Dear Trump Administration Official

I’m writing to you not as a political opponent, but as a historian who’s spent a lifetime studying what happens when democracies flirt with strongmen and otherwise decent people convince themselves that loyalty to Dear Leader today will be rewarded by safety and protection tomorrow. It almost never is.

You’re out there defending Donald Trump’s lawbreaking, cheering his attacks on judges, prosecutors, immigrants, journalists, and even the Constitution itself. You defend his bribe-taking, the jet from Qatar, the violence of ICE, and his hotel and crypto grifts. You say it’s necessary for him to abuse power to “get things done,” that the other side is worse, that he’s strong and that’s what the American people need.

History is littered with people who believed the same things. Let’s start close to home. Richard Nixon didn’t go to prison: his loyalists did. His attorney general John Mitchell did hard time in a federal prison. His chief of staff H.R. Haldeman did hard time, as did John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, and his White House attorney John Dean. The burglars did time, as did the fixers. The forty Nixon officials who went to prison even included two members of Nixon’s cabinet: AG Mitchell and Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans.

The people who “just followed orders” or egged Nixon on — like you’re doing now with Trump — were the ones who went to jail, while Nixon walked away to a quiet retirement. That’s the pattern history shows us over and over, all the way back to the Roman Republic: the boss either dies or escapes while his helpers become the long-term fall guys.

Every authoritarian system runs on the same fuel you’re today giving Trump: people who believe that by protecting the leader they’re protecting themselves and their families. Tragically, at least for them, it never works out that way.

When Hitler’s regime collapsed, he was dead, but his inner circle faced tribunals, prison cells, and even the gallows. The men who signed orders, ran ministries, moved trains, seized property, and “made it all legal” discovered that when corrupt administrations fall, their paperwork trail lasts longer than their leader’s loyalty. Their defense of “I was serving my country” or “just taking orders” didn’t save them: it convicted them.

Mussolini’s story is even darker. As his own crimes caught up with him, his own allies turned and ran. He was executed by people horrified by his excesses. His son-in-law, once his foreign minister and a loyal insider, was put up against a wall and shot after a show trial. Dictators never go down alone: they take their flunkies with them and it’s typically the flunkies who bear the harshest punishments.

Chile’s Pinochet managed to dodge some justice himself, but the men who ran his torture chambers and death squads didn’t. Years later they were dragged into court, convicted, and sent to prison. Time didn’t save them, and neither did politics or the loyalty they expected from the good general. And it won’t save you.

The same happened after Saddam Hussein fell; his henchmen were tried and executed or died in prison. In Romania, the Ceausescu were hunted down and shot but their senior officials faced courts, disgrace, and decades in prison. Across history, when the music stops, the people closest to the guy at the top inevitably find there aren’t enough chairs.

Here’s the uncomfortable (for you) truth: authoritarian leaders like Trump and Putin treat loyalty like a disposable resource. Just look at all the Republicans who served in Trump’s first term and he’s now trying to throw into prison. Loyalty, for narcissists and authoritarians like Trump, is always a one-way street.

So long as you’re useful, you’re protected, but the moment Dear Leader no longer commands power you’ll become a liability, an offering to be thrown out to appease the angry mob. And when the prosecutors come calling for you after Trump’s gone, they won’t start with your elegant speeches or proclamations that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.” They start with your memos, phone calls, pressure campaigns, documents, and quiet threats; they’ll go after your “find the votes” activities, the cooked reports, the arrests without cause, the orders that violated others’ civil rights.

They’ll start, in other words, with the people who made Trump’s crimes happen to people like you. That’s how conspiracies are proven in a court of law: not by vibes, but by nailing the insiders.

Right now, you may feel powerful. You’re on TV, retweeted, and praised by Trump. The base cheers, the fundraising money pours in, the billionaires are chummy, and it feels like history is being written by your side. But history has a funny way of circling back:

— Nixon’s aides told themselves they were protecting the presidency, but they destroyed their own lives instead.

— The seniormost Nazis told themselves they were saving Germany, but they were prosecuted as war criminals.

