Photo composition showing US President Donald Trump face-to-face with German fascist dictator Adolf Hitler. Photo: AI-generated/Qwen.
By Stansfield Smith – Jun 2, 2025
With the second coming of Trump, many who profess left credentials again proclaim fascism is back, after we voted “fascism” out in 2020. Every four years we hear the story: “this election is the most important in our lifetime.” Republicans are the new fascism, Democrats are the lesser evil. No matter what, corporate interests fund both parties and dictate their policies. No matter Democrat Biden green-lighted the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. No matter whether Biden deported more than Trump did, no matter every year the police killed more under Biden than Trump. Trump is the Hitler, not Biden. So once again, time for a reality check on actually existing fascism.
Actually existing fascism in Hitler’s Germany
Hitler’s rule began January 30, 1933, but even prior to this, Germany’s political climate bore no similarity to our own. In the summer 1932, Germany, then with 66 million people, had 30% unemployment, up from 8.5% in 1929, while industrial production dropped 42%.
The three contending parties in the July 1932 election, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party [Nazis], the Social Democrats, and the Communists – each won millions of votes. The German Communist Party, the largest in Europe, numbered 360,000 members, and possessed its own paramilitary organizations. The Social Democratic Party was one million strong, many in their own paramilitary group. The Nazis numbered 1.5 million, with 445,000 Stormtroopers or Brownshirts.
Clearly this reality bears no relation to the US today: we have no mass unemployment, let alone fascist, communist and Social Democratic parties as the leading contenders. In Germany, socialism or fascism—or, three versions of “socialism”—stood as the alternatives in the election. Here we may choose a traditional corporate party run by the 1%, and on “the other side of the aisle,” another one.
William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (p. 165) describes the1932 German election climate, alien to our own. In Prussia, with two thirds of Germany’s population, “between June 1 and 20 there were 461 pitched battles in the streets which cost 82 lives and seriously wounded 400 men…. In July, 38 Nazis and 30 Communists were among the 86 dead.” On July 10, 18 were killed, and a week later, July 17, “when the Nazis, under police escort, staged a march through Altona, a working class suburb of Hamburg, 19 persons were shot dead and 285 wounded.”
In six weeks, 200 were murdered in a part of Germany where 40 million lived. To make it simple for “Trump fascism” folk, that would mean 1700 killed in fascist – antifascist combat during a six-week period in the 2024 presidential campaign.
In the November 1932 election, the two socialist parties obtained 37.3% of the votes compared to 39% for the Nazis and the German Nationalists. Just over two months later, on January 30, Hitler was appointed Chancellor.
He quickly purged the nation’s police forces, replacing all police chiefs with Nazis. The police were ordered not to interfere with the work of Stormtroopers and the Nazi SS. Nazism 1919-1945, A Documentary Reader Vol. 1, The Rise to Power presents the February 17, 1933 Nazi police order: “The activities of subversive organizations are … to be combated with the most drastic methods. Communist terrorist acts are to be proceeded against with all severity, and weapons must be used ruthlessly when necessary.”
Just two weeks in power, Hitler’s Stormtroopers had license to beat, even kill leftists and Jews. Here, Trump’s main target was non-white immigrants, though deportation numbers have actually declined since Biden left office.
February 22, 1933, with fascism in power for only three weeks, 50,000 Stormtroopers and SS men were made part of the police. Did “fascist” Trump incorporate an equivalent of 250,000 Klansmen into the police forces here?
In just three weeks Hitler had the German police forces in Nazi hands, while another two million Stormtroopers patrolled the streets. Mass arrests began, public buildings and homes raided to seize political opponents, often placed in newly constructed “camps.” Meanwhile, Trump, a supposed Hitler, into his second term, has done none of this.
February 27, not a month in power, the German Reichstag, their version of Congress, was torched, which the Nazis immediately pinned on the Communists. The Nazi’s Emergency Degree declared, “Restrictions on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press; on the rights of assembly and association; and violations of the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications and warrants for house searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.” (Nazism 1919-1945, A Documentary Reader Vol. 1).
So began their anti-Communist witch hunt. Truckloads of Stormtroopers rounded up targets, carting them off for beatings and torture. The Nazis seized Communist Party headquarters. Their meetings were banned, their press shut down, party funds confiscated, Communist deputies in parliament arrested. Social Democrats’ meetings were likewise banned, their press shut down; their party outlawed in June. It took a month for the new Nazi regime to behead the left. This was fascism in action.
Reality check
For those fantasizing Trump fascism, a reality check: in his first month Hitler had licensed imprisonment without trial, turned over policing and the judicial system to the equivalent of the KKK, and imprisoned or driven underground thousands of liberal, Communist and Social Democratic opponents. Stormtroopers and SS thugs took over town halls, trade union offices, newspapers, businesses, and courts, removing “unreliable” officials.
Before even 60 days in power, on March 21, it now became a crime to criticize the Nazi party, with trial by military style courts with no jury and often with no right to defense.
April 7 all Jews were dismissed from civil service jobs; Nazi governors were appointed in all German states, having the power to appoint and remove local governments, dissolve state assemblies, and appoint and dismiss state officials and judges.
