Though Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 after a stunning rise to political prominence, his virulent ideas were crafted years before, in the wake of Germany’s defeat in World War I. Serving a sentence for his failed 1923 coup, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf from the Landsberg Prison. In that book, published over a century ago in 1925, Hitler lamented the state of the downtrodden people of Germany:
They were dissatisfied with their lot and cursed the fate which had hit them so hard. They hated their employers, whom they looked upon as the heartless administrators of their cruel destiny. Often they used abusive language against the public officials, whom they accused of having no sympathy with the situation of the working people. They made public protests against the cost of living and paraded through the streets in defence of their claims. At least all this could be explained on reasonable grounds. But what was impossible to understand was the boundless hatred they expressed against their own fellow citizens, how they disparaged their own nation, mocked at its greatness, reviled its history and dragged the names of its most illustrious men in the gutter.
Those who fomented this disillusionment Hitler characterized as “aliens”. He argued:
The institution that is now erroneously called the State generally classifies people only into two groups: citizens and aliens. Citizens are all those who possess full civic rights, either by reason of their birth or by an act of naturalization. Aliens are those who enjoy the same rights in some other State. Between these two categories there are certain beings who resemble a sort of meteoric phenomena. They are people who have no citizenship in any State and consequently no civic rights anywhere.
In most cases nowadays a person acquires civic rights by being born within the frontiers of a State. The race or nationality to which he may belong plays no role whatsoever. The child of a Negro who once lived in one of the German protectorates and now takes up his residence in Germany automatically becomes a ‘German Citizen’ in the eyes of the world. In the same way the child of any Jew, Pole, African or Asian may automatically become a German Citizen. …
The question of race plays no part at all. …
In this way, year after year, those organisms which we call States take up poisonous matter which they can hardly ever overcome. … I realize fully that nobody likes to hear these things. But it would be difficult to find anything more illogical or more insane than our contemporary laws in regard to State citizenship.
For a ‘saner’ policy, Hitler looked to the United States:
At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People’s State.
Indeed, the US had crafted a highly restrictive immigration system to combat waves of Eastern and Southern European immigration, which reached its peak from 1880 to 1920. It imposed severe quotas on national origins and even more exclusionary rules on Asians, the “Yellow Peril” that consisted of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino laborers. Championed by nativists and eugenicists alike, these new US immigration laws favored Northern and Western European countries, while heavily restricting the entrance of Southern and Eastern Europeans, including Eastern European Jews. By 1924, there was a net decline of Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Portuguese, Romanians, Spaniards, Chinese, and Japanese, as these groups departed the United States in greater numbers than immigrated to it.
But for Hitler, this was an inspiration. His vision for a “People’s State” sought to
classify its population in three groups: Citizens, subjects of the State, and aliens. The principle is that birth within the confines of the State gives only the status of a subject. It does not carry with it the right to fill any position under the State or to participate in political life, such as taking an active or passive part in elections. Another principle is that the race and nationality of every subject of the State will have to be proved. …
If we admit the significance of blood, that is to say, if we recognize the race as the fundamental element on which all life is based, we shall have to apply to the individual the logical consequences of this principle. …
The first consequence of this fact is comparatively simple. It demands that those elements within the folk-community which show the best racial qualities ought to be encouraged more than the others and especially they should be encouraged to increase and multiply.
Hitler asks: “Who could now imagine a German REICH based on the foundations of an effete and degenerate dynasty?” When the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935, this distinction between Reich Citizens and those degenerate Subjects of the State, as well as Aliens, would become crucially important to the crafting of the Final Solution, which sought to annihilate all but the Third Reich’s “citizens.”
Hitler’s “People’s State” targeted cosmopolitanism and the “degenerate population” it spawns. And no cosmopolitan force was more dangerous than that of the Jews, who corrupted Germany’s “national stock” with a “mixture of alien elements.” It was no coincidence that the Jews dominated both the capitalist class and its Marxist critics, he said: “While on the one hand [the Jew] organized capitalistic methods of exploitation to their ultimate degree of efficiency, he curried favour with the victims of his policy and his power and in a short while became the leader of their struggle against himself.” Capitalists and Marxists both, the Jew “alien race” created victims coming and going. They were “alien to the national well-being”, undermining its “customs and morals.” Wrestling power from “the hands of aliens and enemies of the people” was essential to making Germany great again.