— Mussolini’s ministers told themselves they were stabilizing Italy, but they ended up dead or disgraced.

— Pinochet’s enforcers told themselves they were fighting communism, but they ended up in prison.

There’s a simple and perennial reason why prosecutors always say, “Follow the money” and “follow the paper trail”: abusive power always leaves fingerprints. And there’s no statute of limitations on some of the crimes you’re now waving away.

Obstruction of justice. Conspiracy. Civil rights violations. Election interference. Murder under color of authority. Bribery. Abuse of power. False statements. Unlawful detention. Retaliation against whistleblowers. Collusion with foreign enemies. These aren’t political talking points that I’m trying to wave around to score with public opinion or scare you, they’re criminal statutes.

You may tell yourself — like all those people before you told themselves — that Trump will protect you. But Nixon didn’t protect his people; he left the White House and never looked back to watch his underlings fall. History’s strongmen never look back. When the heat gets intense enough, they point at others, not themselves.

Already we’re seeing this pattern with dozens of people who’ve left Trump’s first term employ, from his Attorney General, CIA director, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary, and FBI Director all the way down to functionaries in the Oval Office: “I didn’t know he was that crazy.” “They acted on their own.” “I was advised incorrectly.” “They went too far.”

Every authoritarian uses the same script, and Trump has already proven that he’s no different. Do you think he’s suddenly going to decide to protect you rather than run off with the goodies? If so, I have a bridge to sell you.

Seriously, here’s the part nobody in the cheering crowd has bothered to tell you: when regimes fall — or even just lose power, like Nixon did — the leader’s efforts become solely about his own personal survival. Your life, as a disposable underling, becomes a tool he can use to redirect blame and avoid accountability.

The courts won’t ask whether you believed in the cause: they’ll ask what you did. Did you pressure an official? Did you sign that order? Did you participate in killing those fishermen with a missile? Did you move the funds? Did you authorize those deportations to foreign torture centers? Did you look the other way? Did you help cover up the child rapes? That’s when you’ll discover the very real difference between a political appointee and the defendant you’ll become.

I’m not asking you to become a Democrat, to abandon your “conservative” principles, or even to leave your party. Instead, I want you to realize that the Constitution is older than Donald Trump and far more durable than any cult of personality.

There’s a reason the Founders feared concentrated power and split it among three branches of government: like their advisor Montesquieu, they’d also studied history. Strongmen always promise protection to the people they con into doing their dirty work. What they deliver to those folks, though, is always collateral damage.

Right now, you’re standing close to a light that feels bright and powerful. History suggests, however, that it’ll end by burning the people nearest to it. Including you. Presidents can walk away, but staffers, lawyers, deputies, agency heads, cabinet officials, and enablers can’t.

You still have time to choose which side of history you’re on, and which side of a courtroom you never want to sit in. Because the lesson of every fallen strongman is the same: abusive power-by-association today becomes criminal liability tomorrow.

 -Thom Hartmann

Ian McKellen on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Click for video: Facebook

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

Hath chide down all the majesty of England.

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires,

Authority quite silent by your brawl,

And you in ruff of your opinions clothed.

What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught

How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

How order should be quelled, and by this pattern

Not one of you should live an agèd man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self-same hand, self-reasons, and self-right,

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.

You’ll put down strangers. Kill them.

Cut their throats; possess their houses.

Oh, desperate as you are,

wash your foul minds with tears,

and those same hands, that like rebels

lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees,

make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven.

Say now the king,

As he is clement if th’ offender mourn,

Should so much come too short of your great trespass

As but to banish you, whither would you go?

What country, by the nature of your error,

Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,

To any German province, to Spain or Portugal,

Nay, anywhere that does not adhere to England,

Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased

To find a nation of such barbarous temper,

That, breaking out in hideous violence,

Would not afford you an abode on earth,

Whet their detested knives against your throats,

Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God

Owed not nor made not you, nor that the elements

We're not all appropriate to your comforts,

But chartered unto them, what would you think

To be thus used? This is the strangers’ case.

