Project 2025 was the MAGA world’s blueprint for turning the USA into a totalitarian state run by President — now dictator in all but name — Donald Trump. But the precursor to Project 2025 was the Nazi regime in Germany from 1933 to ’45. And if you know your recent history, as everyone who cares about the way the world works should, then you will have recognized the clear parallels between what the current MAGA administration has been doing and what Hitler and his administration did in the years leading up to WWII.

Project 2025 — with its unsettling commonalities with Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf — clearly laid out the process of American Gleichschaltung, the strategy, and the tactics of how the administration would turn the democratic republic into what should be labelled a fascist state, in the proper sense of meaning of the word. And so far, the MAGA administration is succeeding in this goal.

In a piece titled, The Trump administration has a Nazi problem in The Guardian last month, author Mehdi Hasan wrote, “Consider the copious amounts of evidence. On social media, as recent investigations by CNN, NBC News and PBS NewsHour have all confirmed, official government accounts can’t stop posting Nazi imagery and memes, using dehumanizing language about migrants, and leaning heavily into fascist aesthetics.”**

The Nazis did not have a plan per se; nothing laid out in detail to Nazify the state like Project 2025 does (despite common themes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf was mostly a meandering racist screed). In fact, in most instances, they had no plan at all, and did a lot of their “reform” arbitrarily and ad hoc. But they managed through intimidation, force, purges, threats, and repressive legislation to convert the unions, schools, universities, social groups, military, bureaucracy, and even many of the churches to their ideology and their methods. Sometimes their tactics failed so they tried again with new tactics and were often successful. Sometimes they only got grudging acceptance, not full conversion to their ideology, but that was good enough. They were new to power, new to management, new to governance; they made mistakes, but they accomplished most of their goals quickly and relatively efficiently.

It took the Nazis a mere three months in 1933 to secure their grip on the state, to turn the fledgling democracy into a one-party state, and to crush the opposition. In the following years, they tightened the screws, made more and more restrictive laws, locked down their power, and established their police state with no traces left of the former democracy.

How they did it and the changes they made are well described in detail in Richard Evans’ book, The Third Reich in Power. It’s the second book in his magisterial trilogy about how the party rose, governed, and went to war. This book outlines the day-to-day functioning within the state. Anyone who wants to understand the MAGA regime should read at least this book of the three, because it explains much of what is currently happening in the USA, how it will end up, and why it matters to everyone, even those of us in other nations. With Trump’s obvious, Hitleresque desire to go to war (with Venezuela, Cuba, Panama, Greenland, and even Canada), reading the third book in the trilogy might be useful, too.*

On his own website, Evans wrote that the book describes…

…how it was possible for a group of ideological obsessives to remould a society famous for its sophistication and complexity into a one-party state directed purely at war and race hate. He shows how the Nazis won over the hearts and minds of German citizens, twisted science, religion and culture, and transformed the economy, education, law and order to achieve total dominance in German politics and society. The major events of the dictatorship – including the Night of the Long Knives, the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, the Olympic Games, the pogroms, the headlong rush to war – are re-created with skill and understanding, but just as important is the author’s engagement with the myriad, smaller ways in which a whole population became enmeshed in a horrific experiment in human engineering at the very heart of Europe. The picture created is of a dictatorship consumed by visceral hatreds and ambitions and driven by war.

Like Trump, Hitler’s administration was filled with inexperienced sycophants and loyalists, few of whom had any competency in the roles they were given, and several were notably incapable and incompetent at their jobs. Didn’t matter, though: they were all loyal to a fault, just like Trump’s lickspittle cabinet.

For example, on page 447, Evans describes a proclamation read by Hitler at the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, in which he said that, if the existing bureaucracy was ineffective in implementing the party’s policies, then the party’s own members (‘the movement’ — and its internal organizations like the SA) would do it themselves. This has a clear parallel in the current Trump ICE agency; an extra-judicial group conducting raids, kidnapping, even executions of American citizens, often illegally and certainly immorally, outside the rules, restraints, and laws that govern the actual bureaucracy. Rule of law and process are ignored by ICE agents, and even those agents who commit murder on public streets are not charged or arrested, but defended by the administration.

In that 1935 rally, Hitler told his followers,

The battle against the inner enemy will never be frustrated by formal bureaucracy or its incompetence.

