in the Indian publication Scroll, Nandita Haksar, the coauthor of a new book on the prominent Burmese newsroom Mizzima, reported that the freeze has plunged that outlet into uncertainty exactly four years on from a brutal coup that forced Myanmar’s independent media into exile or underground. (I reported on the impact of the coup for a forthcoming book that I’ve written about journalism, and found that it made the country’s surviving independent outlets highly dependent on international donor funding.)
Cutting funding to independent outfits of this kind of course benefits Trump’s friend — Vladimir Putin — as well as his authoritarian friends everywhere. This dangerous fraternity seems largely forgotten with Trump’s destructive rampage front and center.
Meanwhile, it should be noted that the United States — along with other, mostly Western European countries — has, for many years, provided Peace Corps-type aid and training to struggling people and institutions worldwide.
I personally remember a couple of decades ago when a gutsy investigative reporter I know mentioned that she’d been going around the world training journalists on contracts from the State Department. She told me she was worn out, and inclined to turn down an offer to train journalists at media outlets in the former Yugoslavia. She then said that if I wanted the Balkan gig, she’d recommend me.
I told her that I doubted the State Department would want me, given my record of writing stories heavily critical of the then-ruling Bush administration.
She said it wouldn’t matter; the folks making the selections didn’t give a hoot about politics, and were primarily interested in finding people who had the right skill set and temperament to motivate and inspire local foreign journalists to improve their work. So I said fine.
After a short phone call with someone in Washington, I was off to Belgrade, Serbia. I began my gig, working with a broad cross-section of media — from outlets aligned with the Serbian government to those that were critical of it.
Nobody ever told me what to say or do, and I never in any way meddled in local affairs. All of my work was on reporting techniques, technical skills, how to write in a compelling way — that kind of thing.
So when I get these glib social media declarations of insidiousness, even when I read a CJR writer’s attempt at being even-handed, all I can say is that my own experience showed surprising benevolence and a hands-off policy from Washington.
If that’s “soft power,” it’s not a bad way for a country to win friends abroad.
Speaking of friends, I hope my old friend reads this and realizes that getting your information from social media posts by random people who have an agenda but almost no knowledge, and then using that to confirm your own biases, is not a great way to go through life.
It also represents the single biggest danger this country faces, and demonstrates exactly how Trump triumphs. Actual facts, fair-mindedness — these hold no appeal when a filter makes everything look much more sinister and, therefore, exciting, for those with an emotional need for that.
Trump’s ‘I Love You’ Scam
Trump’s supporters, as I wrote in last week’s column, exhibit traits of cult members.
I had previously explored a related phenomenon: how Trump appears to have built his base in part by convincing lonely people that he “loves them.” Of course, this is a man incapable of loving anyone but congenitally wired to spot an opportunity for manipulation.
Thus, I found it ironic to see that an agency now controlled by his administration just sent out this warning about romance scams:
WASHINGTON — With Valentine’s Day approaching, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) want consumers to be aware they may be targeted for romance scams, a deceptive form of fraud that preys on individuals seeking companionship. These scams often start online but frequently escalate to requests for money or valuables sent through the mail, leading to devasting [spelling error is in original announcement!] financial and emotional losses for victims.
“Protecting the sanctity and integrity of the mail is our top priority,” said USPIS Chief Postal Inspector Gary Barksdale. “This includes protecting customers from mail-related crimes, including fraudulent schemes like romance scams.”
I especially love the last line:
“Public awareness is critical in stopping these criminals before they cause harm.”
If only.
