Many are worried about an Adolph Hitler-style takeover of the U.S. by President Donald Trump. Here are some of the factors for and against such an action:
-- In 1992, Ivana Trump said in "Vanity Fair" that Trump owned a copy of Hitler’s second, untitled book. It detailed Hitler’s strategy to obtain power. Trump’s notes were present in the margins. In his rise to power, Trump may have been following Hitler’s strategy.
There are huge differences between the U.S. and Germany, and between Hitler’s plan and Trump’s strategies:
-- The U.S. has a much longer tradition of democracy than Germany, when Hitler took power.
-- Germany had been humiliated in WWI, and forced to pay war reparations. It had not yet recovered. Germany was poor, and downcast. That was an opportunity for Hitler to raise the national esteem. The U S. is not poor, or downcast.
-- Hitler got a law passed that allowed him to arrest many members of the opposition leadership, thus neutralizing them. No such law exists in the U S. yet. However, Trump has promised to jail several opposition leaders. Trump also intends to purge military and federal government leaders whom he perceives as disloyal, and replace them with his own loyal people.
-- The Enabling Act gave Hitler excessive amounts of power. Trump is using his executive orders in similar fashion, but many legal challenges are being filed. These issues will be resolved in court. Judges can immediately order a stay of Trump’s orders. That would delay implementation of Trump’s agenda.
-- Political parties were banned in Nazi Germany. The U.S. Constitution says nothing about political parties, but it is hard to see how Trump could accomplish a ban on parties that have been in existence over 200 years.
The conditions under which Hitler took power were very different from those existing today in the U.S. Trump will do extreme damage, nonetheless.