“Inner enemy” used here is a close parallel to Trump’s frequent claim that the ‘enemy from within’ was the threat that had to be eliminated. By which he meant Democrats (which he specifically named), political opponents, resisters in the bureaucracy, protestors, judges who ruled against him, generals who refuse his orders, actors who criticize him, and anyone who insults or challenges him, including late-night show hosts who mock him relentlessly in every show. He frequently insults people to their face, particularly picking on female reporters who ask him non-sycophantic questions, especially about his relationship with pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and the accusations of sexual assault against Trump himself by at least one of Epstein’s victims. Every night he rages and rants against perceived enemies on his social media platform.

While ICE is frequently compared with the Gestapo or SS on social media, it has a lot more in common with Hitler’s SA; violent, vicious gangs of armed thugs commonly known as the ‘brownshirts.’ As Don Moynihan, Professor of Public Policy, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan, wrote on his substack Autocracy in America:

Trump is creating a paramilitary omniforce to serve him by purging those who might object, merging other parts of law enforcement into immigration enforcement, and surging these forces into blue cities.

Trump’s complaints (obviously heard by the billionaire who owns the media company CBS) against late-night show host Stephen Colbert resulted in Colbert’s cancellation as of May, 2026.  As NPR noted, “CBS’ new corporate owner has taken a series of concrete steps to address the concerns of the news division’s sharpest critics — particularly President Trump and his allies.” Colbert was a victim of that billionaire’s obsequious subservience.

Trump’s subsequent complaints against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel after Kimmel made a non-deferential reference to the killing of MAGA hatemonger Charlie Kirk (who the Trump regime was building a hagiography for), led to Kimmel being suspended by his media company, ABC. However, audience and fan outrage on social media made the company relent and bring Kimmel back, at least for now. Trump continues to denigrate and insult Kimmel and other late-night hosts, so their future is unclear. All this reflects events that happened in Germany in 1939, when five actors were fired for mocking Hitler.

Trump has even openly identified individuals as targets of his increasingly erratic wrath. As NBC noted,

Former President Donald Trump called Democrats and others who have opposed or investigated him “the enemy from within” in an interview that aired Sunday, describing them as more dangerous than major foreign adversaries of the United States, including Russia and China.
Trump specifically singled out those whom he called “lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff,” referring to the California representative and Democratic nominee for Senate, who was the lead prosecutor in the then-president’s first Senate impeachment trial.

Trump has also openly insulted and attacked judges and bureaucrats, for example, calling Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell incompetent and crooked, “too angry, too stupid,” and when his bullying failed to get Powell to bend to Trump’s demands, Trump had his Department of ‘Justice’ investigate Powell (and made sure the media were aware of the intimidation).

In his book (pp. 448-449), Evans recounts how Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenberg, a civil servant under the regime, complained about civil servants being “exposed to attacks on their work… The consequences of this treatment… are that the civil service feels increasingly defamed, without honour, and in some degree of despair.”

The “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” was enacted on April 7, 1933. It “mandated the dismissal of civil servants of non-Aryan descent (primarily Jews) and political opponents of the Nazi regime from all levels of government administration” and covered “traditional administrative roles and judges, teachers, university professors, lawyers, and other public employees.” The law “served the dual purpose of removing perceived enemies and ensuring that the bureaucracy would faithfully implement Nazi policies, including racial discrimination.”

Trump openly called Judge Juan Merchan, “crooked” after Merchan presided over the trial where a jury found Trump guilty of 34 counts “in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush-money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.” Trump has lashed out at other judges involved in cases against him and who ruled against his edicts. Trump has called judges who ruled against his edicts “radical left” and threatened to remove them, writing on (un)Truth Social that Judge Boasberg should be impeached, calling him a  “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator.”

In Germany, judges were expected to rule in favour of the regime and to show loyalty to Nazi ideals. Indoctrination in those ideals was inserted into legal education; obedience to the party’s ideology was necessary to keep or progress in the job:

…Hitler also launched an ideological campaign to redefine the judiciary’s role. The Nazi regime promoted the concept of Volksgemeinschaft—a racially unified national community—and demanded that legal professionals align with it in both spirit and action. Judges were encouraged to practice Gesinnungsjustiz (justice according to ideological sentiment), whereby loyalty to the Führer and the racial mission of the state outweighed legal codes or constitutional principles. Legal education was overhauled to indoctrinate future judges in National Socialist principles, while legal organizations like the National Socialist League of German Jurists ensured that career advancement was contingent on party loyalty. In this context, judicial independence was not simply suppressed—it was rendered obsolete. The court system became a mechanism for enforcing ideological conformity, and Hitler’s early legal manipulations ensured that no avenue of resistance remained within the judiciary.