On May 2, Hitler destroyed the trade union movement. After the Nazis had cynically made May Day a national holiday, all the trade union offices were occupied, all union property and funds confiscated, trade union leaders arrested and the trade unions reorganized as the Nazi’s German Labor Front.
On May 6 huge book burnings began, with 25,000 at the University of Berlin. Soon, all professionals in the fine arts, music, theater, literature, press, radio and film had to join their respective Nazi cultural organizations whose directives became law.
We can only wonder how some imagine Trump is following Hitler’s footsteps.
There were now two million Nazi Stormtroopers; given Germany’s 66 million population, a comparable Trump fascist gang would number 10 million. These “brown-shirted gangs roamed the streets, arresting and beating up and sometimes murdering whomever they pleased while the police looked on without lifting a nightstick…. Judges were intimidated; they were afraid for their lives if they convicted and sentenced a storm-trooper even for cold-blooded murder.” (Shirer, p. 203). Do we see 10 million government fascist thugs doing this here?
On July 14 all political parties besides the Nazis were prohibited, the fascists could confiscate the property of any organization it considered anti-Nazi, and could revoke anyone’s citizenship.
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By 1935, 20% of German Communist Party members, 30,000, were in concentration camps. These were the most militant element of the anti-Nazi resistance. Another 10-20% of members continued underground work, but the Nazis soon rounded up, imprisoned, and executed a high percent of them. By 1939, 30,000 communists had been executed and 150,000 more sent to Nazi concentration camps.
“Within twelve months he had overthrown the Weimar Republic, substituted his personal dictatorship for its democracy, destroyed all the political parties but his own, smashed the state governments and their parliaments and unified and defederalized the Reich, wiped out the labor unions, stamped out democratic associations of any kind, driven the Jews out of public and professional life, abolished freedom of speech and of the press, stifled the independence of the courts and ‘coordinated’ under Nazi rule the political, economic, cultural and social life of an ancient and cultivated people.” (Shirer, p.189)
That was fascism in real life, not the make-believe one liberal-leftists see today. Trump has not thrown out the Constitution, wiped out the AFL-CIO, banned political parties, nor sent his political opponents to concentration camps.
Why this infantilism about Trump fascism?
In almost every presidential election going back generations, people on the liberal-left continuum resort to this scare tactic of Republican “fascism.” They may admit corporate America owns the two parties—as Bernie still does—yet vote Democratic as some “lesser evil.” They may even provide a class perspective on corporate rule of the US. They may accurately explain why our living conditions steadily worsen, that it continues regardless of who is the president. But note: very few say this during election year.
Instead, in election season we are told we must first defeat the fascist threat, then build our movement. This has been an effective strategy to trap our movement in the Democratic Party for generations. Not only does it reinforce domination by corporate America, not only does it miseducate people about fascism, but it also obstructs the working class struggle to combat our ever-worsening living conditions.
This infantile Trump “fascism” story has even led many liberal-leftists to become defenders of national security state operations by affirming the anti-Trump Russiagate hoax and by their support for the US war on Russia in Ukraine.
This has given “lesser evil” Republican pundits a wider hearing among working people with their exposes of these operations – the milieu including Candice Owen, Tucker Carlson, Judge Napolitano, and Ron Paul.
When the ruling class needs fascism
So long as corporate America has the working class – and the liberal-left – tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary methods of rule break down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces.
The historic function of fascism, as Nazi rule shows, is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy. That is far from the case in the US today.
Unfortunately, it has been habitual for the liberal-left to emphasize the crimes Republicans engineer against working people here and abroad, but underplay those committed by Democrats. This only helps to misdirect discontent towards the Democratic Party.
Labelling the crimes of Trump and Republicans as fascist propagates the just-so story that imperialist rule is nicer under Democrats. A Democrat oversaw the slaughter of 20% of the North Korean population (US own admission), a level equal to the Nazis in Belarus; a liberal Democrat, Nazi-style, imprisoned a whole ethnic group; a liberal Democrat brought mass slaughter to Vietnam; a liberal Democrat legalized indefinite military detention of US citizens without charge; a liberal Democrat brought us to the very edge of nuclear holocaust. It miseducates people to spread the myth that imperial brutality is somehow less barbaric than the Nazis, or depends on which party rules.
Caitlin Johnstone goes after believers in Democrats as “lesser evil,” pointing out that the Democratic Party exists to make sure good people do nothing. She forgets about believers in Republicans as “lesser evil,” and that party also exists to make sure good people do nothing. Both parties funnel popular movements into channels the corporate elite can control.
Advocates of Trump as fascist not only discredit and isolate themselves from more politically aware working people. Those who push the Trump fascism story are signaling to all their own attachment to the Democrats and the two party system. Historically, they have been a powerful obstacle in the way of the need to build a working class movement politically independent of the 1%.
SS/OT
Stansfield Smith
Stansfield Smith is a Chicago-based anti-imperialist activist. He was active for over a decade in the Chicago Committee to Free the Cuban 5. His work is now on ChicagoALBASolidarity.wordpress.com. He has written on Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and on North Korea for Counterpunch and others.
