Fascism? Authoritarianism? Nazi Germany expert assesses Trump’s actions | Opinion
Opinion by Scott McIntosh, Idaho Statesman, 10/1/25
The political conditions in the United States today are similar to the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany in the 1930s.
But Christopher Browning, an expert on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, wouldn’t put what’s happening in the United States today under President Donald Trump in the same category as the fascism that Nazi Germany saw.
“I still say Trump is not Hitler, and Trumpism is not national socialism,” Browning told me in a phone interview. “What are the right terms for him? Certainly he is an autocrat, somebody who wants to rule outside the Constitution, outside the law, outside the previous norms. He certainly is a kleptocrat, someone who absolutely, openly and shamelessly is enriching himself through colossal corruption in a way no previous president has ever imagined, much less tried.”
But it’s not accurate to compare what Trump is doing to what Hitler or Italy’s Mussolini did, which was to create dictatorships, wage war, conquer other countries and carry out violations of human rights on a massive scale, even to the point of genocide.
“No, Trump is not that,” Browning said. “The term I would give to what … Trump is doing is populist authoritarianism.”
The playbooks are similar: testing constitutional limits; using emergency powers expansively; undermining democratic institutions; undermining elections; politicizing government agencies; manipulating the media by flooding zones with disinformation and discrediting legitimate news sources; targeting political enemies; coercing and threatening businesses, universities and the media; demanding personal loyalty over institutional loyalty; and unconstitutional use of law enforcement and the military.
Browning is professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, taught for 25 years at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and was a visiting professor at the University of Washington. He has written several books on Nazi Germany, including “The Path to Genocide” and “Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.”
I am among those who are reluctant to throw around the word “fascism” lightly or make offhand comparisons of President Trump to Hitler – or compare anyone to Hitler, for that matter – but the actions of the Trump administration these past nine months made me want to reach out to an expert on fascism to see how Germany, once a constitutional republic, devolved into a fascistic dictatorship, and what that portends for our great experiment in democracy here.
Browning is neither an alarmist nor is he particularly reassuring. He gives a clear-eyed assessment of where we are as a country, and notes our weaknesses that leave us still susceptible to authoritarianism, as well as our strengths that make us more able to withstand an attempted fascistic takeover of the government.
‘Eerie, similar trajectory’
“I would say that in terms of the decline of democracy or democratic crisis, there’s a fairly eerie, similar trajectory in terms of Mussolini coming to power in Italy, Hitler coming to power in Germany, and the dynamics of Trump’s second term here,” Browning said.
In particular, a hyperpolarization of politics in pre-Nazi Germany and parliamentary gridlock led traditional German conservatives to team up with Hitler, fearing that left-wing opponents presented a greater threat to the country than fascism. They believed they could control Hitler, harness his mass appeal and crush the left-wing communists. (Sounds familiar.)
But once Hitler became chancellor, he overran traditional conservative politics, seized power for himself through a nationalist, populist movement, diminished respect for democratic norms and stripped away constraints on executive power. (Sounds familiar.)
“Once in power, Hitler established a dictatorship with lightning speed,” Browning said. “Hitler gets rid of free speech, free press, free assembly, banned all political parties. He gets rid of due process, can create concentration camps in which he can place German citizens, not just foreigners, without trial, without verdict, without sentence.”
Browning pointed out that it took Hitler only five months to transform Germany into a one-party, police-state dictatorship.
That is a big difference between the resiliency of the German Weimar Republic, then in its infancy as a 14-year-old democracy, and the U.S. democratic republic, now approaching its 250th anniversary.
“The whole pace of things is much different,” Browning said. “We’re already now into what, month nine or 10, and in terms of what Hitler accomplished in five months, Trump is nowhere close to that. Even if he is trying to be an authoritarian, he is not creating, as yet, a totalitarian dictatorship in the way that Hitler did.”
But while the road is much slower, it’s still somewhat the same path.
Trump, in his first nine months into his second term, has adopted authoritarian policies and actions (using the military as a police force; using masked ICE agents to round up people off the street, smashing windows and demanding to “see your papers”; using the power of the government to threaten and shut down free speech; and firing Department of Justice and intelligence workers who don’t pledge loyalty to him, to name a few).