And this your mountainous inhumanity.

Speech credited to Thomas More/Shakespeare

"...When a nation kneels before money, power, and spite..."

      

“Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been—arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America’s shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul—it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader” - Oliver Kornetzke is an American writer whose commentary of U.S. and global politics is known for its raw honesty. 

   

Don Colossus at the G20 Summit on the grounds of his golf complex in Doral, Florida

 

A massive golden statue of [Pathological Narcissistic] Donald Trump will soon loom over the grounds of his golf complex in Doral, Florida, the site of this year’s annual G20 Summit.

The gaudy effigy stands 15 feet tall — 22 feet when affixed upon a 7,000-pound concrete pedestal — and is coated in gold leaf. It depicts Trump with a raised fist in the moments after he survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024.

It’s part sculpture, part publicity stunt, commissioned by a group of cryptocurrency investors to promote a meme coin: the Patriot Token.

“THE $PATRIOT TEAM, LIKE MANY AROUND THE GLOBE, WERE INSPIRED BY HIS COURAGE UNDER FIRE AND WERE COMPELLED TO BUILD HIM A GLORIOUS STATUE,” the token’s website reads.

The New York Times on Tuesday reported that the project, which began in mid-2024, now “appears close to fruition.” An unveiling date has not yet been announced, but Trump is expected to attend the event, according to the Times.

The statue has been referred to as “Don Colossus.” Its creator, Ohio artist Alan Cottrill, calls it “The Patriot Statue ” “Don Colossus” is the name of the project’s artificial intelligence component.

“The cost of the statue with pedestals is around $400,000, although the spend to manage the logistics and events definitely will be in excess of a million dollars [of taxpayers' money],” Patriot Token wrote in an X post in January 2025.

Trump has previously touted the statue, posting a social media link to a Breitbart story about its construction in December 2024. The president texted one of the project’s organizers that it “looks fantastic” in December of last year, according to the Times.

While appreciative of the project, Eric Trump, the president’s third child, said that the Trump Organization is not associated with Patriot Token.

“We appreciate the support and enthusiasm, but we want to be crystal clear — we are not involved in this coin," he said Monday in a post on X.

The statue will eventually tower over world leaders when Trump hosts the G20 Leaders’ Summit from December 14-15, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami. It will mark the first time the U.S. has hosted the event since 2009.

The Group of Twenty (G20) is an international forum that brings together the world’s largest economies for regular meetings to address the most urgent challenges facing the global economy.

 Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

"Our children and grandchildren — won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all"

 

As people testified before Congress yesterday about the brutality and violence they’d suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call “detention centers.”

Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is: “[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”

Jails are where people accused of crimes but still waiting for their day in court are held, as Merriam-Webster notes: “[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes.”

But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”: “[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”

The British originated the term “concentration camp” to describe facilities where “rebel” or “undesirable” civilians were held in South Africa during the Second Anglo‑Boer War (1899–1902) to control and punish a rebellious population.

They were facilities where the “bad elements of society” were “concentrated” into one location so they could be easily controlled and would lose access to society and thus could not spread their messages of resistance against the British Empire.

The Germans adopted the term in 1933 when Hitler took power and created his first camp for communists, socialists, union leaders, and, by the end of the year, Hitler’s political opponents. They Germanized the phrase into “Konzentrationslager” and referred to the process of their incarceration as “protective custody.”

The first camp was built at Dachau just weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and by the end of the year there were around 70 of them operating across the country.

When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986/87, we visited Dachau with our three children. The crematoriums shocked our kids, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps (which were all located outside Germany to ensure deniability).

The ovens at Dachau were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera or other disease, much like the 35+ people who’ve recently died in ICE’s concentration camps.

When American friends would visit us and we’d take them to Dachau (we lived just an hour up the road) they’d invariably be surprised when I told them that by the time of the war there were over 500 substantial camps and an additional few hundred very small ones all over the country.

