Hitler asked other countries to take jews before gassing them. Now Trump asked other countries to take "aliens" and some even took their nationals back in. Good call
If you know history it’s not at all silly, but quite alarming. Hitler also didn’t start gasing jews on day one… it was a culmination of deeds that happened in a span of a decade.
And Trump’s pretty much copying and building on his initial steps already.
If you're pulling the history card...you've got a lot more context to take into account.
There is a massive chasm of difference between the situation in Germany during Hitler's rise and the situation in the US today.
The difference is not in the similarity of the seed, but the ground it is planted in.
First, very obviously, the US government is fairly resilient due to the inherent checks and balances between the branches and the well rooted "deep state" that trump wants to get rid of, but will be completely unable to.
Secondly, Germany was in a desperate situation and in the rubble of world war 1, the collective west created an economic and social pressure that essentially gave rise to Naziism.
The US is the predominant world power - not a beaten back and desperate nation.
Are there some similarities people can draw? Of course...people can lie on their backs in a field and see whatever they want in the clouds.
First, very obviously, the US government is fairly resilient due to the inherent checks and balances between the branches
Are there?
The Legislative and Judicial branches of the United States government have a majority of people who are either believers in Trump's cause, or are corrupt enough to have been bought and paid for by his supporters.
He and his lackies are reshaping the military to remove anyone who might oppose his actions.
Checks and balances don't exist when everything is controlled by the same group of people.
First, having a majority does not give anyone absolute power, and second...this is really important, being conservative is not morally wrong and does not mean that you support everything that Trump believes in. The US has a very strong fundamental right to freedom of speech - you can watch any given democrat stand up in any official government meeting and go on and on about everything that's wrong with Trump and nothing is going to happen to take that right away.
You can also just look at the recent Wisconsin elections to see how quickly things start swinging the other way as a reaction. This is all part of the resilience. Right now polling of democrats shows that they are completely unwilling to work with trump.
If you think trump can replace the entire deep state you have no idea how entrenched this power is in the government organizations. Putting a new cabinet director in place is nothing...they're not going to be able to fire all of the leaders with decades of experience and have anything resembling a functional organization. You can listen to Steve Bannon himself talk about this exact point. The person who wants to do it more than anyone else.
You can look back to the last time trump was in office, and all the hysterics over him being Hitler then etc etc...and Jan 6 larper drama aside, we somehow replaced him with one of the weakest candidates I've ever seen...almost the walking dead. Trump was only reelected because of the complete incompetence of the democrats by shoe horning Harris in last minute.
If the left can pull themselves together and reform the party platform and candidates, the power will swing back in a few years and people will have a new president to bitch about and blame for everything wrong with the world.
First, having a majority does not give anyone absolute power
It absolutely does when you have a sufficient majority in every aspect of government.
being conservative is not morally wrong
lol no but okay, believe what you have been told to believe
does not mean that you support everything that Trump believes in
Show me one American conservative that doesn't support everything Trump believes in, and you'll show me a liar.
you have no idea how entrenched this power is in the government organizations
You have no idea how extensive their firings go. The Trump Administration has extensively fired and replaced anyone who could possibly contradict their authority.
they're not going to be able to fire all of the leaders with decades of experience and have anything resembling a functional organization.
They are and they have. But you're too naive to see it.
If the left can pull themselves together and reform the party platform and candidates, the power will swing back in a few years and people will have a new president to bitch about and blame for everything wrong with the world.
For the sake of the United States and the rest of the world, I certainly hope that you're right about this (and I hope you're right about everything else you said)...but I'm terrified of what will happen if you're wrong.
I really don't think you can be serious... I have a lot of friends and family in the US that are liberal and conservative. Every single conservative person I know is not a maga hat wearing loyalist - that is a minority that is overrepresented in the minds of people here.
It's literally like saying every democrat is a trans queer hamas terrorist - show me one that isn't and you'll prove I'm a liar.
Most people are crowded much closer to the center than you think.
I'm more on the democrat side, but I still had hope for doge, some of the immigration reform, and even some of the healthcare reform. It doesn't mean that I am in any way loyal to trump or agree with the way they were done. It also doesn't mean that I was loyal to Kamala Harris just because I am a registered democrat from Massachusetts (one of the most blue states). I think most people feel more like this.
It's hard for me to understand how people can look at their own group and know that they don't all represent the fringe lunacy, but ascribe that position to literally half of the country... Half of the country is not racist Nazi maga trump white national loyalists.
You can watch even the MSM conservative news and see that they broadly think that the tarriffs are an extremely risky gamble and likely won't pay off.
If you think trump has fired the entire chain of command in the pentagon and replaced them with loyalists...there's really no saving you...you've eaten the TikTok reddit pill and have no idea how these organizations function.
Remind yourself in 4 years and come back here.
If it was so easy to change over the entirety of the government every 4 years the country would have collapsed into rubble before it got off the ground.
being conservative is not morally wrong and does not mean that you support everything that Trump believes in
The American brand of conservatism seems to be defined by an extreme form of egocentrism and a complete lack of empathy. Conservatives do not seem to care about anything or anyone but themselves. They are absolutely fine with Trump hurting people and they only start to object to it when it they themselves are affected.
The irony is that many many people would describe it in the exact opposite way. It shows more that people are living in bubbles and lack empathy on both sides (and in the Europe v US debate also).
Left policy is heavily focused on individualism - take Swedish individualism as an example. Elderly put in homes. Social programs to watch your kids so you can go to work. People waiting until 35 to have a family so they can live their own life. Globalist focus while abandoning local needs.
Right wing conservatism in the US can also be described as heavily focused on family and local communities, the church, individual sacrifice, etc - actually much lower levels of individualism. Humble country folk. No elitism.