Hitler had the German judiciary purged of non-loyalists after the passing of the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.”  He also “created parallel judicial structures that operated outside the bounds of traditional legal norms. The regime established Sondergerichte (special courts) to handle politically sensitive cases and sidestep what remained of judicial procedure.” Much like what Trump has done with ICE and his Department of Homeland Security.

In 1934, the infamous Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) was created following the botched investigation into the Reichstag Fire and subsequent show trials. This court became the principal organ for the repression of political dissent and was notorious for its swift and brutal judgments. Under Roland Freisler’s leadership, it turned trials into propaganda spectacles and wielded the death penalty with devastating frequency. The proliferation of these extrajudicial institutions further weakened the standing of the traditional judiciary, now seen as redundant unless compliant with Nazi aims.

Judges who were purged continued to suffer. They were “…not just dismissed but often publicly humiliated or subjected to surveillance, contributing to a broader atmosphere of fear within the legal community. Even judges who had no party affiliation but remained committed to Weimar legal norms were scrutinized and sidelined.”

At least 13 MAGA-run states have banned abortion; even women who are victims of incest or rape can’t get an abortion in nine of those states. MAGA’s obsessive desire to control women’s bodies and reproduction is almost identical to the Nazi’s misogyny program.

Four months after Hitler took power, women lost their reproductive rights. Abortion, which had been decriminalized in 1927—an era when pregnancy commonly endangered a woman’s life—was completely banned. The Nazi government reinstated an 1871 law that criminalized abortion. Women’s clinics—which provided abortion services and birth control—were shut down.

Hitler dissolved the Reichstag (the German parliament) in 1933 and staged fake elections to legitimize his own power, much like what Trump has threatened to do with the upcoming US midterm elections. In fact, he has already begun the process to de-legitimize previous election results that didn’t favour him, pursuing his insistent lie that he won the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s FBI recently raided election offices in Georgia, claiming fraud but really using it as a cover to steal confidential voter information that the administration can then manipulate into conforming with Trump’s fraudulent claims. Georgia, readers will recall, is the state Trump called to try to con Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Secretary of State, into faking more votes in his favour, saying in a recorded call, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.” But he didn’t, and the vindictive Trump never, ever forgets a refusal, an insult, or a slight.

Trump’s Executive Orders often ignore or violate the US Constitution and pre-existing laws. For example, his edicts that impose tariffs on imports are illegal. But he simply ignored the law and imposed the tariffs regardless of any legal restraints. And his cabal implemented them. Similarly, Hitler made laws that ignored or violated the German Constitution:

The Enabling Act, passed on March 23, 1933, represented a further and more profound erosion of judicial oversight. Officially known as the Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich, this act granted Hitler and his cabinet the authority to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag or the President, even if such laws contravened the constitution.

Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag in early 1933 as his excuse to impose Nazi order, rules, and control on the nation, suspending civil liberties, branding other political parties as enemies of the state, and banning them. Trump is looking for a similar ‘Reichstag Fire’ moment to impose the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, and suspend the midterm elections so as not to lose the majority MAGA has in Congress and the Senate.

A lot of observers through the assassination of the MAGA hatemonger, Charlie Kirk, would be his Reichstag Fire moment, but that was too far from the midterm elections to be successful and might not survive court challenges against its use. Kirk was, instead, made into the MAGA Horst Wessel and deified by Trump’s pseudo-Christian Talibangelist supporters. Trump will wait until the midterms are closer to invoke the Act, when it will be too late for court challenges to be effective in stopping him.

Hitler’s regime opened its first concentration camp (Dachau) in 1933, only a few months after he was appointed Chancellor and continued building them until late 1943. Auschwitz, the largest camp, was built in 1940, both as a concentration and a death camp. Eventually, 23 main camps were built, many of which had satellite or subcamps, bringing the total to more than 1,000 camps scattered throughout Germany and occupied territories. Trump ordered the federal government to construct immigrant “detention centers” (aka concentration camps) near the Mexican border, via an Executive Order signed on  25 January 2017, days after his inauguration. More than 100 of those ICE “detention centers” were built in 2025. Construction continues today with a “massive $45 billion expansion of detention facilities financed by Trump’s recent tax-cutting law” that gave his billionaire friends more cash. There are a total of 371 detention centers in the USA as of January, 2026.

