The echoes are growing stronger — but who is listening?
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Comparisons of Team Trump and Team Hitler have long — and with some very good reason — been off the table. And yet the list of parallels, of echoes, grows steadily:
- Exalting one’s own “tribe” (white supremacy)
- Vilifying and scapegoating the “other” — claiming opponents are “criminals”
- Intimidating others with rhetoric, and even violence
- Creating camps to hold undesired human beings
- Intolerance of the least fortunate; expressing delight at others’ suffering
- Glorifying male sexuality
- Encouraging couples to make more members of the “superior” race
- Demanding total loyalty
- Expecting obedience to all demands of the leader, without question
- Oversimplifying complex matters, promoting self-serving “common sense” solutions
- Disseminating propaganda and targeted disinformation to low-information citizens
- Trying to impress with military-style pageantry
- Exploiting superstition
- Invoking a mythical past to justify self-aggrandizement and predation
- Coveting other countries
And, finally, and most immediately relevant:
- Appointing poorly qualified and horribly mismatched people to top positions
With confirmation hearings unfolding now in Washington, we get to see this displayed in all its grotesque glory.
Old fashioned values are out the window. Decency, competency, honesty, honor — words that today sound so quaint, they might as well be from Old English. Thou may rest assured, none apply to the new regime.
Republicans have clearly abandoned the ostensible purpose of confirmation hearings spelled out in the US Constitution: to decide if nominees are well qualified to carry out the duties entailed by the position. Trump’s nominees stick religiously to a script. Everything is predetermined talking points, quite likely not even written by the contenders nor the GOP senators themselves nor necessarily even by their own staff.
Nothing will change GOP senators’ minds or occasion spontaneous inquiry. It is all performative. They are in lock-step behind a feared leader.
As for the Democrats, their senators come across as intelligent and passionate, yet clearly frustrated by the charade these sessions have become.
They do try to bring out blatant deficiencies in woefully unqualified candidates. But instead of following a coherent strategy to expose dangerous failings in Trump’s nominees, they seem to be taking random shots at targets that pop up like flashing dots on a visual field test.
One Democratic senator after another sought to discomfit Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of defense, with questions about embarrassing facts in his past — which he mostly deflected, sometimes clumsily, but often like a tennis pro practicing overheads in warmups.
Echoing the awful, bloody Kavanaugh hearings, they went after him for infidelity to his wife and to his girlfriend, alleged sexual assault (go here to see the police report), misuse of money, and bacchanalian drinking (in several instances, he had to be carried out.) To these charges, Hegseth responded repeatedly, “Anonymous smears!”
Hegseth had no answer when Sens. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) pointed out that the stories were clearly not anonymous — that they had seen several signed witness statements describing those incidents.
In any case, Hegseth predictably deployed the Jesus Defense — he had been absolved of anything and everything that had gone on before he found salvation.
Aside from his playing the religion card, it should have been obvious to the Democratic senators that their questioning of Hegseth about his personal improprieties was unlikely to resonate with Americans who already overlooked similar and worse things from Trump. More importantly, even Hegseth’s clear lack of character and moral compass must be considered a distant second or third to the real whopper: his manifest, glaring unfitness for the job itself.
Even Hegseth admitted his scant qualifications for such a difficult and sensitive position — managing nearly 3 million people and a budget not far off of a trillion dollars — by saying he plans to hire people smarter and more capable than himself. Which should have immediately prompted the questions: “Then why aren’t we actually considering someone smarter and more capable?” and “Why, really, are you in front of us at all, besides the fact Trump saw you on Fox?”
Saying that he is especially the guy to run the Pentagon because he has no experience in the institution (i.e., he’s an “outsider”) — though he had been a soldier on the front lines — raises a comparison: Should Apple be run by someone whose main experience in tech was working in one of its retail stores?
Republicans were, at best, able to get Hegseth to confirm that he would comply with basic things like submitting paperwork. For a position presiding over situations that could lead to the annihilation of humanity!
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What the Democrats need to do is find more effective strategic communicators — who are fearlessly direct and relentlessly focused on issues that have a chance to move the needle of public opinion, however slightly. They should at least have been ready with charts comparing Hegseth to highly qualified past Republican picks, including Gen. James Mattis, a widely admired figure who resigned after a falling out with Trump during his first term.
We all know the awesome responsibility of running the Pentagon. Hegseth should have been questioned by someone who would skip quizzing him over the details of specific policies, alliances, and terminology and instead drill down on what Hegseth actually understands about the vital role of the secretary of defense, the precise skills, talents, and knowledge needed for the job, and the tremendous risks involved.
The bottom line is that — putting aside all of his character issues, even if his character were impeccable — Hegseth is completely and totally unqualified to run the Defense Department.
If, as many have suggested, a substantial subset of Trump’s nominees were picked precisely to convey the utmost disrespect for the seriousness of governing, to give the middle finger to what may go down in history as the American edition of the Weimar Republic, Hegseth can take his shameful position at the head of that class. He has almost literally no redeeming qualities that would make one inclined to overlook his grave character flaws.
Senators could have moved away from what might have felt to some viewers like a game of gotcha, by stressing the big picture — and the risks to America and even the world — with putting an incompetent man in charge of the planet’s most powerful military.
In a time when a large share of the public seems to have been cognitively reengineered through social media, it’s essential to experiment deliberately to see what, if anything, works in getting really vital concepts across to the electorate.
And while we’re at it, we might consider cueing up those Nazi-themed documentaries. The comparisons cry out, right down to the unqualified and insane but highly ambitious monsters Hitler put in charge of large parts of his government. Only very belatedly, with their country and its reputation in ruins, did Germans discover that the early misgivings expressed by a few prominent anti-Nazi figures had a factual basis.
Oh, and regarding that old story, widely recirculated in 2024, in which Trump’s first wife, Ivana, reportedly told her attorney that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a bedside cabinet, Trump’s artful response was that he had never read Mein Kampf. One does tend to believe Trump’s claim that he did not read something — but, more importantly, Ivana had not said it was Mein Kampf — which is a book-length manifesto rather than a collection of speeches, of which there are plenty of published collections.
In any case, if Trump hasn’t been cribbing from Hitler’s speeches and program, well, one can only say that the resemblance is remarkable and uncanny. Then again, it should not surprise us that diseased minds, just like great ones, think alike.
