I wrote the book on Hitler’s first 100 days. Here’s how Trump’s compare

In July, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the “crowded events” that set “the wheels of the New Deal” in motion during the first few months of his new presidency — effectively inventing the concept, during a fireside chat, that the first 100 days of any presidential term were of particular importance. In the same year, Adolf Hitler, who had been appointed Germany’s chancellor on Jan. 30, was busy consolidating dictatorial power — an effort in which he found remarkable success.

That success came, in large part, because Germany’s institutions quickly, under the threat of force, fell in line with Hitler’s vision. Hundreds of thousands of previously unaffiliated Germans embraced the new Nazi rulers, assembled in celebrations, flew Nazi flags, and sought membership in the Nazi party. Elites in business, the universities, the civil service, the judiciary, and the army might have been uneasy about this or that part of the new order. But they much preferred Hitler’s “national revolution” to the old system of the Weimar Republic, with its checks and balances and parliamentary compromise.

And in the example of Hitler’s first 100 days in power — about which I published a book in 2020 — is an unsettling lesson for the contemporary United States, where President Donald Trump has employed many of the same moves as Hitler in working to swiftly consolidate power in the early months of his second term.

For Hitler, everything depended on ensuring a Nazi party victory in the parliamentary elections that came on March 5 — 35 days into his term as chancellor. After gaining a slim but critical majority in that vote, Hitler moved quickly to establish the so-called “people’s” government he had in mind by taking control of the individual states like Prussia and Bavaria, adding his storm troopers to local police forces, and creating massive performances suggesting national unity through ceremonies broadcast over radio.

In the week after the elections, Nazi party loyalists all across the country helped in the effort. They banned socialist newspapers, ransacked trade-union offices, raised the Nazi flag over city halls, and assaulted Jews as well as the lawyers who came to their defense.

Just over two weeks after the election, on March 23 — day 53 — the Catholic Party joined the Nazis and their allies to facilitate the passage of the Enabling Act, which suspended the constitution and shifted emergency power from the office of the president — then Paul von Hindenburg — to that of the chancellor. Hitler was officially able to govern as dictator, and, after political paralysis and amid the depths of the economic depression, the Third Reich was able to act.

On April 1, day 62, the Nazi party engineered a nation-wide boycott of Jewish business, which they followed up in less than a week by the less showy, but far more consequential, “restoration” of the civil service, which mandated the termination of Jewish employees. Any mailman, teacher, or judge with one Jewish grandparent was out of a job; the Reich also encouraged the dismissal of anyone else deemed politically unreliable.

This lock-step revolution in social and political life was enforced by violence. Without due process, thousands of political opponents were thrown into the Nazi party’s concentration camps, and thousands more were roughed up. Throughout, the public’s support for the political audacity and national unity of the Third Reich became more visible.

This genuine wave of hope and enthusiasm is what really scared opponents or skeptics on the sidelines. It energized all sorts of local initiatives against anyone who offended Germany’s new ethnic unity — namely, Jews, who were boycotted, barred from swimming pools, and no longer permitted even to lend “Jewish” names to the telephonist’s spelling guides. On April 22, day 83, “Z as in Zacharias” officially became “Z as in Zeppelin.”

After 100 days, Hitler was well on his way to outlawing rival political parties and coordinating civic groups into Nazi structures in an effort to break up divisive social milieus.

In the same time period, Roosevelt had taken the U.S. by storm. Just around his own 100-day mark, the humorist Will Rogers quipped, “Congress doesn’t pass legislation anymore, they just wave at the bills as they go by.” There was some truth to what Rogers said: Facing the unrelenting pressures of the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s crucial Emergency Banking Relief Act passed unanimously. But there were strong demonstrations of the health of U.S. democracy, as well: Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act was passionately opposed by many Republicans, as well as some Democrats.

There were striking parallels between Roosevelt and Hitler’s efforts: Both leaders took swift, strong action to upend the existing political order in their country. But there were even more striking differences: Not only was there no dictatorial Enabling Act in the U.S., but Roosevelt addressed Americans as “my friends,” while Hitler, often wearing a brown party uniform, spoke to “racial comrades.”

Trump, on that latter point, is not exactly following Roosevelt’s example. He addresses Americans as either believers or disloyalists — not friends. He has, too, governed as if he has an Enabling Act in place: declaring faux-emergencies, and ignoring laws, established procedures and court orders alike. He has renamed things in the name of patriotism — see the Gulf of Mexico, or, as Trump would have it, Gulf of America — and taken pointed measures against those who have refused to accept such pronouncements as law, including by banning the Associated Press from the White House press pool. There is a curated gleefulness about his administration’s arbitrary and excessive displays of power — say, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posing for photos in front of caged deportees in an El Salvador prison.

But Trump hasn’t mimicked Hitler or Roosevelt’s effectiveness. He lacks a cohesive ideological outfit, “the orderly component parts” of “careful planning” needed to construct the “connected and logical whole” that Roosevelt tried to explain in his fireside chat. And he doesn’t have the equivalent of Hitler’s two million ideologically vigilant storm troopers to enforce a revolutionary agenda, either.

There is another key difference to 1933: Unlike Hitler, Trump does not have the growing support of the public.

But Trump is succeeding on one front with terrifying parallels to Hitler in 1933: He has created a growing sense of uncertainty in America — uncertainty about the direction of government; the endurance of mandated changes; the dangers of speaking up; the fickleness or depth of his own popular support; and whether the future could possibly see a restoration of stability.

Germans in 1933 struggled to figure out who was a true convert to Nazism, who was an opportunist, and who was just frightened. But what they all learned was that there would be no moderating restabilization of the Third Reich. It kept on overreaching, with catastrophic consequences, until its defeat at the end of World War II. .

Observers today don’t know what to expect. There is no apparent plan for stability or accountability, or even any sense of courtesy or mercy in those who govern. That vacuum makes it easy to be either overly optimistic about a return to sense and normalcy, or overly pessimistic about shifts in the entire gravitational field of American politics.

Out of kilter, we are susceptible to all sorts of anguished distortions about the integrity of our leaders, our neighbors, and ultimately ourselves. Germans in 1933, including the Nazis themselves, called the victims of this phenomenon “Märzgefallene” — those who had, for whatever reason, “fallen down.” One primary reason they did so: They assumed that everyone else already had.

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