Former U.S. President Donald Trump drives a golf cart at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, N.J., on Aug. 10, 2023. Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images
WHEN THE OBITUARY of the baby-boom generation is finally written, they’ll have to mention Donald Trump in the very first paragraph to explain how a cohort that began with such idealism and promise turned so toxic.
The generation that took to the streets in anti-war protests and civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s and championed the environmental and women’s movements in the 1970s has now retreated to right-wing retirement enclaves in Florida, where Fox News is always on in the background. Boomers drove jam-packed VW vans in a haze of drugs to Woodstock; now they scoot around The Villages in golf carts festooned with Trump flags.
The boomer rallying cry of the 1960s was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Boomers today can’t stop whining about how young people are too “woke.”
I’m a baby boomer myself, and I no longer recognize my own generation. A big slice of white boomers are now living on hate. They hate nearly everything and everybody — even Disney and Taylor Swift! — because Trump and MAGA and Fox News have told them to. They hate books, vaccines, colleges, unions, corporations, cities, Hollywood, Broadway, the NBA and the NFL, Black people, brown people, and of course immigrants. They really hate immigrants. They are convinced that college professors and journalists secretly control America.
My generation has not aged well.
I blame Trump for the boomers’ weird transformation from a youthful progressive force into a tribe of right-wing conspiracy theorists. To be sure, there are plenty of boomers who haven’t succumbed to Trump-induced hate. But too many of us fell for him when he first emerged as a dangerous demagogue spewing racism and lies, and boomers have fueled his rise ever since.
White boomers have had a conservative streak since the Reagan era of “greed is good” in the 1980s. But Trump and his presidency sent the boomers’ rightward shift into overdrive, and many have gone all the way into the thrall of the MAGA cult. Trump brought far-right politics to the fore among his fellow boomers, playing on their fears of America’s growing racial diversity.
White boomers now make up a key segment of Trump’s base. He is a threat to democracy today mainly because so many in my generation are willing to hand him unlimited power. I find it depressing that people I grew up with have allowed their brains to curdle to the point that they are willing to abandon the democratic values that were central to the American society we boomers inherited.
From Huckster to Extremist
From the start, the extraordinary demographics of the boomer generation have set it apart. As American soldiers came home from World War II in 1945 after the defeat of Germany and Japan, they were eager to make up for lost time and start families. That created a sudden baby boom in 1946, a year after the war’s end. But the boom surprisingly continued for decades, as Americans, benefiting from sustained economic growth in the 1950s and ’60s, found they could afford to have larger families. Demographers have defined the boomer generation as the 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964, a period when the U.S. total fertility rate — an estimate of lifetime fertility — exploded from 2.49 children per woman in 1945 to a peak of 3.77 in 1957. (For comparison’s sake, the total fertility rate in 2022 was just 1.67Opens in a new tab.)
The millennial generation (those born roughly between 1981-1996) has now surpassed boomersOpens in a new tab as the largest living adult generation, but the boomers have certainly been one of the most politically dominant generations America has ever seen. There have now been four boomer presidents, including two from each major party: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump. (Joe Biden, born in 1942, belongs to the so-called Silent Generation, which includes those born between 1928 and 1946: the children of the Great Depression.)
Even with a Silent Generation president, boomers still hold sway over the American establishment. A generational power indexOpens in a new tab, created in 2021 by the Visual Capitalist website, calculated the overall economic, political, and cultural power of each living generation, and found that boomers still ranked first with 43.4 percent of the nation’s economic power and 47.4 percent of political power. They only trailed in cultural power, where Generation X (1965-1980) led with 36 percent.
Donald Trump, born on June 14, 1946, was one of the first boomers. But unlike the fathers of millions of others born that year, Trump’s father, Fred Trump, did not fight in World War II. Instead, he profited from it by building and owning thousands of apartments that he rented out to war workers.
As the born-wealthy son of a New York real estate mogul, Donald Trump skipped the anti-war and the civil rights movements, and never shared the counter-cultural experiences of the 1960s and early 1970s that so defined the boomers’ coming of age. He was enamored instead of money and money-making and burnishing his own image, and his Scrooge-like tendencies would finally align him with the rest of his generation as boomers moved into their 30s and 40s in the Reagan era.
When Obama became the nation’s first Black president in 2008, boomer politics really began to warp into something ugly. By then, the oldest boomers were in their early 60s, and they proved susceptible to Trump when he began to transform himself from a corporate huckster into an extremist political figure who used conspiracy theories about the president’s birth certificate to gain right-wing notoriety.
The growing racial and ethnic diversity that underscored Obama’s victory seemed to frighten these older boomers who had grown up in a much more homogeneous society. In 1980, when the oldest boomers were in their early to mid-30s and were coming into their own as adults, the U.S. was nearly 80 percent whiteOpens in a new tab; by 2023, white people made up less than 60 percent of the population.
The anti-Obama tea party movement in 2009 and 2010 claimed to be built around opposition to the president’s budget policies, but it was really a backlash by white boomers and other older white AmericansOpens in a new tab against the rise of a more diverse and progressive society. By 2015, Gallup found that 44 percent of boomers identified as conservative, and only 21 percent as liberal.
The racial backlash grew and helped elect Trump president in 2016. The only age group that supported Trump that year were voters over 50Opens in a new tab. The oldest boomers turned 70 in 2016, and that year Trump had his biggest win among voters 65 and older.
