There’s a forgotten moment from Donald Trump’s history that I think about with some regularity. About two decades ago, Trump got into a fight with the town of Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., over a flagpole he installed at his golf course there. The pole was installed without a permit and the height violated local codes. This was not the fight he had centered on an oversized flag installed at Mar-a-Lago — a story that became part of the Trump-as-patriot lore of his followers, with details exaggerated in service to the idea that he put the display of the flag above all else.
What lingers for me about the California iteration is an interaction Trump had with Stephen Colbert, then host of “The Colbert Report.” Colbert’s shtick on the show was that he was an uncomplicated, jingoistic voice of the right, so he recorded a segment offering fake enthusiasm for the future president’s tussle. Then, at the end, he exposed Trump’s insincerity.
“What’s important is this flag,” Colbert says, with his character’s trademark bravado, “and its message of freedom — a message as important to Donald Trump as it was to the 13 original colonies.”
Cut to Trump.
“I don’t know what the 13 stripes represent,” Trump says.
This isn’t surprising, in either the specifics or the broad strokes. The story of Trump’s tenure in national politics has been that he — often coarsely — seizes on symbols of American patriotism while showing little understanding of what they represent or the traditions they embody.
It’s true of the flag, the 13 stripes of which he has formed a habit of hugging during the past eight years. It’s true of the presidency itself, which by all outward appearances he entered while believing that it operated something like being the CEO of a private company. At no point did Trump indicate that he viewed the office as something he was entrusted to hold for four years, as his response to the 2020 election shows. At no point did he indicate that he viewed the presidency as a coequal branch of government with Congress and the Supreme Court.
This haphazard approach to American institutions and history is useful to consider, given Trump’s declaration over the weekend that he would target his perceived opponents as though they were disease-carrying animals.
“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day,” he wrote on social media, “we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.”
“The threat from outside forces,” he added, “is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within.”
In 2015 and 2016, Trump’s rhetoric focused heavily on the purported threats from outside the country, including immigrants and terrorists (groups he often conflated). But those targets were not personally annoying to him in the way that his political opponents — and those he claims are aligned with his opponents, such as federal prosecutors and media members — are annoying. So he has shifted.
As soon as Trump offered these comments, historians (both professional and amateur) noted that they echoed the rhetoric of fascist leaders like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. This raises a new question: Is Trump doing so knowingly — or is he simply following the same path those dictators walked?
The distinction here is admittedly subtle. It seems important to distinguish between a potential president whose clumsy anger at his opponents has him using language deployed by some of history’s worst actors and a potential president who is willfully modeling himself in their mold.
Stories about Trump’s flirtations with Hitler — or, at least, with some narrowly constructed vision of the mass murderer — have been around for decades. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported an allegation made by his wife as they were going through a divorce.
“Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed,” Marie Brenner reported. Asked about it, Trump claimed that he was given Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” as a gift and that, “if I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Books released after Trump’s presidency contained anecdotes in which Trump offered words of praise for Nazi Germany to White House chief of staff John Kelly.
“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” Trump told Kelly according to Michael Bender’s “Frankly, We Did Win This Election.” At a moment when he was frustrated by pushback from military leaders, Trump reportedly complained to Kelly that he wished his officers could “be like the German generals” during World War II.
“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly replied, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s “The Divider.”
This is true. But Trump’s familiarity with Hitler didn’t extend so far as to understanding that there was internal dissension even given the iron fist with which he controlled the country. By all appearances, Trump just sees the fist.
Over the past eight years, this has become obvious. Trump offers praise to a range of autocrats and dictators: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. These are leaders who don’t share an ideology or a system of government but share an approach to the wielding of power and a popular response that Trump finds appealing.
Jonathan Karl’s new book, “Tired of Winning,” documents a conversation between Trump and another Republican politician that gets to this point, according to an excerpt obtained by Politico.
“Trump gloated to a prominent member of Congress that [former German chancellor Angela] Merkel — who detested the 45th president privately and had trouble hiding her scorn publicly — told him she was ‘amazed’ by the number of people who came to see him speak,” Karl writes, according to Politico, “and Trump said ‘she told me that there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine.’ The Trump-allied congressman knew who Merkel was comparing Trump to, but couldn’t tell if Trump, who took Merkel’s words as a compliment, himself understood.”
“Which would be more unsettling,” Karl continues, “that he didn’t or that he did?”
That, again, is the question. Is it more alarming if Trump knows very well that Hitler used rhetoric comparing his opponents to rats that needed to be eradicated or if he simply got to the same place by himself? Is it better if Trump doesn’t know how Hitler’s story ends — taking his own life as his grotesque empire collapsed having earned a reviled position in world history — or if he does? Which possibility offers a less disconcerting set of possibilities for the post-2024 future?
And, of course, how does that distinction color other reports about what Trump has planned, that he wants to scour the federal bureaucracy of disagreement, turn federal law enforcement against opponents and imprison asylum seekers in camps?
Trump didn’t spend a lot of time lingering over his “vermin” comments on social media this weekend. He was too busy sharing and resharing video clips of his applause-drenched entrance to an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at New York’s Madison Square Garden, accompanied by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and musician Kid Rock. That’s what he enjoys: the applause and the adoration of people who came to the famous entertainment venue to see two people beat each other senseless.
In 1939, Madison Square Garden also hosted a pro-Hitler rally that disparaged the media and Jewish people. The event was soaked in just the sort of patriotic iconography that Trump adores, with only a slightly elevated level of contradiction.