Is it fair to categorize the ICE detention centres as concentration camps? Scholars think so. Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center director, Michael Zank, commenting on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ comparison of the ICE detention centers with concentration camps, said,

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is right to pierce our general indifference to this humanitarian disaster unfolding at our southern border by using strong language. By referring to the caging of asylum seekers as “concentration camps,” she managed to get our attention. The analogy is correct, as many scholars have confirmed.

Both the President and Florida/MAGA Gov. Rick DeSantis called the ICE facility they built quickly on an airstrip in the Florida Everglades, “Alligator Alcatraz.” But critics called it Alligator Auschwitz. While some disagreed with the comparison, others agreed:

Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” wrote that Alligator Alcatraz deserves to be called a “concentration camp” based on an objective definition of the term…
…others have suggested that the many aspects of Trump’s draconian immigration policies invite such comparisons — not to the Holocaust, per se, but to harsh measures that dehumanize outsiders, operate outside of a country’s established legal system, and seem to at least pave the road to, well, another Auschwitz.
In a sermon he delivered on July 5, Rabbi Ammos Chorny of Beth Tikvah congregation in Naples, Florida warned against the “Auschwitz” comparison, but nevertheless invoked the Holocaust in decrying the ICE facility.

The Nazi playbook is evident not only in Project 2025, but in the day-to-day working of the MAGA administration and in Trump’s own insulting, attacking, and increasingly deranged posts on his social media platform. To be clear, MAGA is not identical with the Nazis nor does MAGA pursue the same genocidal policies (yet, anyway; executing American citizens on the street and detainees dying in detention centres may suggest it will happen). But the parallels between how MAGA and the Nazis created their authoritarian state are self-evident.

In his Rule of Law substack, former Navy SEAL and federal prosecutor, Nate Charles, writes. “[is it] fair to compare the MAGA movement to the Nazis. His answer? Absolutely… Step by step, they used democracy itself to dismantle democracy, and today’s MAGA movement follows that same playbook: demonizing minorities, discrediting elections, and elevating one man above the law.”

The Financial Times data journalist John Burn-Murdoch recently wrote, “While US history is hardly free from political violence or maltreatment of disfavoured groups, this blitz on America’s citizens, institutions and — by many estimations — the constitution itself ranks as arguably the most rapid episode of democratic and civil erosion in the recent history of the developed world.”

The two-and-a-half century American experiment with democracy has ended. The country is a dictatorship in everything but name. Whether you call it totalitarian or authoritarian instead of fascist doesn’t matter. They all mean American democracy has been defeated.

Notes:

* Published by Penguin Books, 2006, ISBN 978-0-14-303790-3.

** Hasan provides many examples, including:

The Department of Labor posted a video with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”, recalling the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“one people, one realm, one leader”). Another tweet from the Department of Labor announced that “America is for Americans,” which sounds a lot like another notorious Nazi slogan: “Deutschland den Deutschen (“Germany for Germans”).

And the Nazi rhetoric goes far beyond internet memes. Earlier this month, DHS secretary Kristi Noem stood behind a podium which said “One of ours, all of yours” – a phrase that “seems related to the practice (although not the explicit policy) of collective punishment used by the Nazis against their enemies”, according to Holocaust historian Page Herrlinger. Last year, the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller gave a demagogic speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service that sounded like it had been plagiarized from Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s 1932 speech The Storm is Coming. Even the myth-busting website Snopes could not help but “observe the similarities” between Miller and Goebbels’s fascist rhetoric.

Then there is the staffing issue. In February 2025, it emerged that James Rodden, an ICE prosecutor in Texas, had been running a social media account praising Hitler and declaring that “America is a white nation”. This is a federal prosecutor – not a teenager or a troll – pushing Nazi ideology. He was pulled from his post after the story first broke, but this month it appears he returned to work. When the Texas Observer, which broke the story, called Rodden for comment, he had none, and referred reporters to his press office…

…How does this rhetoric and behavior from Trump administration officials and social media accounts not amount to the normalization of Nazis and Nazism? And how are the rest of us supposed to be OK with any of this?

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