As president, Trump surrounded himself with other white boomers who had turned hard right: Roger Stone (born in 1952); Steve Bannon (born in 1953); and Michael Flynn (born in 1958), among many others. Despite Trump’s psychopathic and criminal behavior, despite the January 6 insurrection, two impeachments, and four criminal indictments, boomer voters have generally stuck with him.
I know that my parents’ generation, those who fought fascism overseas in World War II, would be ashamed that so many members of their children’s cohort are now willing to give in to fascism at home.
So many right-wing boomers today claim they want a return to the America we grew up in. If that’s true, they should remember that our parents and teachers also warned us about what the Nazis wrought in Europe just before we were born.
Trump disqualified himself from office by taking part in an insurrection and thereby seeking to substitute the rule of fear for the rule of law.
The historian Eric Foner was the first to connect the storming of the Capitol to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bans oath-breaking insurrectionists from holding office. The legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen made the case for disqualification, exhaustively and convincingly, in a law review article posted last August.
Since that dramatic intervention, the discussion of Trump’s disqualification has changed fundamentally, as people have taken in that Section 3 exists, have understood that it defines a qualification for presidential office (lack of oath-breaking insurrection), and have realized that it arose to handle a moment like our own. It is the supreme law of the land, and it could not be more applicable. The issue of Trump’s eligibility for office has now reached the Supreme Court, and oral argument will begin tomorrow (February 8th).
I have been following this discussion since I first wrote about disqualification six months ago. In the beginning, few people had given the matter much thought. Although there were a few legal scholars who had written about Section 3, it was not a familiar subject. So a first impulse was academic, in the narrow sense of the word: we haven’t studied that; it must be unimportant. But Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is, after all, part of the Constitution. It commands attention.
One thing that helped was the realization that Section 3 defines a qualification for the presidency. The Constitution regulates in various places who may run for president; some rules are in Article 2 of the 1787 Constitution, some are in two amendments. Altogether the qualifications are: being thirty-five years old or older; having been born in the United States (or as a “natural-born citizen”); having lived in the United States for fourteen years or more; not having already served two terms as president; not having taken an oath to support the Constitution and then taking part in an insurrection.
Now, one can have views about those various qualifications; whether or not we think they are ideal, they are part of the Constitution. Some Americans who are disqualified by them would otherwise have a legitimate shot at becoming president: Barack Obama, for example, who is disqualified by the Twenty-Second Amendment since he has served two terms; or Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is disqualified by Article Two since he is not a “natural-born citizen.” About half of the American population is disqualified by the age rule.
Of all of the qualifications for presidential office, not having been an oath-breaking insurrectionist is, let us say, the least demanding. It is the one most clearly related to one’s own choices. And it arose from a moment in American history that we rightly regard as decisive for our republic, the years after the insurrection that became the Civil War. As that context has been understood, as that history has been recalled, Section 3 has come to seem like an appropriate, and indeed necessary, part of our constitutional structure.
When Section 3 was unfamiliar, it seemed like a hindrance, an uncomfortable barrier to our everyday habits, a hard story for media to headline. With time, it has come to seem like a tool, which is what it was meant to be. When we reflect upon the logic of Section 3, and consider its origins in the 1860s, its constructive character becomes clear. Indeed, thinking back to the 1860s and to the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment can help us to see our moment for what it is, and help us to stop ourselves from making poor decisions. The earnestness of the discussions of 1866 is refreshing. This seriousness comes across in two outstanding amicusbriefs by American historians, which I rely upon here.
One way to think about the discomfort to which constitutionality gives rise is to consider what we mean by “normality.” In history, and indeed in the contemporary world, it is normal for democracies to die. When a tyrant emerges who deploys intimidating violence, it is normal (in the sense of typical human weakness) for people to be afraid and to go along. It is normal (in the sense that people will do it) to obey in advance and thereby to betray democratic institutions and commitments. The existence of Section 3 reminds us of another sense of the word “normal”: what we should do. It is abnormal, Section 3 declares unambiguously, to be an oath-breaking insurrectionist. It should be normal, Section 3 firmly instructs us, to react in a decisive way when we face an oath-breaking insurrection.
A Constitution survives not only because it gives remedies but because it recalls principles. It defines a normality in which a republic can endure. Our republic.
The remedy is real, and timely. Although we may not like to see this, we find ourselves in the moment for which the authors of Section 3 prepared us: amidst an oath-breaking insurrection that can become a larger conflict. Donald Trump violated his oath of office on January 6th, 2021: and that horrible day of insurrection was the peak of a larger pattern of activities that began before the election and continues until the present day. Trump said in 2020 (as he had said in 2016, and as he also says now) that he would not respect the outcome if he lost.
When he did lose in 2020, Trump acted much as leaders in places like Belarus and Côte d’Ivoire have recently behaved: he sought to manipulate the vote-counting apparatus and other relevant institutions, and he encouraged violence to upset the the transition of authority. (These similarities are discussed in an amicus brief I was honored to co-sign). Trump knowingly lied about the 2020 election, creating the conditions for insurrection; his campaign now is centered on his big lie, which becomes the justification for violence against those who do not believe. As he threatens judges, prosecutors, and elected officials, he spreads the rule of fear. If Trump is the nominee and loses, he will very likely try another insurrection; if Trump is the nominee and wins, he promises to round up his political enemies and to take other actions that will invite a response from inside and outside the government. This is the arc that Section 3 is meant to halt and redirect.
