We know how Hitler brought on fascism. Trump is doing the same here | Opinion

Fascist regimes do not give birth to their hate and fear-mongering overnight. To gain the support of ordinary citizens, it’s the teaching of hate and the dehumanization of an ethnic group that achieves the results a strongman, like Adolf Hitler induced from the German people ahead of and during World War II.

According to Robert Gellately, author of “Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis,” it took the decade of the 1930s to build support for extermination of the Jews. Every problem Hitler addressed, he tied to a massive Jewish conspiracy that wasn’t. In time, even those who weren’t his true believers went along with his diabolical plot to rid Europe of Jewry.

It was a campaign of demeaning and degrading Jews, so at some point, ordinary citizens could look the other way when hearing of extermination camps to rid Europe of its Jewish population. Years of regularly painting Jews as an evil force to be removed from the purity of the German race. Hitler used issues like communism, rural poverty and socialism to tap into the emotions of average Germans, but he would always close by lying about Jews being responsible for so many of Germany’s problems.

President Donald Trump is taking a page from Hitler’s playbook as he turns Americans against our own neighbors, Latinos at work in the United States. He scripts his remarks on migrants with what will incite the emotions of his voters. He blasts brown people who came from south of the border years ago as criminals and rapists, knowing full well, just as Hitler knew, that it will gradually seep into the consciousness of enough voters to approve of what can only be described as ethnic cleansing.

In the meantime, the conservative Cato Institute reports that 65% of those seized by ICE agents had no prior convictions and more than 93% had no violent convictions, meaning many of them were traffic, immigration or nonviolent offenses.

Gellately tells us that by 1932, thousands of trained experts attended Nazi speakers’ schools, and then they were licensed to return to their local communities, where they were unleashed to preach opposition to the Jews.

Just listen to Trump on any given day, and you can hear the hate and loathing that seep from his pores as he cleverly labels an entire ethnic group as losers and criminals to be removed from our communities. He hardly needs trained experts like Hitler employed to achieve his objectives. Social media and its facile manipulation of facts and truth mobilizes right-wing fanatics who perform the same function as Hitler’s trained experts did.

It also takes the manipulation of network news, which Trump has mastered over the years. As a guy who only knows what he sees on TV, he polices Fox News like a hawk to make sure there is not the slightest deviation from the Trump hymnal. And Fox usually fortifies Trump’s lies and distortions of the news, leading to our current moment, when there is no room for truth in the minds of Trump loyalists.

The border issue may be the best example. There seems little hope for members of Trump’s Republican Party to parse the issue and understand how so many working-class Latinos removed from our communities are to be regarded differently than those he castigates daily and throws to the wolves of ICE.

Also, Trump killed a path to citizenship, instructing his minions in Congress to kill the bipartisan bill when Joe Biden was president so he could run on the issue. Meanwhile, a powerless people who provide the foundational work of our local economies are grabbed at their workplaces by masked ICE agents and imprisoned in detention centers with no regard for any constitutional protections.

Even some Trump voters have questioned what their votes have produced on the streets and in the families of their communities. They watch in horror as the vicious tactics of ICE agents remove Latinos who provide a line of employment integral to our daily lives, like keeping restaurants open and manicuring lawns Americans cherish. They have committed no violent crimes other than the Trump-defined crime of crossing the border years ago to escape the violence in their own countries and to find opportunity in America — in jobs Americans won’t touch.

As for the Democrats in Congress, they are still freaking out over how badly Biden handled things at the border and how Trump played the Dems like a fiddle and laid the entire mess at the feet of Biden and his Democratic accomplices, especially his vice president, Kamala Harris, who became Trump’s presidential opponent.

It takes the wisdom of Solomon and the courage of David for a Democrat to stand before the American people and counter the inaccuracies and lies in Trump’s version of border security, and his relentless attack on innocent people. To date, a unified Democratic message seems lacking in confronting Trump’s terror aimed at those who have sustained our local economies. It makes no difference what the predictable Republican majority will do as it takes its orders from the fascist regime in the White House. It does make a difference that the loyal opposition stands up for those innocents who have committed no violent crimes and, in some cases, have legal authorization to live in America.

When voters are fed a steady diet of attacks on an ethnic group, as Trump has done with Latinos, and when he employs masked ICE agents showing no identification and acting like the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Hitler’s true believers seem to have been reincarnated.

When it happens day after day, and too many Americans either pay little attention to the lies and distortions or dismiss them as just another day of Trump at his worst, other Americans lap up his prejudicial feed. Like Hitler’s Germans, they are acclimating to a new way of interpreting America, the land of the free. Theirs is a freedom from responsibility, it is a freedom to attack your enemies, physically or otherwise, it is the freedom to tear down your opponents’ values, even simple ones like “Everyone Is Welcome Here.”

Theirs is a freedom to seize Latinos from the streets, farms and fields of America without warrants and due process. It’s a freedom to excise from our history books any hint of violence against our own people and a freedom to remove books from libraries that challenge their white Christian nationalist values.

There is no room in America for this kind of freedom, but it will not pass from this moment until our public officials stand up, speak out and act. That goes not just for the few Republicans who may still be able to dredge up that badge of courage the cowardly lion sought from the Wizard of Oz. It’s also about the Democratic Party, which must offer Americans a humane alternative to Trump’s cleansing of an ethnic group.

To date, it seems that only Trump succeeds at stealing the airtime on the border security issue and training Americans to ignore any compassion for the powerless.

That is a strategy that has the makings of a fascist regime.