Trump, Islam, and the “Hitler-Adjacent” Problem

Historians and Religions Scholars Weigh in on What a Trump Presidency Would Mean

by christopher peak

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rying to ignore the narcissism, the name-calling, and the flooding of testosterone that embodies Donald Trump is a very difficult task. Some, myself included, would argue that it’s physically impossible.

Regardless of whether or not you’re able to avoid or ignore him, Donald Trump is a runaway political freight train, and as they tend to be, save for Will Smith swooping in and saving Jason Bateman at the last minute, he is perhaps unstoppable in 2016. However messy his orations are or vague he is in policy, he is a political some-thing that this country hasn’t seen for a very long time, if ever.

His rallies have raised eyebrows and his rhetoric has furrowed them. He’s asked supporters to “pledge” allegiance to his candidacy, and he’s called for the arrest of peaceful protestors in public spaces, while ordering others “not to hurt [protestors], [but] if you do, I’ll defend you in court.”

He suggested to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that there should be “some form of punishment” for women who get abortions (should abortion become illegal in a Trump presidency), and expressed an unfounded fear that his millions of supporters would riot if the GOP blocked his nomination in July, saying, “I think it would be — I think you’d have riots. I think you’d have riots. I think you would have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen, I really do. I believe that. I wouldn’t [like] it but I think bad things would happen.”

He is polarizing; without doubt. Never before has this country witnessed a political candidate elicit such a visceral dislike from not only the opposing party, but the party for which he seeks the nomination for, and yet still have millions of more votes than the next candidate. In that regard, Trump’s resiliency toward the Republican nomination is quite remarkable.

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e’s continually said questionable things regarding Islam, like his call for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S. and his proposed plan for all Muslims being required to carry I.D. on them at all times, something historians are reminded of in the lead-up to World War II and the victimization of Jews by the Nazis.

The fact-checking website Politifact has since debunked Trump’s now infamous quote as false when describing what he saw in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, saying “thousands and thousands of people cheering as [The World Trade Center] was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.”

That never happened.

His flaccid response to disavow former KKK leader David Duke’s endorsement, as well as his offer to pay the legal bills of a white man charged with assaulting a black protestor during a recent rally, have all aided in maintaining Trump’s rolling boil on the political hot stove — week after week, and much to the chagrin of the GOP.

The violence at his rallies and raising of arms in chanting unison, have caused some to draw an eerily and uncomfortable comparison to Hitler.

Fedja Buric, a professor of history at Bellarmine University says no, Trump is not Hitler, but more Mussolini, saying, “Like Mussolini, Trump rails against intruders (Mexicans) and enemies (Muslims), mocks those perceived as weak, encourages a violent reckoning with those his followers perceive as the enemy within (the roughing up of protesters at his rallies), flouts the rules of civil political discourse (the Megyn Kelly menstruation spat), and promises to restore the nation to its greatness not by a series of policies, but by the force of his own personality (“I will be great for” fill in the blank).”

Comedian Bill Maher said this about Trump on his HBO show Real Time With Bill Maher, “I try to resist comparisons to Hitler because there’s only one Hitler— he broke them all— but you know what? If you’re stirring up xenophobic hate among an angry, humiliated population and talking about rounding up minorities, it’s a little Hitler-adjacent.”

And however offensive and inappropriate the Trump to Hitler comparison is, and it is both, political pundits and fellow Republican candidates, like Senator Marco Rubio, have openly and frequently voiced their concerns about Trump’s tone and cult following over the course of the campaign season, which is now never-ending.

Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper, Senator Marco Rubio, then a candidate, compared Trump to a third-world dictator in Latin America, calling him a “strongman,” even expressing fear at the possibility that somebody would die while attending a Donald Trump rally. Republican strategist Ana Navarro, echoed and sympathized with Rubio’s statement, saying,

“I could sympathize with every word that was coming out of Marco’s mouth because both Marco and I come from a community that is full of political exiles, that has seen strongmen rise in countries in Latin America.