The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 were looking back at a dreadful rebellion. They knew that the horrors of the Civil War had begun as an insurrection, and that some of the insurrectionists (like Trump today) held federal office when they broke their oaths. In late 1860 and early 1861, before a shot had been fired, high officers of the federal government broke their oaths and took the side of the rebellion.
Section 3 targeted a very specific group of people: not all insurrectionists, not all oath-breakers, but very precisely oath-breaking insurrectionists. There is wisdom in this precision, since Section 3 was forward-looking. Section 3 was meant as an emergency tool to be used to halt an oath-breaking insurrectionist before his actions led to a far worse conflict, or even the end of the republic. It catches us right where we are, and places the tool that we need in our hands.
Section 3 is bracing, because it shakes us from the wrong sense of normality to the right one, because it shows us how the past instructs the present, and because it gives is a tool to shape a better future.
The people who designed and debated Section 3 were informed by the horrors of the 1860s, but they were also thinking about us. And that should be a good feeling. Our warm sentiments about the Constitution can be limited to the provisions we like best. We don’t really expect the Constitution to come bearing gifts. But that is what Section 3 is: a gift from the past to the present, a measure meant to resolve a special challenge, once which could reappear — as people in 1866 understood.
Section 3 is constitutional self-defense, enabling us to handle a difficult problem of the twenty-first century: what to do with people who are elected to office and then use that office to destroy the rule of law. The gift from 1866 is strikingly timely, since such subversion by an elected official or officials is now the normal way that democracies are brought down. Some constitutions, such as the German one, have provisions for this eventuality. So does the American one. Those provisions arose from experience.
The main author of the Fourteenth Amendment, John Bingham, was an interesting man. He was aware that fear was the enemy of law. He was concerned during the Civil War that American leaders would lose their resolve. After Lincoln’s assassination, Bingham was one of the prosecutors. Bingham made it clear that Section 3 was an offering to generations to come, to Americans who would live and face challenges after his own “debt to nature was paid.” He also, incidentally, made clear that Section 3 was supposed to apply to the president of the United States.
If we can look at 2024 from the perspective of 1866, our situation is easy to classify. We are amidst oath-breaking insurrection and facing something worse. And so we predictably experience a fear that can make that something worse more likely. Because there was an insurrection, we are afraid. If Trump’s people can storm the Capitol, what else might they do? And this, of course, is the choice: law or fear. If we give in to fear again and again, law will eventually yield.
Those who use violence, as Trump did on January 6th, know that they can always threaten more violence. When that threat is internalized, when it becomes anticipatory obedience, authoritarianism is on the way. Indeed, when we choose to shy away from the law because we are afraid, we are taking part in that authoritarian transition. When we make legal arguments to cover our fears, we are actively hastening it.
The saying is that fear is a poor counselor; it is certainly a poor legal counselor. When we are afraid, we are no longer seeking reasons to make the right decision; we are seeking excuses to do nothing. This means that standards for what constitutes a legal argument drop precipitously.
Trump’s lawyers (and his supporters in amicus briefs) are banking on fear, and inciting it (Trump and his lawyers threaten “bedlam” if they lose this case). His lawyers (and supporters) depend heavily on the claim that the president of the United States is not an officer of the United States (and therefore not subject to Section 3).
An argument this bad depends upon fear. Even in print, it has a wink-wink-nudge-nudge quality — we know this is a horrible legal argument, and you Justices know that this is a horrible legal argument, but we both know that you are just looking for a way out. So here’s your alibi for ignoring the Constitution.
The argument that the president of the United States is not an officer of the United States is risible. People will laugh at it. A Supreme Court that rules for Trump on that ground will be ridiculed for as long as our republic lasts, and rightly so.
The “originalist” argument is that since Section 3 does not explicitly mention the president, he was not intended by the authors of Section 3 to be included. Section 3 reads (with one ellipsis):
No person shall (…) hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
From that text it would seem clear that the presidency is one of many federal and state offices. “No person,” “any office,” “officer of the United States” are not phrases that brook exceptions.
The “originalist” argument hangs not on the omission of the word “president” but on the inclusion of the words “Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President,” which I left out above. The claim is that, since electors and senators and representatives are mentioned, the president was meant to be excluded. But of course that is not really an “originalist” argument: what an originalist would need is a sentence such as “The president is excluded from this provision.” There is no such sentence. The reason why electors are called out is that they are not a part of the government. The reason why senators and representatives are mentioned was to clarify that they (as well as members of the executive and judiciary branches) were included.
In the debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, it was explicitly clarified that the president was included in Section Three. John Bingham, the chief author of the Fourteenth Amendment, referred to the president as an “officer.” This was routine usage at the time, including by the officers in question, the presidents themselves. In any event, Bingham also said that Section 3 applied to the president. In contemporary public discussion of Section 3, it was taken for granted that the president was meant.
Twenty-five historians who looked into the matter concluded that Section 3 was meant to apply to the president. Four more historians in a separate brief drew exactly the same conclusion. These are the leading scholars of the period and the issues. The conservative legal scholars who began this discussion concluded that the president is an officer. Antonin Scalia, a figure of some repute in conservative judicial circles, believed that the president was an officer. In Trump’s own legal briefs in other matters he also defines the president as an officer.
I cannot say whether the Supreme Court will re-qualify Trump for office. I can say, though, that requalifying him on the grounds that the president of the United States is not an officer of the United States is preposterous. It defies the wording of Section 3, and the intentions of its framers, and the way it was understood by society at the time. It defies the whole historical experience on which Section 3 was based. And it defies Section 3’s political logic of defending the rule of law. Section 3 is about stopping an oath-breaking insurrectionist from destroying or damaging the republic. The most important oath is the president’s and the most dangerous insurrection is one led by him.