Is it 1933 All Over Again?
So, imagine if you will, that it’s 1933. Armed with these ideas about “citizens” and “aliens”, enraged over the mess he’s inherited from his predecessors and by the nightmarish conditions his country has endured, Hitler explains that he will target “illegal alien criminals” and anyone who chooses to “block the removal of criminal aliens.” He invites the members of the Reichstag to “stand up and show your support” for this principle: “The first duty of the German government is to protect German citizens, not illegal aliens.”
Of course, this being the dawn of the Nazi era, those few who don’t stand up are summarily shot later that night.
I can almost see the eye-rolling and hear the shouting: “Please Sciabarra. Not the Hitler Analogy. Spare us!”
Let me assure you: I do not believe that Donald J. Trump is Adolf Hitler or that the United States is a full-blown fascist dictatorship. Yet. But insofar as Trump draws from the same crude collectivist well of racism as an antidote to palpable fear of contemporary conditions, the ominous parallels exist.
In a State of the Union speech peppered with half-truths, outright lies, and reality TV-like political theater, a speech that used some Americans as props, others as targets, and still others in ways that exploited their pain for political purposes, Trump knocked it out of the park in giving us a glimpse of the coming ‘Golden Age,’ “perhaps like never before.” Blaming the Democrats for “destroying our country,” Trump told us that the US is “going to win bigger than ever.”
And “like never before,” he continued to warn the country of those dangerous “illegal” and “criminal aliens,” “drug lords,” and “murderers” who have poisoned America. In a mic-drop moment, he challenged his congressional audience: “If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”
The Republicans in the hall stood up in rousing applause; the Democrats refused to budge. Trump let it all sink in for several moments. He smiled at the Republicans and then turned toward the Democrats with a sweeping hand gesture, tilting and shaking his head, with his lips protruding in disdain. He scolded the Democrats: “Isn’t that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself not standing up. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Unlike our imagined 1933 mental experiment, the chief difference here is that those Democrats who did not stand in support of Trump’s proposition were not taken out to the Potomac riverbank and shot for treason. But Trump’s declaration that the US government’s chief duty is to its “citizens” and not “illegal aliens” echoes an obscene belief that “illegal aliens” have no rights, that due process is not meant for them, that they cannot hope for any path that would allow them to pursue the American dream.
The War on Immigrants
Oh, he’ll tell you that “we will always allow people to come in legally, people that will love our country and will work hard to maintain our country.” What he will not tell you is that the current immigration system has made it almost impossible to follow a legal path to citizenship. Even if Trump were to hermetically seal off the border, we still have millions of undocumented immigrants in this country who are not murderers, who are not rapists, who have been working diligently, taking on productive jobs that many citizens wouldn’t dare apply for, much less perform. So much for ‘America First’, when few if any American citizens will step up first to do the kinds of jobs that have been performed for decades by immigrants, both documented and undocumented.
Make no mistake about it: Trump’s goal is to deport every last one of them. After all, they are “criminals” by definition, since they entered this country “illegally.” But even if they are pursuing legal paths to citizenship, they are not safe. And if these holier-than-thou America Firsters succeed in their Deportation Dreams, they will create nightmarish devastation throughout whole sectors of the US economy that depend on immigrant labor, from farming, fishing, freight, forestry, meatpacking, the auto industry, and construction to the service industries and the long-term home healthcare workforce, where an estimated one-third of workers are immigrants, especially immigrants of color.
I’ve seen home health aides up close and personal who have performed heroically. They come from Russia and Ukraine, but also from Nigeria, Jamaica, and Haiti. In all the years that these workers took care of my aunts, my mother, and my sister, not once did a white US citizen walk through the doors of our apartments to fill the job. Today, as I struggle with my own medical challenges, I too benefit from the remarkable care offered by such immigrant home health aides. I suspect they’re all documented, but that won’t stop Trump and his minions from threatening to deport them.
The administration has moved to restrict H-1B Visas through high fees, to place severe caps on refugee admissions (unless you’re a white South African), and to bolster ICE apprehensions of green-card holders or at immigration courthouses, or at naturalization ceremonies. And with a 40-country ban on legal immigration, giving no exception for spouses or children, followed by a 75-country ban that comprises half of legal immigrants, with no exceptions for spouses or children, it is clear that the Trump administration could not care less about legal paths to naturalization or even legal paths to permanent residency for “documented dreamers”.