When we see a Donald Trump and his… the kind of populism, that kind of negative rhetoric, I think it brings back very bad memories for anybody that, like me, or like Marco’s parents, had to flee.”

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o I decided to reach out to some experts for their opinions about the Trump phenomenon. What exactly is going on, here? What would a Trump presidency mean for the U.S., and why is a major political party obsessed with continuing to foist anti-Muslim, anti-Islam sentiment under the noses of millions of angry, mainly white, voters. Because it’s not just coming from Donald Trump’s campaign, but we heard it from former candidate Ben Carson, who said, “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.” And Senator Ted Cruz told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, that police should be openly patrolling “Muslim neighborhoods—” something the U.S. did after the attack on Pearl Harbor in Japanese neighborhoods in and around Sacramento.

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ir Richard Evans is an Oxford educated, former professor of history at the University of Cambridge, and current president of Wolfson College— which is part of the Cambridge system.

Evans is best known for his work on Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly the Third Reich, so I asked him about the comparisons we’ve heard in the media in comparing Trump’s rallies to those of Hitler’s— specifically his 1933 campaign for Chancellor of Germany.

But (with regard to antisemitism) could one argue that his views toward Muslims and Islam as a whole, ie., wanting to ban them Muslims from entering the country and wanting Muslims to carry IDs, are at least on a parallel line with antisemitism?

I don’t know enough about Trump’s precise statements. Hitler did after all think all Jews across the world were engaged in a conspiracy to destroy Germany, the first fruits being defeat in World War I. I don’t think Trump is going as far as this. Nor is he proposing to imprison all Muslims who are already in America, or deport them.

On the other hand, Trump, like fascist leaders, does depend above all, on rhetoric to gain support, and he encourages his supporters to be violent towards protesters at his meetings, and his pledge to make America great again echoes Hitler’s to make Germany great again, not least in its vagueness and lack of content.

However, what Hitler meant was revising the Treaty of Versailles and conquering Europe, and for all Trump’s aggressive rhetoric towards China
etc., I don’t think he is advocating foreign conquests.

Trump seems to me to be a classic American populist, raising protest against the Establishment and advocating economic reforms to better the lot of the working classes; these include curbing immigration as well as introducing protection against Chinese competition.

His unbuttoned, non-Establishment style fits this mould too. There’s so little real content in his rhetoric that it’s hard to see whether he would act like
a dictator if he were elected. His hostility to the media doesn’t mean, for example, that he would close newspapers that criticized him.

It’s tempting in comparing Hitler with Trump to apply Marx’s dictum about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce; but the differences are as striking as the similarities, if not more so.

I posed the same question to Professor Peter Fritzsche, PhD., who’s currently a professor of history and Eastern European culture at the University of Illinois. In 2008, he wrote “Life and Death in the Third Reich.”

I would say three things. [Trump] moves between fascist and classic [right-wing] American populist, which means there is a bit more going on even in his view than just populism. But in my view, Hitler’s appeal (not his intentions) are also best understood in terms of populism.

Secondly, like Hitler and other anti-establishment figures, he has to slay his establishment before he gets to the “real” enemy on the Left.

And third, it is to me astonishing that the Republicans are so inclined to support Trump over Clinton, no matter what (at least that is what the candidates have said) — this replicates the total inability of non-socialist Germans in 1932/33 to agree to support the only real democratic force left in Germany, the only party that vote against emergency dictatorship legislation, that is the Social Democrats whom they for 15 years simply thought of as Communists.

This inability to step down on partisanship and uphold basic constitutional values is to me the most striking similarity between 1932 and 2016.

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n this country, there’s an omnipresent (and growing) fear of Islam— as a religion, and of Muslims— as a population. And it continues to sprout through the cracks of America’s id. And Donald Trump is perpetuating this fear onto his supporters by being cavalier with facts, like when he tweeted out to his 7.5 million Twitter followers that Thomas Dimassimo, the man who broke through a barrier during a rally in Dayton, OH, was affiliated with ISIS— even though the video Trump cited, showing Dimassimo standing in front of a backdrop of the ISIS flag, was a hoax.