The hard part, of course, is that so long as we are within the logic of Section 3, so long as we are amidst the oath-breaking insurrection, we are afraid of the worse conflict that might follow. We fear the oath-breaker and the oath-breaker plays on our fear. And so we seek the excuses that will allow us not to take responsibility, that will allow us to push the problem forward into the future. But in the future we may no longer have appropriate constitutional tools.
And so it is our very fear that is the signal that we must act. In Section 3, we have an appropriate constitutional tool for the fearful moment. And surely it is encouraging that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, in looking ahead, were looking out for us.
The future of democracy — not just in the United States, but around the globe — may very well hinge on whether former President Donald Trump is elected or defeated this November.
It’s important to understand that Trump is not an aberration, but rather the American iteration of the global far-right project to replace democracy with authoritarianism throughout the world. His brand of hyper-nationalism combined with the intense consolidation of executive power follows the same playbook as fascistic leaders in other countries, like Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, and Javier Milei in Argentina, among others.
Trump, however, presents a unique threat to democracy as a whole that the world leaders in the aforementioned paragraph do not. If elected to lead the third-largest country, the largest economy, and the most well-funded military in the world, Trump’s election to a second term would be a green light to fascists around the world that the era of democracy has come to an end. It would embolden the worst elements of society throughout the world and mobilize fascists to further entrench themselves in their respective countries’ governments.
TRUMP 2.0 WOULD EFFECTIVELY RE-ESTABLISH MONARCHY
In 1787, as the US Constitution was being assembled, Philadelphia socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” Franklin famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” While electing Donald Trump to a second term wouldn’t abolish the Constitution outright, he has already signaled he would be in favor of “termination” of articles of the Constitution. Franklin’s response to Powel signaled that he knew transitioning from monarchy to democracy would require constant effort, and that monarchy could once again become the dominant form of government without a vigilant public.
Trump’s quip that he would govern as a dictator “but only on day one” is uncharacteristic of dictators, who typically cling to power as long as possible and frequently alter the nature of their governments to ensure their rule in perpetuity. Like other far-right authoritarian leaders around the world, Trump would have the title of president, but would rule as a king. He has a multitude of contemporary examples to draw from.
In 2017, for example — just a year after a failed coup attempt — Turkey’s voters narrowly approved a referendum Erdogan pushed for that changed Turkey’s government from a parliamentary democracy to an executive presidential system. In 2018, he became the first president with new sweeping executive powers. He was recently elected to another five-year term last year, extending his rule to more than two decades.
Vladimir Putin has done the same in Russia, where a constitutional change in 2020 allowed him to reset the two-term limit for presidents back to zero. Rather than stepping down this year as planned, Putin could remain in office until at least 2036. And Chinese President Xi Jinping’s party eliminated presidential term limits in 2018, paving the way for Xi to potentially remain in office for the rest of his life. The 69-year-old won a third term in office last year, making him the longest-tenured Chinese head of state since Mao Zedong.
Should he win the November election, Trump would take the presidential oath of office at age 78, so him remaining in office for multiple terms would be unlikely given his advanced age. However, the profound damage that a second Trump term would do to democracy would be felt for decades — particularly by racial minorities.
A SECOND TRUMP TERM COULD END MULTIRACIAL DEMOCRACY IN THE US
It’s important to establish that American democracy in particular has been only for the privileged few for most of the United States’ existence, as the genocide of Native Americans proved along with the enslavement of Black people. Even after the end of the Civil War, the right of Black people to have a say in government was routinely denied and curtailed — often by force — by both white supremacist vigilantes and government officials.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and the eventual election of the first Black president still hasn’t ended the assault on democratic rights that many Black Americans today still face by law enforcement and state legislatures. As this publication has previously explored, Nazi Germany borrowed many ideas from the antebellum-era United States to create the framework for an aryan ethnostate.
Trump himself has not said anything about rolling back gains for African Americans, but his allies have started to test the waters of an anti-civil rights campaign in earnest. During a 2023 gathering of more than 20,000 far-right activists dubbed “America Fest,” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk attacked both Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.
“MLK was awful,” Kirk said at the gathering, which was headlined by figures like Donald Trump Jr., former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida). “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he didn’t actually believe.”
“I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it and I’ve thought about it,” he continued. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
The United States’ status as a multiracial democracy makes it one of just a small few around the world, as many Western democracies are ethnically homogeneous. And even in ethnically homogenous democracies, fascism has proven its resilience when countries are faced with an influx of new residents who don’t look like the majority racial group.
After the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015, for example, Germany and Sweden set themselves apart by accepting more refugees than most of their European neighbors, taking in more than one million refugees and over 100,000 refugees, respectively. Denmark accepted more than 35,000 refugees from Syria. A 2020 study found that many of the refugees settled in Germany are thriving, with roughly half of them finding a job by late 2020 and support for immigration high among the German populace.
