Führer

'Trump has long shown an interest in deploying U.S. troops domestically for demonstrations of force, whether to deter migration or to crack down on civil protests.' The Washington Post, 1 March 2025, 'Pentagon orders up to 3,000 troops and Stryker combat vehicles to border'.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/01/hegseth-border-troops-mexico-stryker/

'In moods and mentalities, it seems, Volk and Führer partook of the same troubled Danubian brew. On the one hand, the people with their peculiar 'despair of politics' (as Trevor-Roper has put it), their wallowing in petulance and perversity, what Haffner calls their 'resentful dimness' and their 'heated readiness to hate', their refusal of moderation and, in adversity, of all consolation, their ethos of zero-sum (all or nothing, of Sein oder Nichstein), and their embrace of the irrational and hysterical. And on the other hand the leader, who indulged these tendencies on the stage of global politics'. Martin Amis, 2014, The Zone of Interest, Jonathon Cape, London. (Acknowledgments and Afterword: 'That Which Happened')

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003) British historian, author of The Last Days of Hitler.

Sebastian Haffner (1907-1999) German journalist, author of Defying Hitler: A Memoir published posthumously when the manuscript was found by his son Oliver Pretzel. The memoir records the German mentality of victory during his childhood which was followed by defeat, hyperinflation, disenfranchisement of the poor and elderly and the slow rise to power of Hitler in a nation that had no real leadership to oppose him even though most Germans were repulsed by him. In his book The Meaning of Hitler, according to Alan Bullock, in the New York Review of Books, his main argument is that Hitler was one of few people who had a major impact on the world: 'Without him there would have been no partition of Germany and Europe; no Americans or Russians in Berlin; no State of Israel; nothing like so rapid a decolonialization of Asia and Africa, or so quick a reduction of European pre-eminence. But all this was exactly the opposite of what Hitler hoped to achieve.'

And thus the lessons of history forgotten, a loud and unforgiving ugliness appears again.

'Trump seeks to fast-track deportations of hundreds of thousands' The Washington Post, 1 March, 2025. 'The use of expedited removal at the border for recent arrivals has resulted in countless errors, but expanding a system that lacks due process to longtime residents in the interior of the country is problematic at a whole other level,” said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Lee Gelernt, who in January filed a lawsuit on behalf of immigrant advocates seeking to stop Trump from using expedited removal in the U.S. interior.  Providing due process is built into the fabric of our country but is step by step being eliminated by this administration'.

In a future broken America, children will ask parents and grandparents, 'How was Trumpism possible?' and 'Why didn't you stop them?'"