Warnings For Americans From A Historian of the Nazis
The 12 "warning signs" of authoritarianism every American should be aware of, from Laurence Rees, author of 'The Nazi Mind.'
Donald Trump’s musings about dictatorship once sounded almost funny. Nobody laughs anymore.
Trump has not created a dictatorship. He has, however, dragged the US further toward authoritarian rule than many of us thought possible. His corruption of the legal system, subordination of Congress, embrace of state violence, and hostility toward free elections led the sober-minded centrist Jonathan Rauch to write earlier this year: “Yes, it’s fascism.”
How Trump has managed to do that, contravening the values that made the US the world’s leading democracy, remains hard to fathom. But at least part of the answer lies in his use of techniques that earlier historical figures have used to amass and centralize power.
Laurence Rees, a former head of history at the BBC and best-selling author, has made studying those techniques his career’s work. His books and video documentaries explore how skillful, if repugnant, Nazi leadership drove ordinary Germans to monstrous wrongdoing during World War II. In January 2025, as Trump returned to the White House, Rees published ‘The Nazi Mind’ in an attempt to explain the inexplicable.
To state the obvious, Donald Trump is not Adolf Hitler. MAGA is not Nazism. No despot or movement in history compares to the Third Reich, and the nature and scale of evil it perpetrated.
Moreover, Trump’s handiwork appears less formidable today. Most of America recoils from his second-term grotesquerie. If permitted free and fair elections, voters will punish his Republican Party this fall – just as Hungarian voters have now punished Trump’s authoritarian role model Viktor Orbán.
But the lessons Rees identifies remain relevant to the crisis confronting 21st-century America. And that is not merely because Trump and a disturbing number of his young fans have at times expressed admiration for Nazi strength and ruthlessness.
“Everything is fragile – often a great deal more fragile than we think,” Rees writes. He lists 12 “warning signs” of how authoritarians can corrupt democracy.