But in recent years, the diversification of those countries has led to racist and nationalist backlash. In Germany, the Nazi-adjacent Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party recently held a meeting with neo-Nazis and other white nationalist groups to discuss mass deportation plans. The Guardian reported that some participants in that meeting included members of Austria’s Identitarian Movement, which subscribe to the racist “Great Replacement theory” that immigrants are being deliberately sent to “replace” whites as the dominant racial demographic. That meeting prompted mass protests across the country. One protest was even joined by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
In Sweden, a nascent fascist movement rooted in anti-immigrant fervor has also been steadily building power. The Sweden Democrats, which has roots in neo-Nazi organizing in the 1980s and 1990s, has gone from a fringe group to a legitimate political party, winning gains in Sweden’s 2022 parliamentary elections. While Moderate Party leader Ulf Kristersson was elected Prime Minister in 2022, his coalition depends on the support of the Sweden Democrats.
Meanwhile, Denmark’s racism has become apparent when contrasting its treatment of predominantly white Ukrainian refugees with how it treated Syrian refugees. Denmark’s government implemented a policy of seizing gold and jewelry from migrants who came from war-torn Middle Eastern countries like Syria and Iraq, but exempted Ukrainian refugees from that law. This prompted condemnation from human rights watchdog group Euro-Med Monitor.
While examples like these are still few and far between, electing Donald Trump to the presidency could help strengthen and enable other racist politicians around the world who seek to implement racial hierarchies in other western democracies.
One stark contrast between Trump and Biden is Biden’s commitment to multiracial democracy. His campaign has emphasized the importance of diversity as a strength, not only with respect to his decision to make a Black woman his vice president and his appointment of a Black woman to the Supreme Court for the first time in US history, but in other actions as well.
As a Democratic president, Biden exercised his power over the Democratic National Committee to elevate South Carolina — which has a sizable population of Black voters — above the predominantly white states of Iowa and New Hampshire in the presidential primary process. He’s used his presidential pardon powers to clear the records of thousands of people with small marijuana convictions (a crime for which Black people have been disproportionately prosecuted), helping them obtain jobs and housing and rebuild their lives. And despite the Supreme Court tossing out his $400 billion plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student debt per borrower, Biden has found other pathways to implement debt cancellation. This has a profound impact particularly on Black Americans, who are more likely than whites to have to borrow money to pay for college given the generational wealth gap.
The 2024 election isn’t just about whether Americans truly want to live in a multiracial democracy as opposed to a monarchy with a racial hierarchy — it’s about whether we want to live in a world where democracy and equal rights for people of all backgrounds is respected. The results of November’s election will have a rippling effect for years to come, if not decades.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro (Photo: Netflix) and Donald Trump (Photo: flickr/Gage Skidmore).
There’s an early episode of the TV sitcom Will & Grace where one of the characters (it had to be Grace, but it was actually Will) makes an interesting analogy between relationships and gardening. The gist of it: In any successful relationship, he suggests, there’s the flower and there’s the gardener. The former — the above-the-title star of the romance — must be nurtured, tended to, and catered to by the latter, aka, the costar.
Two gardeners may have a solid shot at “happily ever after the end.” For them, love is a peaceful, easy, low-impact activity where they can feed off each other. However, when two flowers like Will and Grace cross-pollinate, love — and life — becomes a series of stalemates. It will almost always end in dehydration.
Love in the garden isn’t as simple, though, as Will & Grace made it sound. Look how it turned out for Adam and Eve. You can only stay on your knees for so long. Even if you apply the flower-gardener analogy to friendships and working relationships as well as to romance, a flower and a gardener might co-exist for decades (or for six seasons and two movies of Sex and the City), but love, like, tolerance, and devotion don’t necessarily bloom forever and for always.
But then, sometimes it does. How many people have gone down in service of Donald Trump? I don’t know what it is about our 45th president that turns his followers into totally submissive sheep, willing to suspend their common sense indefinitely and lose their freedom for him.
We’ve seen the videos of the January 5 attack on the U.S. Capitol. We’ve watched his gardeners go to prison. Domino dancing/watch them all fall down. Meanwhile, the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted Trump continues to run free, still standing, still blooming, and, inexplicably, still inspiring an insane level of devotion among his flock.
He’s probably more likely to return to the White House in 2025 than he is to ever be fitted for an orange jumpsuit to match his spray tan, all because his gardeners refuse to let him shrivel up and die. Are they getting anything of beauty in return? Since Trump burst onto the political scene a little under a decade ago, and especially since he lost the 2020 election, what has he really done for anyone other than himself and his kids?
The other day while I was watching Maestro, the new biopic of the legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein directed by Bradley Cooper and starring Cooper as the titular master, I had a déjà vu feeling. I haven’t even made a dent in my Oscar-season screeners, and already I’m sensing a pattern: The Trump Effect is in full effect in Hollywood. Megalomaniacs have taken over the movies.
A number of the films I’ve screened in recent weeks — Maestro, Nyad, Passages, Priscilla, Eileen and others — feature an overlapping dynamic: someone losing themself in someone else. One character at the center of each film is narcissistic and self-centered, like the star of their very own Trump Show — er, Truman Show. They’re the flowers, and in order for them to bloom, their gardeners must get lost in their talent, their skill, and their charisma until the garderners eventually disappear.
Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) in Passages is enmeshed in a love triangle with a gay married couple, and she goes to extreme lengths to avoid that gardener fate. The object of her affection is Tomas (Franz Rogowski), a film director who needs constant watering by everyone who enters his orbit, much to the frustration and exhaustion of his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw). By the time Agathe makes a fateful decision that sets the destiny of the three central characters in motion, she’s already all but vanished.
Joe, a thirtysomething father of two, pulls a semi-disappearing act in May December, the dark comedy inspired by the true-crime story of Mary Kay Letourneau. The handsome man-child (perfectly played by Riverdale’s Charles Melton) gives his youth and, to some degree, his entire identity, to his significantly older wife Gracie (Julianne Moore) on a silver platter.