“How could the people not know what was going on?” they’d ask. The answer was simple: the people did know. These were where the “undesirables,” the “criminal troublemakers,” and the “aliens” were held, and were broadly supported by the German people. (It wasn’t until 1938, following Kristallnacht, that the Nazis began systematically arresting and imprisoning non-political Jews, first at Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.)

By the end of his first year, Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings.

By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America, and Trump, Homan, Miller, and Noem hope to more than double both numbers in the coming months.

In Tennessee, The Guardian reports that Miller has been coordinating with Republican leaders to create legislation that would turn every local cop, teacher, social worker, and helper in the state into an official agent of ICE and criminalize efforts by cities to refuse cooperation. It also makes it a felony crime to identify any of ICE’s masked agents or disclose conditions within the concentration camps to the public.

Germans didn’t have the benefit of warnings from a fascist history they could look back on; much of what Hitler did took them by surprise, as I’ve noted in previous articles.

In 2026 America, however, operating with the benefit of historical hindsight, entire communities are rebelling at Trump’s effort to beat Germany’s 1933-1934 prisoner numbers.

In city after city, Americans are organizing to deprive ICE of their coveted spaces, putting pressure on companies not to sell and on cities and counties not to permit any more concentration camps.

Because immigration violations are labeled “civil,” people in ICE concentration camps are stripped of many of the normal constitutional protections that apply to people in criminal incarceration. This has created a legal black hole that ICE and the Trump regime exploit, where indefinite imprisonment, abuse, and medical neglect flourish with little to no oversight or accountability.

Human rights organizations like the ACLU describe pervasive patterns of abuse in ICE detention: hazardous living conditions, chronic medical neglect, sexual assault, retaliation for grievances, and extensive use of solitary confinement.

Detainees who have committed no crime other than being in the United States without documentation report being shackled for long periods, packed into freezing, overcrowded cells under constant fluorescent light, and denied hygiene and timely care. Meanwhile, GOP-aligned private prison companies are making billions off the program.

Inspections and oversight are inconsistent: one recent investigation found that as detentions and deaths surged in 2025, formal inspections of facilities actually dropped by over a third. ICE regularly refuses to allow attorneys, family members, and even members of Congress to access their concentration camps; the issue is now being litigated through federal courts.

History shows us that once a nation builds a mass detention apparatus, it never remains limited to its original targets. Future generations of Americans — our children and grandchildren — won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.

Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now. History isn’t whispering its warning: it’s shouting.

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Trump Is a Threat to Democracy.

Consider his autocratic abuse of presidential power, his constitutional ignorance, his lawless demagoguery, his sociopathic bullying, his pathological narcissism, his grandiose delusions, his anti-social personality disorder, his malignant arrogance, his felonious behavior, his moral relativism, his white nationalism, his perfidious nationalism, his hateful racism, his infectious nihilism, his outrageous iconoclasm, his ruthless competition, his puerile dereliction, his embarrassing stupidity, his provocative transgressions, his mocking disrespect, his impetuous vulgarity, his sexual predation; his belligerent intimidation, his incessant lying, his conspiratorial gaslighting, his obsessive vindictiveness, his hypocritical cowardice, his compulsive xenophobia, his callous misogyny, his insufferable bigotry, his disgusting buffoonery, his histrionic rallying, his seditious actions, his obstruction of justice and concealment, his army of thugs, his detention of children, and his dangerous authoritarianism... .

-Glen Brown

"Trump and his MAGA crew have inflicted untold trauma and misery on children!"

The irony should not be lost on Americans that the MAGA movement and its QAnon cousins made so much noise about how the hunt for pedophiles was their obsession. It turns out that those concerned about child sexual predators should have staked out Jeffrey Epstein’s island…not a D.C. pizza restaurant.

The list of those associated with pedophile and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein from the released files reads like a who’s who of the MAGA/oligarch class. Although the Trump-Epstein files contain reportedly “salacious” allegations against Donald Trump, he continues to deny wrongdoing. Despite ongoing efforts to minimize his ties to Epstein, “the two men bonded over their pursuit of young women,” the New York Times reports.) However, no one can dispute that Trump has gone to extreme lengths to prevent the full release of documents revealing the extent of Epstein’s orbit (perpetuating the trauma and injustice for Epstein’s victims).

