On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler held his first Cabinet meeting in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
Friends and sycophants surrounded the newly appointed Chancellor. The handful of holdovers from the previous regime wouldn’t be there when the group met again.
Hermann Goering, his right-hand man, was one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party and had known Hitler since 1922. Ernst Rohm was the only one to call him “Adolf.” SS chief Heinrich Himmler had been a friend for over a decade, and all three were at Hitler’s side in his doomed attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess shared a cell with Hitler after the failed coup.
At the Cabinet meeting, these men jockeyed for their leader’s favor. They offered ideas they knew he would like and praised him before every remark. It’s how the Holocaust was born. They knew his views on Jews and Aryan supremacy.
Hitler would, in turn, praise and ridicule his subordinates. He would sometimes set two of them the same task and watch them squirm to outdo one another. At this particular meeting, Goering had the Fuhrer’s ear. They discussed how a big, beautiful bill could be passed by the Reichstag, the German parliament, that would effectively hand total power over to Hitler.
It was necessary, they argued, to bring peace to the Fatherland and make Germany great again.
Hitler opened the Cabinet meeting by explaining that millions of people across Germany were “joyfully” greeting his appointment. He told his Cabinet he had confidence in each member. But he was worried, he told them, that the opposition Center Party and the Communist Party opposed his aims and would bring the nation to a halt with a general strike.
Hess urged Hitler to give an interview, explaining that inflation was under control and “the danger of the rights of civil servants are untrue.”
The only real answer, they agreed, was to persuade the Reichstag to voluntarily give up its power. And trust Hitler to usher in a new golden era.
Less than three months later, on March 23, 1933, hundreds of brown-shirted stormtroopers stood guard at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin as the Reichstag voted on Hitler’s Enabling Act.
With his implacable Nazi guards intimidating the lawmakers, Hitler told them he would end unemployment, he would bring down inflation, and broker peace with Russia, Britain and France.
The compliant congress voted overwhelmingly to pass the act by a vote of 441 to 84. And that was the day democracy died in Germany.
Soon, there would be no opposition to worry about. Just one party and only one voice that mattered. One man who ruled. Adolf Hitler.
It’s a lazy comparison to draw parallels between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump. But the specific time we find ourselves in right now in America does, indeed, have some disturbing echoes of 1930s Germany.
Trump is not an ideologue. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. Trump wrote The Art of the Deal (or his ghostwriter did).
But he is an emboldened president. Through an astonishing combination of guile, instinct, foresight, and plain luck, Trump finds himself in a position of unchallenged power in the White House.
And this is where the comparison with Hitler is worthy of note; there is nobody to rein him in.
Trump’s two-plus-hour Cabinet meeting on Tuesday had no point. There was just one reason to allow the cameras in. To show the world his casual power. Trump was so comfortable he wasn’t even trying.
How do I know? In private, he has a potty mouth. He swears loudly and often. Previously, only in private. But now he’s calling BS all the time. Not BS. But BullS–t.
He insults his henchmen with casual insouciance. Humiliating a crestfallen Pete Hegseth while sitting right next to him. Patting Marco Rubio as he mocks the thoroughly defeated man he once derided as “Little Marco” and continues to punish like some mugging Machiavelli.
Hegseth tries to channel a Fox TV producer and line up a ratings winner by blocking Ukraine’s defensive weapons, only to discover on live TV that he has effed up yet again. It’s why he never escaped weekends on Fox & Friends. He was never prime time smart.
Bondi thought she was onto a winner with Epstein, thinking she’d curry favor with the boss by promising full transparency. She didn’t understand that it was all just PR. Billionaires stick together. Too many emperors. Not enough clothes.
And all the while, Rubio is grinning like a Cheshire cat who swallowed the stinking cheese and is trying too hard to disguise his self-disgust.
As for the other Cabinet members, they’re so busy sucking up to the boss they have forgotten to think for themselves. Trump muses about gilting the ceiling cornices in the Cabinet room and guilts them into voting if they agree. Of course, they all agreed. With whatever Trump wanted.
Their pathetic attempts to brown-nose are about as successful as Bondi and Hegseth’s, because Trump is already one step ahead of them.
You can imagine him laughing with Dana White later, telling him on the phone how much fun it was to make them all look like idiots.
Trump had four years to plot his comeback, and it hasn’t all been as smooth as he would have liked, but he would claim that he is now the most powerful U.S. president in history. And he may be right.
He has steamrolled Congress into accepting his agenda-defining policy bill despite the ardent opposition of the GOP deficit hawks, the centrist chickens, and the MAGA vultures. He even got us all calling it his “big, beautiful bill.”
He harangued the Supreme Court into backing his deportation flights to God knows where. He humbled academia into accepting his lunatic DEI demands by cutting off its cash.
And he has browbeaten the media, forcing CBS and ABC into humiliating settlements nobody truly thought they should pay. He even kicked the Associated Press out of the White House press briefings and replaced the venerable agency with right-wing pigeon posts.
Don’t think for a moment that there weren’t swathes of the country cheering every move.
Foreign leaders may have fancied their chances after the tariff market meltdown, but then Trump blew up Iran’s nuclear bunkers and, to everybody’s amazement, it kinda worked out.
Then, Trump gradually brought back the tariffs at similar percentages, and the investors barely blinked.
Trump’s Tuesday Cabinet was more sprawling, more unpredictable than any appearance he has ever made in front of the media and, consequently, the world. But Trump was in his element. He was like Hitler in that he knew that he held all the cards. This was his front room. His stage.
It’s easy to dismiss the specter of 1930s Germany. It could never happen here, you may say.
But consider this. In 1930s America, in Long Island, New York, to be precise, scores of brown-shirted young Nazis were led on parades through the streets to a summer camp where they would be taught the doctrines that would culminate in the Holocaust just a few years later and 6,000 miles away.
Tens of thousands of people caught the “Camp Siegfried Special” train from Penn Station in New York to live out their Nazi dreams.
There would be street signs in Yaphank, Suffolk County, Long Island, that would read Adolf Hitler Street. And Goebbels Street. And Goering Street.
They were removed in 1941. But the stain remains.
Donald Trump is no puppet. There is no one pulling the strings. Susie Wiles, his chief-of-staff, is a gatekeeper and little more. Stephen Miller’s sphere of influence rarely reaches beyond immigration and deportation. Scott Bessent is a convenient luxury. Tulsi Gabbard, Kristi Noem, Bondi, Hegseth, and Rubio are on borrowed time, and who knows what Vance really thinks, but Trump doesn’t care.
The President of the United States can do whatever he wants, and there is nobody to stop him.
The checks and balances are gone.
That is real power.
Beware.
The post Opinion: The Echoes of Hitler That Make Trump the World’s Most Dangerous Man appeared first on The Daily Beast.
