Whether Trump is purely ideologically racist - like, explicitly believes whites are superior? I don't think so, but I think it's also apparent he has many beliefs that are implicitly or otherwise very racist, and any serious person would discard them after self-examination.

Just look at Trump's racist dog whistling over crime stats in Chicago. I've never met a person in my life who looked at crime statistics like that who wasn't also trying to push some sort of racist agenda. He pardoned Arpaio for violating a court order to stop racially profiling Mexicans. Trump has worked to increase arrests of illegal immigrants. Trump has cut off funding to anti-KKK groups. Trump refused to answer questions specifically about whether he wants to disavow white supremacists.

And just look at the other fiascos. Do you really think "millions of illegals voted for Hillary" is any less whackjob than "Jewish international finance lost us the great war"? Do you think there's zero potential for Trump to sign an "American Election Protection Order" before the next election to prevent all the illegals from voting again? What if he tries to take away business owned by illegal immigrants?

Whether they're plausible in reality? Who knows, but I don't think at all that these are out of range of Trump's desires.



Do you have evidence that Hitler wanted to murder Jews from the start? I cited a book earlier which claims the consensus among historians is that the Nazi's platform was not genocidal until 1942, when they realized they would lose the war. You can mine a few quotes that suggest Hitler could have been genocidal earlier, but when I looked I found no direct evidence of genocidal, murderous intent from the early days of the Nazis.

As far as being indifferent to minority groups, I mean, we can only speculate about what he really believes.. but the track record of his behaviors makes it pretty clear he doesn't like black people or Mexican people.

Remember Trump's temper tantrum about the size of the crowd at his inauguration speech? I take his desire for large crowds to be much the same as the intent of Triumph of the Will. I mean the guy actually said "what a turnout!" when talking to victims of Hurricane Irma. The point is: if Trump could, Trump would probably show off how he's an ineluctable force in history, that he's majestic and destined to rule, incapable of being opposed or dethroned. I just think he's too stupid to succeed in image-making. So when you say here:



You're right that Trump's propaganda makes us laugh, but do you honestly think he's trying to do some cynical parody of Republican patriotism, or is he just doing really bad patriotism? Remember this is the guy who basically refused to read at a deposition:



I don't think I can emphasize enough that I truly think this guy is a ****ing moron. I don't see much sarcasm, satire, or anything coming from him anywhere else, am I really to take that his Twitter feed is a cynical parody? I have a hard time accepting that the man who tries to put off reading is also a satirist.

That and the article you linked was pretty dumbfounding to me, I wasn't aware that the United States gave clemency to literal SS Einsatzgruppe mass murderers simply to prevent communism from spreading. And I think the important part in the ADL article as well is, it makes it clear that business wasn't actually driving and helping Hitler along, but they weren't opposed either, and acted like opportunists when it benefited them. Which is pretty much how it seems most American industry leaders view Trump.

Looks to me like he's just trying his level best to slow walk the person ordering him to do something he doesn't want to do and generally make it unpleasant and awkward in hope that they stop.

Could be, yeah. That's not like, the smoking gun for that point, but yeah it can be interpreted another way.

The guy probably suffers from book learnin` anxiety, be nice

put him in a room with a nice big flatscreen and turn on fox and friends and everything is going to be okaaaaay

I didn't say you did make compare AHCA to the Holocaust (these idiots did: https://twitter.com/search?q=AHCA%20holocaust&src=typd), and no, it isn't clear in the slightest from your quote that you weren't referring to Nazism after a certain period.

I didn't say Hitler wanted to murder Jews or that he was genocidal "from the start", only that he was an anti-Semite (but it's also not something I've spent much time reading about. But from what I gather, genocide became the official policy in 1942. But does that mean the intention wasn't there before?). I'm not going to go digging through Hitler quotes right now. But the sincerity of his anti-Semitism is not something that historians doubt, and in Mein Kampf he describes how he became anti-Semitic (his time in Vienna after WWI, which was at the time a hotbed for political anti-Semitism at the time, pushed him in that direction). The only argument I was making -- admittedly, on the basis of speculation -- is that Trump isn't actually evil (i.e., he'd be morally opposed to genocide, he isn't, as you said before, a racial supremacist in the strictest sense of the phrase) in same way that Hitler was, and that that would make a difference in how the Trump runs his administration. But yes -- that too is speculation about the future.