That stated, the number of children Trump has harmed in his second term exceeds even those victimized by Epstein and his enablers. Beyond delaying justice for Epstein’s victims, Trump and his MAGA crew have inflicted untold trauma and misery on children. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vaccine fetish has spawned measles outbreaks with serious health consequences for children and their parents. 

Cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, rollbacks to EPA regulations, slashed life-saving medical trials, and obliteration of USAID have taken their toll on the most vulnerable children here and abroad.

The mass deportation operation, however, is in a class by itself when it comes to cruelty and needless suffering inflicted on innocent children. Trump shock troops used five-year-old Liam Conjes Rojas as “bait” (then detained him and his father for days). They grabbed and whisked out of state a two-year-old. 

This paramilitary band of thugs have repeatedly left terrified toddlers in cars after their parents were snatched away. They routinely spray tear gas into peaceful crowds with children present and wrestle racially profiled Hispanic teenagers to the ground (refusing to believe they are citizens). Parents are afraid to send their children to school. And Renee Good’s children will grow up without their mother.

Liam was freed by court order after the judge excoriated the Trump operation. “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” Judge Fred Biery wrote. “Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.” He signed the order “[w]ith a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.”

But hundreds of children like Liam remain locked up like criminals. The Marshall Report found: The number of children in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention on a given day has skyrocketed, jumping more than sixfold since the start of the second Trump administration. The Marshall Project analyzed data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and found that ICE held around 170 children on an average day under Trump. During the last 16 months of the Biden administration, ICE held around 25 children a day.

That tally does not include those detained in the recent Minneapolis surge or “children in the custody of the Border Patrol or the Office of Refugee Resettlement, where children are held without a guardian.” (Yes, without a guardian.)

Moreover, as the Washington Post reported, “Advocates and attorneys contend that hundreds more youth have been affected in cases where authorities have separated families, which are not comprehensively tracked. Those include instances in which parents have been deported but their children remain in the United States in government custody.”

The Post continued: “Attorney Eric Lee said he saw children all over the facility during a recent visit, some as young as 3 or 4. ‘What is happening in these detention centers is worse than anybody thinks,’ he said.” Tragically, these cases are becoming commonplace:

Kristin Etter, an attorney for some of the new families, recently met with an Ecuadorian mother and her 11-year-old daughter who were arrested in Minneapolis while on their way to school. The fourth grader spends most of her time in the Dilley facility without opportunities for intellectual stimulation, Etter said… [A parent of a 3 yr. old] described inadequate medical care for herself and her toddler, who suffered diarrhea, and for the other detainees, who had to wait hours for treatment, even for serious illnesses.

The secret police now openly assault children and their parents. After the weekend tear-gassing incident in Portland, Mayor Keith Wilson decried the attack on a peaceful gathering, where many small children were present:

To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave. Through your use of violence and the trampling of the Constitution, you have lost all legitimacy and replaced it with shame… To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children.

The first departures should come from the White House, DHS, the Justice Department, and Republican caucuses in the House and Senate (which authorized the money and confirmed leaders of the mass deportation scheme). They are ultimately responsible for the deaths, mayhem, and damage (physical and otherwise) inflicted upon children.

Republicans need to stop inventing bogeymen to scare voters (e.g., Your child’s gender will be changed! Trans people are lurking in bathrooms!) and stand up to the real monsters. If only they recalled the religious (or secular) precepts they rely upon to demonize others, they might act to end this madness.

Academics and pundits spend too much time quibbling over whether the Trump regime is “authoritarian” or “fascist.” What is not debatable: a regime that abuses, terrorizes, and neglects children — and engages in a cover-up of monstrous sex crimes against kids — is evil. Anyone who has participated in or enabled these unforgivable actions should be banished from public life.

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Trump Is a Threat to Democracy.

