The Hitler Myth vs. The Trump Myth

Historian Ian Kershaw provides some reasons for hope…and for less hope.

Historian Ian Kershaw’s 1987 The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich attempts to analyze and explain the Nazi cult of personality which led Germans to see in Adolf Hitler a self-sacrificing, peace-loving, humble man of the people when (as was plenty clear at the time) the “Fuhrer” was in fact a raging egotistical murderous psychopath.

Kershaw’s discussion is relevant to our own time, and our own high profile lying egotistical psychopath, for fairly obvious reasons. His conclusions are important as much for the ways in which Hitler and Trump differ as for the ways in which they, and their cults, converge.

—

If I were paywalling, this is where the paywall would be. But! I’d rather everyone be able to read the post. So, if you like this essay, and keep reading, consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can keep scribbling. It’s $50/year, $5/month.

—

The people make the leader, not the other way around

One of Kershaw’s main arguments is that Hitler didn’t create his own cult of personality. Rather, Kershaw says, “The idea and the image of a ‘Fuhrer of the Germans’ had…already been moulded long before it was fitted to Hitler.”

Kershaw links the longing for a messianic strongman to the disappointments of Weimar democracy, which seemed riven by petty faction and were unable to confront the major crises of the day: the rise of Communism; the humiliating burdens of the post-World War I Versailles treaty; the economic turmoil of the Great Depression.

“[T]he greater the gulf between high expectations from government and an actual performance so disappointing as to undermine the legitimacy of the political system, the greater is the potential for the spread of notions of ‘charismatic’ or ‘heroic’ leadership,” Kershaw suggests. Hitler certainly cultivated a heroic image and paid obsessive attention to his own appearance and cadence in speeches. But his own performance, and his own person, were in many ways secondary to the fact that people wanted to see somebody as a savior. Hitler was in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time, and that was at least as important as any of his personal qualities.

The United States in 2016 was not facing the kinds of problems that Germany was in the 30s. In comparison to, say, 2008, the US economy was stable and growing at the end of Obama’s second term, and certain intractable political knots—most notably health care—had been, if not solved, then to a good degree untangled. Why, then, were people looking for a God-Emperor, if that is in fact what they were looking for?

The most likely answer here is status threat—or, more bluntly, white racist panic. One study in 2018 found that when racist white people fear that democracy is benefiting marginalized people, their support for authoritarian rule increases substantially.

The Obama presidency, and some small increases in visibility and statusfor LGBT and BIPOC people, then, led to a desire for a heroic authoritarian leader to restore white people to their rightful place in America, just as the indignities of Versailles led Germans to long for an authoritarian leader to restore them to their rightful place in Europe. A sense of grievance and incapacity breeds superleader fantasies. People like Trump and Hitler can benefit not because they have magical charisma, but because they are willing to adopt the fantasies of their followers as their own.

Hitler vs. the Nazi party

Hitler is today closely, even inextricably, associated with the Nazi party. And in fact, Hitler’s control was sweeping. The Nazi party had virtually no independent function or power outside of its leader.

But this was not how people at the time viewed the Nazi party. On the contrary, Kershaw argues, the Nazi party was generally unpopular, and its officials were generally (correctly) viewed as venal, corrupt, and power hungry.

People blamed the Nazi party for the slow pace of economic improvements; they blamed the Nazi party for attacks on the Christian churches; they blamed the Nazi party for (very unpopular) street violence against Jewish people; they blamed the Nazi party for the eugenic murder of disabled people.

But rather than holding Hitler accountable for what his party did, Germans at the time believed  that Hitler was being misled by bad advisors, or that the truth of what his party was doing was being hidden from him.

Thus, when Hitler stepped in and said he was ending the eugenics program, or stopped some of the excesses of the anti-Christian movement, or even when he ordered mass murder of rivals in the Nazi party, his standing actually increased.  Thus, Hitler was able to maintain his personal popularity despite—or even because of—the contempt for his party.

Hitler was able to maintain the façade that he was not responsible for the regime’s excesses in part because he controlled so much of the apparatus of the state personally. The Nazi censors were more draconian in silencing criticism of the Fuhrer than they were in silencing criticism of other party officials, which perhaps explains in part why even leading Church officials spread the lie that Hitler was personally committed to a defense of the Church. And of course Goebbels and his propaganda machine constantly pumped out glowing mythic hagiography of the Fuhrer, assuring the people that Hitler was all things good and righteous.