Meanwhile, in Eileen, Anne Hathaway’s killer kiss and Bette Davis eyes lead the title character (Thomasin Mackenzie) down a dark, twisted path not unlike the January 6 mob in service of Trump — which is also sort of what happens with Oxford University student Oliver (Barry Keoghan) in Saltburn the moment he catches a glimpse of Jacob Elordi as Felix, a beautiful and charming aristocrat.
In Maestro, Felicia Montealegre, the long-suffering wife of Leonard Bernstein, doesn’t go quite so far in her enthrallment. But in real life, Montealegre did stay married to the West Side Story composer for 27 years, ’til her death did they part, despite his string of flagrant affairs with various men and women. (Priscilla Presley knows when to cut Elvis loose in Priscilla, but has real-life Priscilla ever really let him go?)
Early in Maestro, Montealegre asks Bernstein to tell her a secret about himself, and he reveals that as a boy, he used to fantasize about killing his father. In hindsight, one might reinterpret the scene as presaging her own slow, decades-long “death” by vanishing at the hands of Bernstein’s ego and his voracious sexual appetite.
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright, in Oscar-caliber mode), the writer at the center of American Fiction, doesn’t inspire that kind of devotion from anyone during the movie’s 117-minute running time. But although we never meet his ex-wife, nor are we told exactly why their marriage ended, it’s not hard to imagine that their marriage couldn’t contain his ego, which he would probably mistake for creative genius.
The flower and the gardener even make an appearance in Barbie, the year’s biggest film, which takes an old-fashioned binary view of the battle of the sexes. In one pivotal scene, Ken tells Barbie that he only exists because she does. In the Mattel universe, he’s not wrong, but since Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie, who play Ken and Barbie respectively, are human beings and not dolls, the moment of vulnerability teeters on the cusp of heartbreaking.
Ken: “I don’t know who I am without you!”
Barbie: “You’re Ken.”
Ken: “But it’s Barbie and Ken. There is no just Ken. That’s why I was created. I only exist within the warmth of your gaze. Without it, I’m just another blonde guy who can’t do flips.”
Ryan Gosling as “Just Ken” and Margot Robbie as “Stereotypical Barbie” in Barbie (Photo: YouTube/Warner Bros.)
Of all the flowers and gardeners I’ve seen in Oscar-season movies so far, only Bonnie Stoll, Jodie Foster’s supporting and supportive character in Nyad, emerges from her devotion fully in tact. She puts her life on hold — and remortgages her house — in order to help Diana Nyad (Annette Bening), her maddeningly self-involved bestie of 30 years, achieve her dream of being the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida.
After three failed attempts, Bonnie, fed up with the swimmer’s extreme narcissism, temporarily takes her leave, and for Diana, ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone. In a satisfying and fully earned character arc, Diana evolves without completely ditching the megalomaniac she is at her core. She remains an imperfect storm of stunning skill, massive ego, and incredible insecurity, but she also comes to realize there’s no “I” in “we.”
Diana’s journey becomes Bonnie’s, too. Could the 64-year-old have swum 110 miles from Cuba to Florida without Bonnie as her coach and wing-woman (fin-woman?)? As I watched Team Nyad’s MVP (that would be Bonnie) encouraging Diana to take those final few steps out of the water and onto the coast of Key West, I had my doubts.
In the end, I was just as impressed by Bonnie’s accomplishment as I was by Diana’s. She’s the constant gardener throughout Nyad, on dry land and on water, but at the finish line, she’s equally and fully in bloom.
Brother Son Husband Friend Loner Minimalist World Traveler. Author of “Is It True What They Say About Black Men?” and “Storms in Africa” https://rb.gy/3mthoj
Germans cheer Adolf Hitler on his 51st birthaday as he stands on the balcony of the Reich Chancellory.
(Photo: Bettman / via Getty Images)
There are few Americans alive today who remember Hitler, and for most of us the details of his rise to power are lost to the mists of time. But Donald Trump is bringing it all back to us with a fresh, stark splash of reality.
The Nazis in America are now “out.” This morning, former Republican Joe Scarborough explicitly compared Trump and his followers to Hitler and his Brownshirts on national television. They’re here.
At the same time, America’s richest man is retweeting antisemitism, rightwing influencers and radio/TV hosts are blaming “Jews and liberals” for the “invasion” of “illegals” to “replace white people,” and the entire GOP is embracing candidates and legislators who encourage hate and call for violence.
Are there parallels between the MAGA takeover of the GOP and the Nazi takeover of the German right in the 1930s?
It began with a national humiliation: defeat in war. For Germany, it was WWI; for America is was two wars George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied us into as part of their 2004 “wartime president” re-election strategy (which had worked so well for Nixon with Vietnam in 1972 and Reagan with Grenada in 1984).
Hitler fought in WWI but later blamed Germany’s defeat on the nation being “stabbed in the back” by liberal Jews, their fellow travelers, and incompetent German military leadership.
We’ve been sliding down this slippery slope toward unaccountable fascism for several decades, and this coming year will stand at the threshold of an entirely new form of American government that could mean the end of the American experiment.
Trump cheered on Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but later lied and claimed he’d opposed the war. Both blamed the nation’s humiliation on the incompetence or evil of their political enemies.