Consider his autocratic abuse of presidential power, his constitutional ignorance, his lawless demagoguery, his sociopathic bullying, his pathological narcissism, his grandiose delusions, his anti-social personality disorder, his malignant arrogance, his felonious behavior, his moral relativism, his white nationalism, his perfidious nationalism, his hateful racism, his infectious nihilism, his outrageous iconoclasm, his ruthless competition, his puerile dereliction, his embarrassing stupidity, his provocative transgressions, his mocking disrespect, his impetuous vulgarity, his sexual predation; his belligerent intimidation, his incessant lying, his conspiratorial gaslighting, his obsessive vindictiveness, his hypocritical cowardice, his compulsive xenophobia, his callous misogyny, his insufferable bigotry, his disgusting buffoonery, his histrionic rallying, his seditious actions, his obstruction of justice and concealment, his army of thugs, his detention of children, and his dangerous authoritarianism... .

-Glen Brown

 

Acts of Revisionism: Hitler, Stalin and Trump

 

Authoritarian leaders typically attempt a radical reshaping of civic life.  Every area of life—from culture and the arts to education and science—becomes subordinated to the preferences of the leader.  Hitler was unusually successful, reordering every aspect of German society and gradually winning the acceptance of the German people.  

Stalin created an atmosphere of terror and fear, and more were killed in his purges in Russia than were killed at the hands of the Gestapo and Nazis in Germany.  

Trump’s villainy and retributions are designed to intimidate political opponents, particularly liberals and progressives in the states that voted against him in 2016, 2020, and 2024. These three authoritarians engaged in acts of historical revisionism, which are designed to alter presumed historical facts and rewrite existing historiography.  

In 1933, Stalin restored history to a prominent place in the academic curriculum, giving prominence to the achievements of the tsars and the goal of teaching devotion to the motherland. Hitler made sure that his photograph was displayed prominently in every classroom in the country, and that reading primers included a picture of the Fuhrer.  The teaching of biology was revamped to emphasize the laws of heredity and racial teaching.

Trump’s revisionism is not yet as threatening as the actions of Hitler and Stalin, but is similarly centered on higher education, libraries, and cultural institutions. The New York Times reported last month that the “National Park Service was taking a crowbar to U.S. history.”  

On Trump’s orders, Philadelphia’s Independence National Park, visited by several million people annually, took down an exhibit on the contradictions between George Washington’s ownership of enslaved people and the Declaration of Independence’s promise of liberty. 

A plaque at the Muir Woods National Monument in California was dismantled because it noted that the tallest trees on the planet could store carbon dioxide and slow the Earth’s dangerous warming.

In 2025 and 2026, Trump pressured the Smithsonian Institution to pivot away from what he called “divisive,” race-focused narratives toward a more “celebratory” version of American history.  He is using executive orders and funding threats to demand a review of museum content for “improper ideology.”  

In renaming the Kennedy Center, he installed a new board of directors and emphasized that traditional and patriotic performances would replace “woke” programming.  White supremacists are being placed in key positions, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was created to protect our civil rights infrastructure.

All three authoritarians tried to take advantage of perceived international weakness.  Hitler made incremental challenges in Europe and decided that England and France were not willing to challenge him.  Stalin used terror to establish his basis of power.  

Trump perceived a European Union weakened by Brexit in England; the support of right-wing populists in Hungary, France, and Italy; and weak responses from a divided Democratic Party at home and the Western powers in general abroad.  

He’s giving freer rein to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and beating up on neighbors in the Western Hemisphere.

As Timothy Snyder warned, “history does not repeat, but it does instruct.”  Trump is using ugly and dangerous words to describe two American citizens who were executed in Minneapolis (e.g., “urban terrorists,” “insurrectionists”), which suggests that martial law could be forthcoming.  

He has sent the director of national intelligence to Georgia in support of voting records from the 2020 election, which he believes was stolen. Trump’s FBI is now arresting journalists.  As Garrison Keillor warned in the past, events will get worse before they get worse.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.