RE: speculation -- ya, of course it's speculation. Hence my line about being naively optimistic. My view that Trump isn't actually racist is based mostly on things I've read/heard second hand, and I'm not going to dig them up right now. (Ok, I found one: Jared Kushner reportedly said that Trump didn't believe in birtherism, and that it was a cynical attention grab because "Republicans are stupid"). But yes, it is my view that Trump's use of racist rhetoric and his white identity politics is largely rooted in cynicism and an effort to manipulate the masses, and that he himself doesn't want to see hispanics (or any other minority groups) expelled from the country (or systematically consolidated and murdered using industrial apparatus) out of sheer, all-consuming hatred (as Hitler did). Rather, his white identity politics was a strategy that was part of a conscious effort to break from Mitt Romney's 2012 strategy of building a coalition that included hispanics at the expense of white working class voters in the rust belt.

On a tangential yet not completely unrelated note, there's also this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-black-voters_us_57c0707fe4b02673444fdf6c

(TL;DR: Trump was popular with African Americans, until he ran for president)

Well forget what those idiots are doing.

In the late 1970s Trump was sued by the federal government under the FHA for discriminating against African American renters. He settled the case in part by agreeing to provide lists of available apartments to an African American organization, and was shortly after sued again for not doing so. At the time, Trump considered his settlement a victory, since he claimed that it showed he was not required to rent to "welfare recipients" unless they were "equally qualified".

This particular court case was fairly high profile. I think it's really what pushed him into the public spotlight in the first place - i.e. Trump is literally famous for discriminating against black people.

:shrug:

Yes, it's clear he was an outspoken antisemite. Though the historical circumstances are different now that makes a direct parallel impossible. Like, you could be an outspoken antisemite then without consequence. There are consequences now to being outspokenly racist.

So I should make it clear: I don't think Trump wants genocide, I'm more concerned that he's opening a can of worms that can't be closed again - he's building a base of racist, system-hating people who seek strong leadership to protect them from outside invaders. He's the prism taking all of these ****ty aspects of American society and bringing them together. And, given any sort of crisis - this could explode if something were to happen like another global financial crisis.



So - if you're right, which it's certainly possible you are - then what Trump's doing is still creating that potential base of support for another person. If the results of that poll I linked earlier hold - that means about 35 million Americans consider themselves "Trump supports" above any other political affiliation. These are people who freak out that a black person didn't stand for the national anthem, and demand the person be fired for it - base nationalism, racism, conspiracy theory nonsense. The foundation is there.

I might cite the example of Child K. The supposed origins of Hitler's involuntary euthanasia program was a letter written by distraught parents requesting Hitler's permission to euthanize their deformed child, which he granted. I recall reading some sources that claimed his inner circle interpreted the request to imply that, therefore, all deformed children should be euthanized, and thus the origin of the program was a hilarious misinterpretation by the state of the scope of Hitler's order. Either way, the program wasn't something that the Nazis always intended to do, someone just gave super idiot Adolf Hitler a dumb idea and he ran with it.

So what someone actively claims to want isn't necessarily a sign of what they'd be capable of doing. If someone were, for example, highly prone to suggestion and swept up by their own passions, and if that person were to, for example, deliberately surround themselves with white supremacists and pay them to offer their advice, they might be prone to do certain things that they maybe otherwise wouldn't have done.

By the way, Child K was the first victim of Nazi euthanasia. The processes and technologies they developed as a consequence of that decision led eventually to the Final Solution.



If the parents of a suffering child aired a passionate plea for euthanasia on Fox News, do you think President Trump would authorize it...?

True, but not terribly relevant in this case. It doesn't matter what society permits. It only matters what's in Trump's heart. (gag)



I don't think Trump created that. Conservative media did. All he did was take advantage of the fact that a large swath of the public had already been awash in conspiracy theories and racist paranoia that has no connection to reality. Most Republicans felt the compulsion to uphold a sense of decorum that prevented them from adopting much of the messaging of conservative media. The only thing special about Trump, in a certain respect, was that he didn't. He was the only politician in the Republican primaries whose rhetoric matched what much of the Republican base already hears and sees on Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and others. He didn't create the xenophobic sentiments or the nationalism. He merely harnessed it for the sake of electoral politics.

Some people talk about some future, more capable authoritarian leader who could be able to piggy back off Trump, as if Trump is some kind of trailblazer who's shown us the playbook for how an authoritarian comes to power in the US. But I really doubt there's much that he's done that that hypothetical person wouldn't be able to do himself/herself. Most of the work was already done for Trump.

