Trump speaks during the Military Family Picnic on the South Lawn of the White House. Photo by Getty Images
While he was writing Mein Kampf within the walls of Landsberg prison in 1924, Adolf Hitler argued that Germany’s salvation required a single, infallible leader — one whose will would override parliamentary squabbling, legal constraints and institutional checks. This governing idea, known as the Führerprinzip, became the spine of Nazi rule: first consolidating control over the party, then over the state.
A century later, the Führerprinzip is no longer lurking in the shadows. In Donald Trump’s second term, echoes of the doctrine are surfacing in policy, purges and propaganda, transforming American governance from a constitutional system into a vehicle for personal power.
Americans got an early glimpse of Trump’s authoritarian impulses in his hit reality TV show The Apprentice. His cosplay boardroom rulings were final, often abrupt and rarely questioned — mirroring a top-down leadership style that emphasized dominance over deliberation. At the time, Trump’s business empire was riddled with failures, yet his onscreen persona cast him as the ultimate arbiter of success and singular greatness. His trademark edict, “You’re fired,” thrilled viewers but also showcased his comfort with public humiliation. Long before executive orders and loyalty purges, the Führerprinzip was playing out on prime-time television, with 24 million Americans watching.
As the public was sucked in by Trump’s pose as a successful entrepreneur, by his outrageousness, his theatricality, grand promises and populist pronouncements, Trump barely eked out a victory in the 2016 presidential election, assisted by James Comey, widening fissures among Americans, internecine warfare among Democrats, misogynistic views about Hillary Clinton, and indifference among Republicans toward his ever-ballooning catalog of lies.
Level-headed advisors, military brass and Cabinet heads succeeded in containing Trump’s Führerprinzip impulses during his first administration — his urges to revoke broadcast licenses for networks like NBC after unfavorable coverage, to launch investigations into his political opponents, deploy active-duty troops during the George Floyd protests, among other potentially perilous moments.
Since taking office for the second time, Trump’s actions seem like they’ve come right out of a playbook for implementing the Führerprinzip – he has issued legally dubious executive orders, assaulted the rule of law, the free press, the judiciary, higher education, and so much more. He has used threats of retribution to turn Republicans into a party that marches in complete lockstep with a leader who demands loyalty above law.
It took Adolf Hitler five years before he was able to force his party to bend to his will, and another eight before he was able to expand his one-man control over the entire country. After serving just 264 days of a five-year prison sentence for his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, Hitler set out to assert his authority over a Nazi party that had been riven by infighting over ideology. At a conference of leading Nazi officials on Feb. 14, 1926 in the Bavarian town of Bamberg, Hitler succeeded in rewiring the party around his personal authority and transformed internal dissent into a loyalty test. Before the Bamberg conference, the Führerprinzip was theory. After Bamberg, it was the Nazi party’s operational doctrine.
When backroom political wheeling and dealing gave Hitler the chancellorship in January 1933, he wasted no time in applying the Führerprinzip to establish an iron grip on all of Germany. The burning of the Reichstag that February gave Hitler a pretext to raid and shut down newspapers and political offices, imprison without trial thousands of Social Democrats and Communists and others deemed a political threat, and end a whole slate of democratic rights that had been in place since the founding of the Weimar Republic.
The so-called Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934 was another crucial step in Hitler’s implementation of the Führerprinzip, and a moment when he became the unquestioned architect of a totalitarian state. In Hitler’s paranoid view, the Sturmabteilung and its leader, Ernst Röhm, had become a threat to his authority. Röhm and other SA leaders were arrested in late June and early July. The purge was also extended to others considered by Hitler to be insufficiently loyal. Up to 1,000 died in the massacre, including Röhm, who was executed after he refused to commit suicide. In the aftermath of the purge, the German armed forces swore an oath of allegiance to the Führer.
Brute force wasn’t used to secure the loyalty of the German civil service. Instead, it was a 1933 law that banned from the civil service anyone whose political views or racial backgrounds were deemed incompatible with Nazi ideology, including Jews and Communists. The civil service became an extension of Hitler’s will.
With a June 1933 decree, Hitler deployed the Führerprinzip to totally eliminate remnants of any political opposition by banning the Social Democratic Party. Party leaders and members were rounded up and sent to concentration camps and prisons, often without trial. Many fled the country or went underground. Germany was now a one-party state.
Obviously, Trump has not used the term Führerprinzip to describe the principles guiding his style of governing — assuming such principles exist beyond enriching himself and fellow billionaires, punishing anyone who’s crossed him, accepting luxury gifts from Middle Eastern potentates, and golfing while Texas children perish in floodwaters. But his rhetoric maps neatly onto the concept: loyalty over law, vengeance over governance, and personal will as public mandate. This post by Trump on his Truth Social propaganda platform says it all: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Just as Hitler used the Reichstag Fire Decree as a pretext to suspend civil liberties, Trump has issued executive orders asserting that his own legal interpretations are “controlling” across federal agencies—subordinating nonpartisan expertise to his personal will. To try to subvert a free press, Trump launched White House Wire, a taxpayer-funded platform that broadcasts MAGA propaganda. Prospective civil servants face loyalty tests, with job applicants being required to explain how they would advance Trump’s executive orders.
What’s disturbing about Trump’s second term is not just the considerable damage he’s already inflicted on our democratic institutions, but what may lie before us. Will, for example, America experience an equivalent of the 1933 Reichstag fire, some moment of national tensions, cooked up or otherwise, that Trump might use as an excuse to declare martial law and seize absolute power?
Nearly 90 million Americans, about 36% of eligible voters, didn’t bother to cast a ballot in last year’s presidential election. Their reasons for staying on the sidelines run the gamut — from not liking either candidate to thinking their votes didn’t matter to harboring a general apathy about politics. The 2024 election was without a doubt one of the most consequential in American history, and may turn out to be one of the most fateful. Many Americans shrugged off warnings by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris that Trump would act on his authoritarian impulses if elected for a second term. But we see now that Biden and Harris were right.
So what do we do now?
Become part of the resistance. Make a protest sign. Join the marchers. Volunteer for your local chapter of Indivisible. Make noise, lots of it. Germany’s first democracy died because too many Germans didn’t think it was worth defending. It would be an unspeakable tragedy if this was also America’s fate.
The phantom spirit of the Führerprinzip is alive and scheming within Trump’s brain. We must work together to banish it. As the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself, but often rhymes. Let’s not be the generation of Americans who ignored that rhyme.
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