The economic crisis caused by America’s Republican Great Depression had gone worldwide and Hitler used the gutting of the German middle class (made worse by the punishing Treaty of Versailles) as a campaign issue, promising to restore economic good times.
Trump pointed to the damage forty years of neoliberalism had done to the American middle class and promised to restore blue-collar prosperity. Hitler promised he would “make Germany great again”; Trump campaigned on the slogan: “Make America Great Again.”
Both tried to overthrow their governments by violence and failed, Hitler in a Bavarian beer hall and Trump on January 6th. Both then turned to legal means to seize control of their nations.
Hitler’s scapegoats were Jews, gays, and liberals. “There are only two possibilities,” he told a Munich crowd in 1922. “Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.”
He promised “I will get rid of the ‘communist vermin’,” “I will take care of the ‘enemy within’,” “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood,” and “One people, one nation, one leader.”
Trump’s scapegoats were Blacks, Muslims, immigrants, and liberals.
He said he will “root out” “communists … and radical left thugs that live like vermin”; he would destroy “the threat from within”; migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; and that under Trump’s leadership America will become “One people, one family, one glorious nation.”
Hitler called the press the Lügenpresse or “lying press.” Trump quoted Stalin, calling our news agencies and reporters “the enemy of the people.”
Both exploited religion and religious believers. Hitler proclaimed a “New Christianity” for Germany and encouraged fundamentalist factions within both the Catholic and Protestant faiths.
Every member of the Germany army got a belt-buckle inscribed with Gott Mit Uns (God is with us).
Trump embraced rightwing Catholics and evangelical Protestants and, like the German churches in 1933, has been lionized by their leaders.
Hitler made alliances with other autocrats (Mussolini, Franco, and Tojo) and conspired with them to take over much of the planet. Trump disrespected our NATO and European allies and embraced the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia, the psychopathic leader of Russia, and the absolute tyrant who runs North Korea.
Both Hitler and Trump had an “inciting incident” that became the touchstone for their rise to illegitimate levels of power.
For Hitler it was the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, by a mentally ill Dutchman. For Trump it is his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the martyrdom of his supporters after their attempted coup on January 6th.
Hitler embraced rightwing Bavarian street gangs and brawlers, organizing them into a volunteer militia who called themselves the Brownshirts (Hitler called them the Sturm Abeilung or Storm Division).
Trump embraces rightwing militia groups and motorcycle gangs, and implicitly praises his followers when they attack people like Paul Pelosi, election workers, and prosecutors and judges who are attempting to hold him accountable for his criminal behavior.
While Trump has mostly focused his public hate campaigns against racial and religious minorities, behind the scenes he and his administration had worked hand-in-glove with anti-gay fanatics like Mike Johnson to limit the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.
His administration opposed the Equality Act, saying it would “undermine parental and conscience rights.” More than a third (36%) of his judicial nominees had previously expressed “bias and bigotry towards queer people.” His administration filed briefs in the landmark Bostock case before the Supreme Court, claiming that civil rights laws don’t protect LGBTQ+ people.
His Department of Health and Human Services ended Obama-era medical protections for queer people. His Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, took apart regulations protecting transgender kids in public schools. His HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, proposed new rules allowing shelters to turn away homeless queer people at a time when one-in-five homeless youth identify as LGBTQ+.
German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.
A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.
In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.
Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.
German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.
Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was the first major Nazi book-burning and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to the libraries and public high schools.
Hitler couldn’t have risen to power without the support of the largest outlets in German media. Some treated him as “just another politician,” normalizing his fascist rhetoric. Others openly supported him.
The conservative elite of Germany, particularly Fritz Thyssen, Hjalmar Schacht, and Gustav Krupp were early supporters of Hitler, as he promised to crush the German labor movement and cut their taxes.
Without the support of rightwing billionaires funding Cambridge Analytica and Trump’s campaign he never would have won the electoral college in 2016.
Hitler couldn’t have risen to power without the support of the largest outlets in German media. Some treated him as “just another politician,” normalizing his fascist rhetoric. Others openly supported him.
After his failed beer hall putsch, he was legally banned from public speaking and mass rallies but, in 1930, German media mogul Alfred Hugenberg — a rightwing billionaire who owned two of the largest national newspapers and had considerable influence over radio — joined forces with Hitler and relentlessly promoted him, much like the Murdoch media empire and 1,500 billionaire-owned rightwing radio stations across the country helped bring Trump to power in 2016 and still promote him every day.
Hitler’s first major seizure of dictatorial power was his use of the Weimar law Article 48 which, during a time of crisis, empowered the nation’s leader to suspend due process and habeas corpus, turn the army’s guns on people deemed insurrectionists, and arrest people without charges or trial.
Its American equivalents are the State of Emergency Declaration and the Insurrection Act, both of which Trump has promised to invoke in his first days in office if he’s re-elected in 2024.
Once Hitler had seized full control of the German government, he set about changing the nation’s laws to replace democracy with autocracy. His enablers in the German Parliament passed the “Enabling Act” that gave Hitler’s cabinet the power to write and implement their own laws.
Trump promises to use the theoretical “unitary executive” powers rightwing groups claim the president holds, but has never used in our history, to have his new cabinet rewrite many of our nation’s laws.
Hitler followed the Enabling Act, six months later, with the Act for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service which authorized him to gut the German Civil Service and replace career bureaucrats with toadies loyal exclusively to him. It was the end of any semblance of resistance to the Nazis or preservation of democracy within the new German government.