“Trump has not succeeded in establishing a Hitler dictatorship, but he certainly is trying to establish an autocratic regime in which he can rule in a very personalized way, rule by whim and whatever he wills,” Browning said. “And that still is hanging in the balance.”
Here’s a Q&A with Browning, edited for clarity and length:
Q: What are some of the guardrails that we have today that are different from the German Weimar Republic that’s slowing down the Trump administration?
A: So the more limited emergency powers and the preservation of the federal system, I think, are the two key things that have prevented Trump from creating his autocratic government more speedily and more extremely. He would love to do it much more sweepingly, but he’s run into obstacles that Hitler was able to overcome very quickly. Trump has not been able to overcome them.
Hitler was able to “dispose of” state governors, something that can’t happen here because of our federalist system of government.
It would be as if Trump could fire (California Gov. Gavin) Newsom and (Illinois Gov. J.B.) Pritzker at will and replace them with Nazi commissars. Of course, Trump may send the National Guard to L.A. or D.C., but he hasn’t been able to take over state governments.
Where Trump has basically been blocked are the blue states refusing to do things that he would like to do, that he can easily get red state governors to do, but he couldn’t get blue state governors to do.
As far as emergency powers, to achieve his ends, Hitler used emergency powers, which were much broader in Germany and were vested constitutionally with the president. Those emergency powers were then used to dismantle democracy rapidly.
What Trump is left with is a few old pieces of legislation that, under very specific situations, give the presidency emergency powers. But he has totally overrun the law and invoked those emergency powers in ways that are totally illegal, and so far we have a Supreme Court and a legal system that is not upholding those laws in the way they clearly were meant to be.
He’s pushed to see how far he can go, and when he met resistance, he had to back off. So it’s not as if he isn’t trying. It’s that so far some parts of the Constitution are holding firm.
Q: In 2018, you said, “Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism.” The biggest and most important difference, you said, is that Hitler was an open and ideological opponent of the idea of democracy, whereas neither Trump nor the GOP wants to abolish elections. Have you changed your mind at all, seven years later?
A: I don’t think any dictator today, such as Putin, rules without elections. Elections will not be fair, they can be staged, you can murder or imprison your opposition, such as Putin does. But you want the seeming legitimacy that that elections give. So I don’t think Trump or Putin or Orban or even Erdogan in Turkey, is doing away with elections. They’re trying to figure out how they can have elections that do not hold them accountable, that they’re guaranteed to win.
So I haven’t changed my view on elections, because I think no 21st century dictator is going to try to rule without them.
Q: Although Trump’s dismantling of American democratic guardrails pales in comparison to Hitler’s dismantling of Germany’s democracy, the first nine months of Trump’s second term absolutely blows away Trump’s first term. And we still have three more years to go. If Trump could do all this in nine months, what’s in store for the next three years?
A: The way in which the Republican Party and Trump are trying to enhance the powers of the presidency and to not have it limited by the legislature or even by the courts, and to, in a sense, brush aside all sorts of democratic norms, means, to my mind, they have no intention that a Democrat should ever get those same powers through an alternation of power.
So that while they don’t openly say it, or even admit to themselves, they are basically creating a system in which they can’t afford to lose an election. They can’t afford to be in a position when the Democrats could do to them what the Republicans are doing to the system now by all of the enhanced powers of the presidency. So I think tacitly and by implication, they simply don’t see another presidential election in which they don’t win.
Q: Given the path the United States is on right now, what’s your view of the future? Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
A: I guess it varies from day to day. Some days I have more hope, and other days I have more despair. It’s very much an emotional roller-coaster ride. And of course, we’re all whiplashed by this constantly changing news and these new things that come at us that you forget even yesterday’s bizarre, unprecedented actions by whatever happens today. So I simply go back and forth.
Some days, when I see that they don’t get away with what they’re trying, I think resistance is having some effect. They’ve had to put (Jimmy) Kimmel back on television, and Disney and others found out that they were losing too much business if they made themselves too obvious a stooge of the regime. So we have small victories. And certainly the pace that Trump would like is slow, but he has another three years. That’s the discouraging part that it’s a very long runway for him to get off the ground, and he’s only less than one quarter of the way down the runway, so whether one can keep him from going airborne is really difficult to guess.
I’m pretty much in a 50/50 position right now.