In addition to the overwhelming effect of media lies and state repression, though, Hitler also took care to deceive his public about his own motives and goals. Kershaw notes (as has historian Claudia Koonz) that Hitler downplayed his hatred of Jewish people during the beginning of his reign. In fact, in public for year he barely spoke about the “Jewish question” that obsessed him.

Hitler also deliberately deceived the German people about the extent of his militarism and his fanatical goal of conquering vast swathes of Europe west and east. Hitler’s early military victories—the annexation of Austria and the Sudentenland—were wildly popular precisely because they were accomplished with little or no bloodshed. As Kershaw explains, “Hardly anyone imagined then that Hitler, in his moment of triumph over the Sudentenland, was actually furious at being maneuvered into a diplomatic settlement of the question.”

Trump vs. the Republicans

The Nazis were Hitler’s party. The Republicans, in contrast, and even after 8 years of MAGA, continue to have a good deal of friction with their orange overlord. You could see the tension in January of this year, when Republicans in the Senate managed to get close to a (very conservative, very evil) compromise on immigration—only to have Trump sink it in the House because he wanted to run his entire presidential campaign on gutter hatred of immigrants.

The result of that mess was that Democrats now constantly attack Trump personally for his hypocrisy on immigration. It’s hard to say whether those attacks have worked—but that’s because Trump’s popularity has always been bad. His current approval, 9.4 points underwater, is actually fairly high for him. He is in general an unliked figure, whose support has always been from hardcore Republicans.

This is a crucial difference between Trump and Hitler. Hitler, through careful manipulation of his own public statements, and through control of a vast propaganda network, managed to become a national figure, who was seen (Kershaw emphasizes) as rising above party and faction. Trump very much wants that status—thus his constant, almost maniacal deployment of flags in his public appearances.

But again despite the antagonism between him and many old guard Republican leaders, Trump is almost completely dependent on Republican voters and Republican institutions—to mobilize voters, to develop policy, to provide staff. Trump has cannibalized the party, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is still, in many ways, made of what he’s eaten.

Trump has occasionally tried to pull Hitler’s favorite maneuver of blaming the party for his own choices. He disavowed Project 25, the Heritage Party platform for a second Trump term,  just as Hitler disavowed his own anti-Church policies. But people more or less believed Hitler, and no one believes Trump, because Hitler had successfully elevated himself over partisan politics, and Trump has not.

 Good news…and not so good

The political press, and not just the political press, decries partisanship and divisiveness. But in this case, it’s clear that partisanship is good. Elevating a genocidal fascist like Hitler above his own party is bad; treating Trump as the symbol of the nation he so wants to be would obviously be terrible. Trump’s personality cult is firmly rooted in Republican partisanship and only Republican partisanship. That makes him very different from Hitler. Specifically, it makes him a lot easier to defeat.

Part of Trump’s failures are structural; democracy in the US is healthier than was democracy in Weimar. The Democrats are (whatever their faults) a more formidable opposition party than Hitler had to face. The media, the courts and other institutions have not done a great job of resisting Trump. But they’ve done better than institutions in Hitler’s Germany did.

A lot of Trump’s weaknesses, though, are personal. Again, Hitler was capable of a good deal of canny self-control; he stopped talking about his monomaniacal hatred of Jewish people for years. Trump, in contrast, can’t stop saying the same incoherent, inappropriate jokes about Hannibal Lecter just because he finds them amusing. Trump’s lack of strategic discipline is a big part of why he lost the popular vote in 2016, the popular vote and the election in 2020, and why he seems on his way to quite possibly losing them both again in 2024.

The fact that Trump is not as talented a politician as Hitler is lucky for us, since it gives us a better chance of defeating fascism. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that Trump, like Hitler, isn’t the cause of fascism. As Kershaw says, charismatic leaders aren’t born; they’re made by their public. A significant minority of Americans wanted someone like Trump—an authoritarian who would restore traditional hierarchies and torture the marginalized people they see as their enemies.

Trump will eventually leave American politics, through political defeat, imprisonment, death, or some combination of those. But if there’s a demand for a heroic leader, some other heroic leader will be invented. And that one may be better at the fascism than the orange self-sabotaging twerp who, despite his utter incompetence, may still yet destroy our (very flawed, but still important) democracy.