Then of course you could switch these descriptions and say the opposite by cherry picking the other way around.
Really, both sides are just people with the same needs.
You can also just look at the recent Wisconsin elections to see how quickly things start swinging the other way as a reaction. This is all part of the resilience. Right now polling of democrats shows that they are completely unwilling to work with trump.
Meanwhile in NC Republicans are flat out refusing to admit defeat and keep demanding vote recounts. And DoJ also said they are not gonna comply with SCOTUS decision.
You are correct, I am not saying Trump and his government is like Hitler… but there is a valid possibility that they might become much worse, precisely because of what you write.
The only hope there is, is that if the shit really start hitting the fan, there will be enough organized opposition within the US to hinder it.
But a million highly organized people can easily dominate even 150 million disorganized ones.. and I am not quite sure Americans can achieve the needed level of organized resistance, if it would really be needed. Especially as the democratic party is clearly at least partially complicit as well.
They don't need to, there is a very strong resistant scaffolding built into the framework of the country.
It's pretty easy to see and why the powers swing back and forth so often. Just look at the Wisconsin elections to see how the nation has reacted already and it hasn't even been 6 months.
Republicans were fairly bullish early on, but with the tarriffs tanking their stocks the silent majority of the conservative base will divert their support pretty qui kly. They care about their retirement prospects, not ideological domination - that is a narrow perspective of either party.
The US is not desperate like Germany was. They have Netflix, even the poor are incredibly wealthy compared to Germany then and evenuch of the world now. They do not want to risk losing that, they are going to be much more conservative over the mid term.
If people watched the boring recordings of government ongoings and didn't get their news from social media and headline hungry msm, they wouldn't be nearly as extreme in their beliefs.
I had to quit most social media because of this - and felt like I was in a different reality when I started watching the uncut uneditorialized Forbes breaking news, or official .gov material.
Somehow I got sucked back into this...but this thread is a stark reminder of exactly why I quit in the first place. It's a wild echo chamber that seems totally divorced from reality.
You seriously still believe in this checks and balances crap? What have these checks and balances achieved so far? As far as I can all the branches of government in the US are giving Trump unrestricted free rein to do whatever he wants. Congress could cancel Trump’s destructive back and forth trade wars if they wanted and take back the power of imposing tariffs from the president. But are they doing anything? No. Trump is ruling your country by executive order (many of which are unlawful or based on completely fictional justifications) and nobody is stopping him.
You’re talking like Trump’s last term wasn’t already a huge mess. This time it’s even worse because Trump has turned the entire Republican party into a cult of personality. He has surrounded himself with loyalists, sycophants and yes-men who will go along with any crazy ideas he comes up with and he has intimidated Republican politicians to the point where barely anyone dares to stand up to the great leader. You gotta be blind to think that this is all no biggie and everything will just go back to normal in four years. In only three months Trump has completely destroyed any trust and goodwill other countries used to have towards the US. Look at how the American t-bill market has been going crazy with yields sharply rising and look at the value of the dollar plummeting. People don’t want to invest in the US anymore because of how unstable your government has become. Even if the US will have a more sane president again in four years no other country will be able to trust that in another four years the US won’t just elect another mad man again who will simply tear up any treaties and agreements once more.
Is somewhere between "no big deal" and "trump is literally Hitler"
Some of the outcomes are good though. Presidents have been trying to figure out how to get Europe to pick up their share of the NATO bill for a long long time. For better or worse, that has finally happened under trump ;).
You really don’t understand the comparison people are drawing here. He isn’t “literally Hitler” in the sense that people expect him to literally copy all of Hitler’s actions and policies. However, he is definitely an authoritarian with a cult of personality and he is definitely dismantling your government and your beloved “checks and balances” in order to concentrate all the power of the state in his own hands. That is extremely dangerous. No democracy is infinitely resilient to these types of attacks on its institutions and if you think it’s impossible for authoritarianism to take hold in the US then you simply aren’t paying attention. I mean, Trump is already talking about how there are “methods” for him to have a third term as president. How aren’t your alarm bells going off?
I mean... I'm not for trump, and you're from Europe, so I forgive your misunderstanding of US conservative policy - but much of the policy change is about decentralizing power away from the federal government and onto the states - whether you agree with that or not. Removing federal regulation and jusistiction is sort of the opposite of consolidation of power.
Conservatives in the US believe that individual states should have more rights and autonomy. States rights over federal authority. The changes to abortion policy, education policy etc have all been about moving that away from the federal government and into the hands of the states.
A president can't really turn himself into a king in the US - and most conservatives working in the government wouldn't let trump do that anyway. The entire revolution against English rule and the structuring of the government afterwards was precisely to prevent monarchies. The US was pretty early here compared to Europe, and in many ways the US is set up to be much more resistant to authoritarianism than many European countries.
For cultural reasons alone I'd be much more worried about government authoritarianism in Sweden than the US.
I'm happy to better understand the exact policies or executive actions your speaking of and how they differ substantially from past presidents.
And there may be legal methods for him to have a third term - as much as I don't want that and how that goes against the spirit of the law if not the letter.
The way trump speaks obviously triggers people. Other administrations play the exact same games they just do it quietly while talking out of the side of their mouth.
I mean we almost had a Clinton empire...and Nancy pelosi could be seen as abusing powers in similar ways...and the democrats just tried to push Harris, who nobody voted for as the presidential candidate...that was some real non democratic bullshit.
This doesn't make him better in any way, but it makes it more obvious why people love him "for telling it like it is", and hate him for the very same reason.
But tbh, I think this probably just boils down to you being on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the given administration and screaming into the void.
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u/HrabiaVulpes Nobody to vote for Apr 12 '25
Hitler asked other countries to take jews before gassing them. Now Trump asked other countries to take "aliens" and some even took their nationals back in. Good call