When pressed by Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd on the validity of the video, Trump replied with, “He was dragging a flag along the ground, and he was playing a certain type of music, and supposedly there was chatter about ISIS. Now, I don’t know, what do I know about it? All I know is what’s on the internet.”

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So I reached out to two respected scholars; Reza Aslan, the NY Times best-selling author, religions academic, and somebody I’ve leaned on in the past on this topic, and Dr. John Robbins, who is the Executive Director of the Massachusetts chapter of CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic Relations), the largest in the U.S.

I wanted their views on what Trump’s campaign has done to moderate Muslims in this country. Has the bigotry caused irreparable damage?

“Well obviously, the rhetoric is distressing and troubling coming from a mainstream political candidate,” Robbins told me. “What is even worse is that the rhetoric is incoherent by design. It’s meant to be emotionally based or appealing on some emotional level to voters, rather than real security solutions and concerns.”

I asked Robbins if he feels this anti-Muslim attitude is something that is generational— meaning— that moving forward, as the younger, millennial-aged population gets older, will some of these prejudices toward Islam and Muslims subside?

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The anti-Muslim sentiment which we face today is all-too similar to discrimination once, and sadly in many cases still, encountered by Americans of Jewish, Catholic, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, African, Polish, and Hispanic backgrounds.

However, I’m confident that it, too, will be lessened with time and exposure; the greatest antidote to hatred is knowledge. Our generation’s question is not whether this will take place, but when: will it be for our children, or our grandchildren? We’re working today to create that better tomorrow, sooner rather than later.

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inally, I asked Reza Aslan about the obsession the U.S. has with the phrase “Islamic-extremism.” Republicans use it frequently. Senator Ted Cruz said in an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live that, “We face a real threat. And that is radical Islamic terrorism… And people are frustrated. They’re frustrated with the President. They’re frustrated with Hillary Clinton that they will not acknowledge what it is we’re facing.”

Aslan refers to the word terrorism as a “waste basket term.” Saying back in January that, “(the word terrorism) says much more about the person using it, than about the person being described.”

And Republicans aren’t the only ones calling for the Obama Administration to use the phrase. It isn’t just a favorite with those on the Right. Liberals are now loudly calling on President Obama to use “Islamic extremism,” or “Islamic terrorism” when addressing the issue.

It’s such a sensitive issue that this past week the White House censored audio from a remark made by French president François Hollande during a Nuclear Security Summit meeting. Hollande was referring to the threat Europe is facing and used the words “Islamist terrorism,” only the phrase didn’t make it onto the 8-minute clip posted on the White House website.

So I asked Aslan if “Islamic terrorism” is a fair-use phrase, or is it just a label, used incorrectly and meant to promulgate fear.

This is what happens in times of societal stress— is that you look for some kind of bogeyman to define yourself against, and that’s actually what’s happening here.

It isn’t really about Islam. It’s just about a time in which people are having a very difficult time recognizing, you know, the political, racial, cultural landscape of the country.

The FBI, the NSA, the CIA, has repeatedly said that we are at far, far greater risk from right-wing and white supremest terrorism in the United States than we are from Islamic terrorism.

Shane Smith over at the New York Times did a wonderful story about this very topic—homegrown extremists, writing that “since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims.”

So just simply saying extremism, then you’re talking white people, and that’s just not going to be palatable to a wide swath of this country, and so you have to otherize it by labeling it as “Islamic.”

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asked both Aslan and Robbins to play pretend for a moment and fast-forward to January, 20 2017— inauguration day for President Trump. How would the average Muslim-American feel waking up on January 21?

“We have enormous, very important national security interests in Muslim majority states,” Aslan told me, “from Egypt, to Turkey, to Malaysia, to Indonesia. And one can assume that a president who peddles in this kind of rhetoric is going to damage those very important partnerships and alliances.”

Robbins was a bit more direct, saying, “Muslim-Americans are extremely patriotic, extremely proud Americans. But folks I’ve spoken to in the Muslim community, both leaders and the everyday Muslim on the street, are genuinely terrified if someone like Trump or Cruz were to be elected president.”

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