"The references comparing President Trump to being Hitler are outrageous." Daniel Lenz
My friend, Daniel Lenz, born among the cornfields of Iowa, but raised in Minnesota, is a legitimate American, honest to a fault, without an ounce of phoniness or insincerity. Yet, his quote above formed the motivation for my article below, much of it a compilation of what I've written in the past, but, this time, documented by footnotes that allow the reader to research the individual quotes.
Anyway, since Mr. Lenz asked for it via his statement above, I've endeavored to provide clear links and similarities between Trump and Hitler in the material published below:
From multiple accounts, there is reason to believe that Trump not only engages in language that echoes Hitler, but in private remarks and personal habits showed a degree of admiration or curiosity about the Nazi dictator. John Kelly, one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, has said that Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’”¹ Kelly also recalled that Trump once told him, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” meaning people totally loyal who would follow orders.² Kelly tried to push back, noting that many of Hitler’s generals actually plotted against him or tried to assassinate him, but Trump reportedly dismissed that as if he couldn’t or wouldn’t grasp it. (Trump's recent public calling out of our military's generals is part of his thinly-disguised plan to force those leaders to conform to the standard of loyalty set during Hitler's regime.)
In public, Trump sometimes denies having read Hitler’s works. He has said, “I never read Mein Kampf,” and “I know nothing about Hitler… other than what I’ve seen on the news.”³ But that is sharply at odds with reports that his first wife, Ivana Trump, told her attorney that the only book Trump kept on his bedside cabinet was a volume of Hitler’s speeches.⁴ Whether or not Trump actually read Hitler, the fact that he chose to keep it next to his nightstand suggests something more than casual curiosity.
This interest is more than biographical trivia, because Trump has repeatedly used phrases and tropes that echo Nazi rhetoric. For example, he has accused dark-skinned Haitian immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”⁵ That phrase is not an innocuous metaphor in this context. In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that Jews and other “outsiders” threatened the purity of the German people by “poisoning the blood,” and described racial outsiders as a “plague” or “poisoners” who threatened the health of a nation. Trump has also referred to immigrants as “vermin” and claimed they bring disease, which recalls older fascist and genocidal rhetorical strategies of dehumanizing targeted populations.⁶
When Trump uses that rhetoric, he sometimes frames it as blunt realism: “They’re poisoning the blood … They’re coming in with disease… they’re destroying the blood of our country.”⁷ Yet when challenged that the language mirrors Hitler’s, he denies any knowledge or claims the usage is entirely different. But experts and critics point out the resemblance is not accidental: the “blood poisoning” trope has a long history in racist and Nazi discourse.⁸
Even more chilling is how Trump has, at times, embraced or tolerated white supremacist movements. In Charlottesville in 2017, white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us.” At that time, his response was widely criticized as equivocal.⁹ More recently, during torch-bearing marches by protesters at the University of Virginia, chants of “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us” were used. Those slogans go back directly to Nazi ideology: “blood and soil” was a doctrine developed by Nazi theorists like Richard Walther DarrΓ©, which held that a people’s blood (their racial heritage) and their soil (their connection to land) were sacrosanct, and those not of pure lineage were existential threats.¹⁰ DarrΓ©, in a speech, said that laws of blood and soil “must find their point of reference as a top priority.” The fact that such chants appear in modern U.S. protests shows how deeply those Nazi symbols and phrases can be revived.
When extremist protesters adopted those chants, Trump’s reaction was not one of clear condemnation. A man wielding “blood and soil” slogans in a rally, with torches and confrontation, was part of a scene in which Trump’s rhetoric had already prepared the ground. Whether he directly authorized it or not, his refusal to forcefully repudiate the language gives moral space to those movements.
Trump has also made particularly outlandish false claims about Haitian immigrants, claiming they were coming into this country and eating the cats and dogs of residents. That claim, for which there is no credible evidence, is a vivid example of dehumanizing and monster-making propaganda. The idea is to portray people as unclean, violent, subhuman in order to justify harsh policies toward them. In modern history, similar lies representing immigrants as disease carriers, criminals, or worse, have frequently been used to incite fear and scapegoating.
Taken all together, private admiration or curiosity about Hitler, ownership of Hitler’s speeches, repeated use of Nazi-like rhetoric (“poisoning blood,” “vermin”), and toleration of white supremacist chants, the picture that emerges is not of mere coincidence. This is a pattern. It is not that Trump is literally Hitler or identical in all ways. They differ enormously in many respects, but the parallels in rhetoric, symbolism, and tolerance for extremist movements are deeply alarming.
We must confront these echoes and the danger they pose. Language matters. Symbols matter. And when a political figure flirts with the darkest chapters of history, we must look at it clearly, and ask how far the flirtation might go if unchecked. (It should be noted that Trump recently welcomed a contingent of white South African immigrants to our country without the normal vitriol he uses with respect to darker-skinned immigrants.)
Footnotes
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PBS News, interview with John Kelly, former Trump Chief of Staff.
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ABC News, “Trump Said He Wanted Generals Like Hitler’s,” interview reporting, 2024.
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Ynet Global, “Trump Denies Reading Mein Kampf,” 2023.
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Ynet Global, statement reported by Ivana Trump’s attorney regarding Hitler’s speeches, 1990.
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Dangerous Speech Project, “Poisoning the Blood: Trump’s Nazi Echoes,” 2023.
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Missouri Independent, “Trump’s Immigrant Rhetoric Mirrors Fascist Tropes,” 2023.
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Axios, “Trump Again Uses ‘Poisoning the Blood’ Language on Immigration,” 2023.
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Dangerous Speech Project, “The History of ‘Blood Poisoning’ in Racist Discourse,” 2023.
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The Atlantic, “Charlottesville and the Failure of Condemnation,” 2017.
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The Guardian, “The Nazi Origins of ‘Blood and Soil’ and Its Modern Echoes,” 2017.
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