With regards to birtherism, it wouldn't be the first time someone did something racist and then backed off trying to give themselves an ironic distance once they realized everyone basically hated them for it.

Well, exactly, society is now permitting a whole lot more disgusting stuff. There's no shortage of coverage on how hate crimes are increasing in the United States. Increasing, while Trump makes it clear he tolerates white supremacist hate groups.



Hitler didn't create antisemitic paranoia, either. Conservative media did. All Hitler did was take advantage of the fact that a large swath of the public had already been awash in conspiracy theories and racist paranoia that has no connection to reality.

I do agree that like, it wasn't as if none of this stuff existed and then Trump created it out of nothing. But I think it's fairly obvious that he's boosting the xenophobia and nationalism, and as such is causing more of it to exist.



Trump is a kind of trailblazer who shows us how democracy gets weakened and how a person creates political instability in a country.

could it????

It's not really an argument to merely state the alternative to the opinion I put forward.



Again that seems true but not really relevant to the argument that I was making about Trump's own personal willingness to institute genocidal policy.



Ok? Not sure what you're getting at here.



Sure. Trump is shifting social norms and making ordinary citizens believe that certain racist behaviors and beliefs that were forbidden are now permissible.

Honest to god that's one of the funniest ****ing things I've read in the past week.

Germans have a long history of antisemitism, it didn't just start with Hitler - like, you're saying Trump didn't create alot of the racist underpinnings in America. That's true, and I'm saying, Hitler didn't exactly have to create them for Germany - it doesn't exonerate Trump to say he's simply playing on old prejudices.



So, personally I don't think Trump wants or plans any genocide. The problem is, it doesn't seem that the Nazis planned to when they first came to power, either. The increase of antisemitism under Nazism was gradual, and genocide did not start until the leaders became desperate. What I mean is - we need to drop this image we have that genocide comes about as the deliberate goals of an evil actor - as if a person starts scheming from day one to take over a country and exterminate a bunch of people. That's the narrative of a comic book, not of the real world. Well, maybe somewhere something like that happened, but the point is that's not how genocides always come about. But as you said, Trump is making more things permissible - beliefs and attitudes that lead us in that direction. That doesn't mean we are necessarily going to continue that way, but it should be something we are keenly aware of and resist - also because I personally don't see any signs of it turning around.

Ohh noo.. not that.. promise?

https://globalnews.ca/news/3769085/

What is Trump's MBTI

http://www.newsweek.com/cia-director-mike-pompeo-bin-laden-documents-special-forces-raid-released-663288

Ahh damnit

Riiight, true -- of course Trump isn't exonerated. But one needs to delineate what is it that he actually did.

There's a difference between widespread prejudice and politically mobilized prejudice. Consumers of conservative media had not only been exposed to xenophobia and racist rhetoric. They had also been told consistently that their politicians had abrogated their responsibilities to the people by failing to use political power to address the social and economic issues caused by illegal immigration. This was the point I was making before. Because many of the Republican candidates were more conversant with National Review than with Alex Jones, their point of view didn't resonate with the Republican base, and didn't get at the heart of their concerns. Trump, on the other hand, found a political message that did, precisely because he tapped into the hysteria that conservative media consumers had already been thrown into. He brought the right's culture war into electoral politics in a way that no other politician had during the 2016 Republican primaries.

I propose that this is only one dimension of what enabled Trump's rise -- one of many necessary causes. Of course there are others, too. Now, is there some connection to Hitler here? I don't know. Is it really that important to try to find some similarity between Trump and the Nazis? Is it really that valuable? Does it really illuminate the present and future of the Trump administration? Because, to my mind, to make the comparison only misleads. It obscures just what made the Nazi regime so evil, all in order to score cheap political points. (Comparisons can, on the other hand, be done well, if substantive, meaningful comparisons are made with the appropriate qualifications, rather than lazy generalities.)



This seems awfully flippant. The Nazis almost immediately instituted discriminatory laws against Jews upon gaining power. Yes, those laws become more invasive, stringent and violent over time. But the Nazis declared Jews an enemy of the people and implemented laws to make them second class citizens within months of coming to power (and, later, non-citizens). And though the persecution gradually became more intense, the persecution at the startwas far more severe than anything Trump could even imaginably do now, and it became much, much worse than that by the time Jews were being consolidated and murdered at industrial scale. (Can you imagine Trump actually stripping citizenship from entire swaths of Americans? Can you imagine the circumstances that would make it legally possible for him to do so?) I see nothing that the Trump administration does that is comparable in reflecting an ideological commitment to persecuting individuals on the basis of their racial identity, nothing that even hints at a group that has been (or will be) scapegoated and humiliated with such consistent focus and determination.