Today, all 55 million current visa holders face “continuous vetting” for “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States.” And in the midst of this, ICE and Border Patrol thugs are routinely violating the due process rights of “illegal aliens” and the constitutional rights of American citizens, at least two of whom—Renee Good and Alex Pretti—have been murdered in the streets of Minneapolis.
Trump’s State of the Union, like others of its kind, had plentiful props that had nothing to do with his leadership: A terrific US Men’s Hockey Team that won Olympic Gold and a 100-year-old veteran of foreign wars who was finally being recognized for his service. But it also paraded props of a different sort, as Trump exploited the pain of those victims of criminal acts committed by “illegal aliens.” And yet, it is a fact that immigrants—both documented and undocumented—are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. The House chamber would have been overrun if Trump had chosen to spotlight the countless victims of crimes committed by those citizens.
Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Cheerleader
But that spotlighted challenge in the House chamber, in which Trump invited lawmakers to stand in support of his proposition, had plenty of cheerleaders who assumed that those who remained seated were, indeed, a shameful disgrace to their country. Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor, posted on X:
POTUS laid out clearly and deliberately: show Americans if you agree with this statement by standing. And 0 democrats stood for the foundational principle of all government that leaders must serve citizens before invaders. Never has there been a more stunning moment in Congress.
Disdain and contempt for actual Americans is the organizing principle of the Democrat Party. It is the thread uniting their entire agenda. They are physically incapable of standing to support Americans over invaders. They are revulsed by the very idea of putting Americans first.
For Miller, of course, “invaders” is a synonym for any immigrant, undocumented or otherwise. He stated further: “Democrats declared to the world their searing disdain for, and profound disloyalty to, the actual citizens of the United States. They were repeatedly entreated to stand. Over and over. They refused. It was a moment that chills to the bone and which will live for a thousand years.” He concluded: “The entire Democrat Party disqualified itself from government service in this one exchange. Nothing like it in US history.”
Well, I can’t speak for the Democratic Party; I’m a registered Independent, and I believe that the Democrats have had enough blood on their hands in supporting the countless, senseless actions of the US government over the long history of the republic.
But if I were in that chamber, I would have proudly remained seated. Perhaps with my fist held high to indicate that I too was one of those “enemies of the people” that Trump has vilified.
The Project of White Identity Politics
Like the Nazis who blamed the “Jews” for all that was wrong in Germany, Trump blames the “illegal aliens”—and the Democrats for allowing them in—for America’s ills. Scapegoating as parallel politics is one thing; but no one in the Trump administration has proposed a “Final Solution” for “illegal aliens”. Mass death is not on the menu.
But lives are still being destroyed by Trump’s deportation policies. He blames “illegal aliens” for crime, for the lack of affordable housing and homeownership, for voter and welfare fraud, for fiscal chaos, and inflation. Worse still, he believes they are corrupting American culture.
Though this country has been built by countless “aliens” who came to these shores seeking refuge, seeking the ability to earn a living and to provide for their families in ways that were not possible in their native countries, it is ultimately this cultural issue that animates the Trump vision. As I have argued, Trump’s brand of White Identity Politics is at the core of his worldview and his fear-mongering policies. In practice, the Trump administration’s attempts to constrain immigration from “shithole countries”, while ridding the United States of people representing certain nationalities and races, echo the brutal, illiberal attacks on cosmopolitanism that we have seen among authoritarians, past and present.
This is the worldview to which Trump demands loyalty, and which brings denunciations of shame if one doesn’t stand up to support it.
I sit with those who refuse to stand for that vision. If such an action “chills to the bone” and would “live for a thousand years” in the annals of history, at least it will have delayed the onset of another ‘thousand-year’ Reich.
1776 vs. 2026
I’ve stolen the title of this essay from This Sect’s 2007 album, “Distress Signals”: “Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Reich”. The lyrics warn that the “air is thick with the stench of fear,” and that under these conditions, we may “pick up the sword” and “let go of the pen.” But those post-punk rockers understand that the predatory behavior of “that wolf again” often leads to moral cowardice and failure and even greater oppression.
So, I’m holding on to my pen—and FWIW, my Razer keyboard.