In his last three weeks in office, Trump issued an executive order called Schedule F that ended Civil Service protections for around 50,000 of America’s top government officials, including the senior levels of every federal agency, so he could replace them all with political appointees (Biden reversed it). The Heritage Foundation is reportedly now vetting over 50,000 people to fill these ranks if Trump is reelected and, as promised, reinstates Schedule F.
The last bastion of resistance to Hitler within the German government was the judiciary, and Hitler altered the German Civil Service Code in January 1937, giving his cabinet the power to remove any judges from office who were deemed “non-compliant” with “Nazi laws or principles.”
When Judge Jon Tigar of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Trump’s new rules barring people from receiving asylum in 2018, Trump attacked Tigar as “a disgrace” and “an Obama judge.” He added that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is “really something we have to take a look at because it’s not fair,” adding, “That’s not law. Every case that gets filed in the Ninth Circuit we get beaten.”
Because the German Supreme Court was still, from time to time, ruling against Hitler’s Gleichschaltung or Nazification of the German government and legal code, and he had no easy legal mechanism to pack the court or term-limit the justices, in 1934 he created an entirely new court to replace it, which he called the People’s Court.
Trump packed the US Supreme Court with rightwing ideologues, many of whom are heavily beholden to oligarchs and industries aligned with Trump and the GOP. If they continue to go along with him — and there’s little to indicate they won’t — he won’t need to create a new court.
When Hitler took over the country in 1933, the military leadership was wary of him and his plans. While they shared many of his conservative views about social issues, most still held a strong loyalty to the German constitution.
It took him the better part of two years, with heavy support from his Brownshirts (who he’d by then integrated into the military) to purge the senior levels of the Army and replace them with Nazi loyalists.
The night before January 6th, newly-elected Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville joined Trump’s sons to help organize the coup planned for the next day. As the Alabama Political Reporter newspaper reported at the time:
“The night before the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville and the then-director of the Republican Attorneys General Association met with then-President Donald Trump’s sons and close advisers, according to a social media post by a Nebraska Republican who at the time was a Trump administration appointee. “Charles W. Herbster, who was then the national chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Advisory Committee in Trump’s administration, in a Facebook post at 8:33 p.m. on Jan. 5 said that he was standing ‘in the private residence of the President at Trump International with the following patriots who are joining me in a battle for justice and truth.’ … “Among the attendees, according to Herbster’s post, were Tuberville, former RAGA director Adam Piper, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, adviser Peter Navarro, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and 2016 deputy campaign manager David Bossie.”
Tuberville is now holding open the top ranks of the US military, presumably so if Trump is reelected he can pack our armed forces with people who won’t defy his orders when he demands they seize voting machines and fire live ammunition at the inevitable protestors.
When Hitler took power in 1933, he quickly began mass arrests of illegal immigrants, gypsies, union activists, liberal commentators and reporters, and (as noted earlier) queer people. To house this exploding prison population, he first took over a defunct munitions factory in Dachau; within a few years there were over a hundred of these camps where “criminals” were “concentrated and separated from society.” He called them concentration camps.
The New York Timesreports that Trump is planning to “build huge camps to detain people,” and “to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget.”
How many people? “Millions” writes the Times. And not just immigrants: Trump is planning to send his enemies to them, too.
Will he succeed in getting around Congress? He did the last time, with money to build his wall taken from military housing.
So far, that’s as bad as it gets: what he has already promised. But these are early days.
Hitler was unbothered by the deaths of German citizens, and was enthusiastic about the deaths of those he considered his enemies.
On April 7, 2020 all three TV networks, The New York Times and The Washington Post all lead with the breaking story that Black people were dying at about twice the rate of white people from Covid. The Times headline, for example, read: “Black Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb.”
As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration’s PPE response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:
“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”
It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And there was an election coming in just a few months.
Trump even invoked the Defense Production Act and issued an Executive Order requiring mostly minority slaughterhouse and meatpacking employees go back to work. It led to a half-million unnecessary American deaths and to this day neither Trump nor Kushner have ever apologized.
In the final years of the Third Reich, Hitler authorized his “final solution to the Jewish problem” that included building death camps in countries outside Germany to methodically exterminate millions of people. These were different from the hundreds of prisons and concentration camps he’d built within Germany for “criminals and undesirables,” although at those camps people were often worked to death or slaughtered when the war started going south.
So far, Trump and his people haven’t suggested the need for death camps in America, although Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott seem particularly eager to see immigrants die either from razor wire or gunshot.
But, then, the Nazis never officially announced their external death camps either; like Bush’s criminal “black sites” overseas where hundreds of innocent Afghans and Iraqis were tortured, often to death, they figured they’d never be found out.
There are few Americans alive today who remember Hitler, and for most of us the details of his rise to power are lost to the mists of time. But Donald Trump is bringing it all back to us with a fresh, stark splash of reality.
When I lived in Germany I worked with several Germans who had been in the Hitler Youth. One met Hitler. Another, Armin Lehmann, became a dear friend over the years and wrote a book about his experience as the 16-year-old courier who handed Hitler the news the war was lost and stood outside Hitler’s bunker room as he committed suicide.
They were good people, children at the time really, and were (they’ve all died within the last two decades) haunted by their experience.
It can happen here.
We’ve been sliding down this slippery slope toward unaccountable fascism for several decades, and this coming year will stand at the threshold of an entirely new form of American government that could mean the end of the American experiment.
To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice for our democracy to rise or fall will be in our hands.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream” (2020); “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Donald Trump. (photo: Brookings)