I think your vastly underestimating the degree of cruelty of the Nazi ideology right from the beginning, and just how well formulated it was by the time Hitler came to power. You've got to be careful with this, because lazy comparisons and ignorance about such things can sometimes can resemble Holocaust denial, although I know quite well that that is not your intention. (Let me be perfectly clear, I'm not accusing of you Holocaust denial. But I am accusing you of being flippant.)

Oh, Alabama.

Not sure how to feel about Roy Moore beating Luther Strange. I don't know much about Strange, but he must be pretty bad to have earned Trump's support. And yet the first paragraph of Moore's Wikipedia bio depicts him as an out of control bible thumper who was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for misconduct in 2003, appointed again, and then suspended again in 2016.

Mhmm, I agree.



I feel it only misleads if you understand the Nazis as many Americans do - simply as "those guys who did the Holocaust". I don't feel then it's the fault of the person making the comparison - it's the fault of the person who doesn't know enough to understand the comparison.

As far as evilness - weren't you criticizing me in this thread for looking at American foreign policy only through the lens of good and evil? In researching this, the question for me never was "is Trump as evil as the Nazis?" - I don't think he is, FWIW. The questions I've asked are all material or otherwise detached questions, like:

• How did the Nazis gain power?
• How did the Nazis appear to Germans before they gained power?
• Who did the Nazis appeal to?
• What in German culture, society and politics enabled the Nazis to take power?

I find when asking questions like these, you find very troubling comparisons to today. And these are the relevant questions - honestly more than anything this is the stuff I'm more curious to talk about, I haven't read much about Germany during the war because that stuff is more commonly learned about.

Like, as an example, go ask any American today: how did Hitler gain power? Most people are probably going to stammer around, and mention something about the Reichstag fire. They won't know anything further than that. The Reichstag fire is an unusual piece of the history - and one that gives the overall impression that the Nazis gained power illegitimately. Which is overwhelmingly not true. The question should really be: how did a functioning democratic society like Weimar Germany, go from democracy to totalitarian racial politics in less than 10 years time. This is the sort of thing we should be talking about.



So - yes, I agree that there isn't a literal doctrine of white supremacy and focused racial discrimination on the same scope or level of evil as the Nazis. I haven't said that and I feel I've been trying to say that for much of this discussion, but maybe you need me to say it directly and clearly. No, Trump is not literally a Nazi.



So, try instead to think about the Nazis in terms of the questions I asked. Ask about how they gained power, who they appealed to, and so forth. Ask questions about the structure of German society in the Weimar era. These are the pertinent questions - not the ones about Nazi racial bull****. Much of the rest of your complaints about laziness and ignorance aren't really relevant - what's lazy and ignorant is just to place a concrete wall between American society and Nazi society based only the specifics of the Nazis' racial doctrine, and ignore all other structural, economic and political points.

By Jove I've found a clue

Trump almost immediately tried to ban Muslims from entering the US on the basis of them being Muslims. So while I agree that he's not exactly following the same aggressive schedule as Adolf Hitler, he is certainly trying to follow something.

But the Nazis did the holocaust and pretending they weren't cartoonish villains who hatched fully formed from Nazi eggs is I guess holocaust denial or something

Sorry if that sounds snarky. But there's a real truth behind the rise of Nazism and yes even an actual gradient to their crimes that for some reason people do not want to acknowledge. Saying to treads close to holocaust denial just shuts down a discussion that more people should be seriously having.

Tried and trying are the operative words here. This is one of the places where the similarities break down between Trump and Hitler; where the differences are crucial, because they suggest Trump would not be able to emulate the Nazis at their worst, even if he wanted to (at least for now). The Nazis were given emergency powers, which allowed them to circumvent most of the checks and balances on their power. The Trump administration hasn't -- yet (one recalls that Bush was given certain emergency powers after 9/11. Perhaps after a massive terrorist attack Trump would be given such powers. But we just don't know what would happen. The comparison here isn't useless, as long as we're careful about what we're trying to say when we make the comparison.)

But let's not forget that even though "Muslim ban" is an accurate appellation for the executive order, it didn't in fact strive to ban all Muslim immigration/entry into the country, because it still had to present itself as being pragmatic rather than racist. Which is relevant if, you know, we're comparing Trump to Hitler, as you guys are so eager to do.