Even Trump recognized the strength of the pen—not the ‘autopen’ mind you, but the pens of those who signed the Declaration of Independence. In concluding his State of the Union address, he acknowledged that “the revolution that began in 1776 has not ended.” On this point, he is indisputably correct. But his “golden age” is a reactionary rebuke that seeks to close America’s doors to ‘aliens’, even as it is poised to invade ‘alien’ lands.
Published nearly 250 years ago, this country’s 1776 founding document states unequivocally:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Nowhere did the founders say that “all men are created equal”—except for foreigners. In fact, the Declaration welcomed foreigners, highlighting the restrictions on immigration as one of the tyrannical acts imposed by King George III, who
has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
The only foreigners the founders excoriated were those “foreign Mercenaries” employed by the King, “to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny.”
After the revolution, the Constitution granted Congress the ability to create rules of naturalization. While Congress has more recently abdicated its responsibility to reconstruct the immigration system in this country, it cannot undermine the principles set forth in Article 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which stress that while “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” so too, no State shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (emphasis added).
Note that, unlike the laws passed by the Nazi regime, the Amendment does not distinguish between “citizens,” “subjects”, and “aliens”. It does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in extending “equal protection” of “life, liberty, or property” to any person living within a state’s jurisdiction. There have been plenty of Supreme Court decisions since the 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, but few will be more important than the forthcoming decision on birthright citizenship. Still, the Justice Department stands behind Trump’s executive order banning the citizenship of those children of undocumented immigrants who have been born on American soil. In Trump’s attempt to challenge the Fourteenth Amendment, it is impossible not to hear echoes of a past Reich that bemoaned the “illogical” and “insane” laws governing any State’s citizenship requirements.
Other Unfolding Follies
The court will also need to address Trump’s newest domestic folly: his efforts to nationalize elections by declaring another “national emergency”. These efforts seek not to secure this year’s midterm elections against fraud or foreign meddling. They are meant to scare the bejesus out of profiled voters who might be dissuaded from showing up at the polls to cast their ballots. More significantly, they aim to destroy one of the pillars of our decentralized, federalist system.
For an administration that has elevated the declaration of emergencies to an artform, none of this is surprising. But MAGA Republicans beware, for with each extension and expansion of executive power, a future Democratic administration will capitalize on it, just as Trump has capitalized on the executive powers garnered by presidencies before him.
As the Trump administration has allocated nearly $170 billion for anti-immigration enforcement, which includes $45 billion for the building of detention centers in a vast Deportation-Industrial Complex, run by for-profit private prison corporations, so too has it invested a “record number of dollars” in military spending. Trump claims this will create “a lot of jobs,” but the US government has “no choice”. A trillion-dollar war budget enriches the military-industrial complex and emboldens US “dominance in the Western Hemisphere,” which has already led to the toppling of Maduro in Venezuela and the escalation of the failed War on Drugs to levels truly “never seen before.” But this yearning for dominance is not restricted to the Western Hemisphere.
“Nobody thought it was possible” that the “Peace President” would be such a foreign interventionist. But domestic and foreign policy are organically linked. Having “ended” eight wars, or so he claims, this morning, Trump has begun “major combat operations” in Iran. Just as he has ignored the Constitution in domestic affairs, so too has he unilaterally unleashed “American warriors” in another undeclared foreign war. (He once opined that these “American warriors” might use US cities as “military training grounds.”)
Trump says he’s defending “the American people by eliminating imminent threats” from the Iranian regime—yes, it’s another “emergency”, folks. Remarkable how “imminent” this threat is considering Trump’s insistence that the US “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program” in Operation Midnight Hammer in June 2025.
“For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted ‘Death to America’ and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder,” Trump declares. He promises “a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests.”
How ‘massive’? How ‘ongoing’? Will this be the same “cake walk” we were promised when the US launched its 2003 war in Iraq?
Trump tells “the great proud people of Iran” that their “hour of … freedom is at hand. … When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” By ending the “mass terror” of the regime, Trump reiterates: “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.”
Trump likes to talk about the last 47 years. What about all the years before that? Could any of these last 47 years be linked to a history of violent US meddling in that region of the world?
That this “noble mission” will generate its own series of lethal unintended consequences and blowback is a virtual certainty.
But all this is a subject for another pen, another day.
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This essay is also published on Medium.
Notablog 