I suppose there are many ways I'm not appreciating the rich subtley and nuances of the inner conflicts and vexing moral conundra faced by the Nazis. Surely there's another side to their story!! My bad. /s

I certainly wasn't trying to shut down the discussion, and I don't think in principle the comparisons are useless. But I do think the comparisons have to be substantive to be meaningful, rather than "I read a lot about this and if you did too you'd agree with me, and if you don't agree with me it's because you're uninformed" -- which, admittedly, is not the form that your arguments have taken (and only some of Reid's have).

Longer response to Reid coming up, but I don't have the time at this very second.

Compared to the nuances and moral subtlety of Trump trying to ban Iranians from entering the country.

I feel you're going off the rails here to change the discussion. Nobody is claiming that there's moral subtlety to Nazism. What I actually said was that, in 1930, nobody could accurately predict whether the Nazis would commit genocide - that there was no obvious, direct way to know this would be the end result of their beliefs and policies.

Not sure what you're getting at with this whataboutism. Are you saying that Nazi's moral position actually is more subtle than I'm giving them credit for? Or are you making the simplistic "Nazis = Republicans = Nazis" comparison that you claim over and over again you aren't actually making?



I don't think I'm "going off the rails". Although I do think we have perhaps been talking past each other, and we may not ever get further than agreeing to disagree because we disagree on first principles. In nearly everything I've said in disagreement with you on this topic, I've had one primary animating impulse. This:



My problem, then, has more to do with using comparisons to Nazis to predict what Trump will do in the future. I do also believe that memorializing the Holocaust/the Nazi regime is valuable and right and an obligation on its own terms, and that ham-fisted comparisons (note: not all comparisons) do a disservice to that. But that's not really driving me.

If you want to make an argument or a comparison, the ball's in your court to do it well. The burden is on you. Facts don't speak for themselves, and you can't fault people for not possessing the requisite context in order to appreciate your arguments -- especially when it comes to matters of the historical record.



Yep. And I stand by the things that I said in the past and what I'm saying now. When understanding why countries do what the do in matters of foreign policy, it's useful to understand that countries are motivated primarily by interest. It's helpful for being impartial and transcending the biases that you might have about countries based on your political identity. Comparing the Nazi regime to Trump is very different discussion. I'd never intended to say that there's no such thing as evil full stop, or that everything that human beings do can be reducible to interest.



I'm not sure why we need to straw man the archetypical "uninformed American" and be accountable to whatever false impressions he has about history. After all, you dismissed what the Twittersphere said about AHCA and the Holocaust about half a page ago.



You may have noticed, I haven't criticized anything you've said about the topics you say you care about. I don't think you're wrong to point out those similarities, and I agree that it's helpful. I've only criticized you because you've also talked about Nazi persecution, and compared it to Trump in a way that seemed to exaggerate Trump's moral transgressions and diminish those of the Nazis.

I'm not saying nor have I said that the future of Trump's presidency is guaranteed to be genocidal because of the comparisons I'm making. What I did actually say and am saying now is there is a serious, non-negligible chance for the future to head that way.

Okay, so here's a question. Does anyone here want to make the argument that capitalism is at fault for the Holocaust?

It seems then that you prefer to not discuss moral topics when you feel it doesn't suit your points, but prefer moral topics when it does suit your points. A little consistency?



I dismissed it because you were trying to make this weird comparison between me and the people making that claim.



I agree - Trump is not as immoral as the Nazis, and I feel it's possible for us to get to these conclusions without having to go through these long-winded slogs of debate every time.

Maybe. Do you mean in the big picture, capitalism causes Great Depression causes Nazi election causes Holocaust? Or do you mean in a more proximate sense, like it being the logical outcome from German corporations asking for slave labour and selling mass extermination to the Nazis for profit? Because really I could go either way, although I'm on my phone so maybe I can write more about it later. Or is that enough?

Historical events have a multitude of causes, never just one, and "fault" is a loaded term. Was capitalism a cause? Yes, it was in fact a significant cause. But it wasn't the only cause.

Woah there. Patently false. I just gave you a principle (i.e., is it a matter of international relations?) that I use to determine how suitable moral concerns are for a certain subject. The other discussions we had were about international relations. This one isn't.



No I wasn't, but ok.



No, I think you're unwilling to own the implications of (some of) your comparisons.