Trump previously declared that he wants the kind of generals Hitler had, men who carry out every order. In that spirit, he has begun purging and selecting generals so he can use the military for his own political ends, including deploying it against Americans. Behind the guise of law enforcement, a total, open, fascist dictatorship is being built. Trump seeks the annihilation of his political opponents. We are within arm’s reach of him declaring Democratic governors and mayors unfit for office and removing them, people he already wants to throw in prison. Will there still be free, democratic, lawful elections?
When Project 2025 appeared, those familiar with illiberal, new-type fascist systems already knew it was the playbook for overturning the constitutional order. The rule of law is abolished by twisting and falsifying law, and by destroying checks and balances.
In these new-type fascist systems, “violence” takes the form of unconstitutional lawmaking. Aggression is embodied in the violent distortion of the law, without physical force. An unlawful despotism is created while maintaining the false appearance of democracy.
Its most typical form is Hungary, the Orbán system, which refrains from overt violence but within democratic scenery one man decides everything, treats the country as his property, and cannot be removed democratically.
Trump’s concept of a fascist state goes beyond that. The architects of Project 2025, having moved into key positions, are step by step implementing the script for destroying democracy, and the physical violence known from classic fascism is not absent either.
Trump’s autocratic system has become a hybrid of classic fascism and the new fascism. While classic fascism emphasized physical violence and 21st-century fascism cements dictatorship by perverting the law, Trump uses both in combination.
The likely reason is that while the intellectual apparatus behind Trump builds the oppressive tyranny by twisting the law, Trump himself indulges in physical violence. The two meet where the MAGA lawyers seek false legal pretexts even for violence.
Nor does Trump omit the indispensable show trials from the fascist toolkit. He truly has a list of those on whom he wants revenge, and for now this is all playing out within a mixed judicial environment. But an attack on the courts is underway as well.
He suppresses all criticism and punishes all resistance. He has launched an attack on the free press. He threatens the free press with brutal lawsuits and tries to force it to its knees. By surrounding and intimidating owners, he seeks to quiet or silence them.
He has attacked free thought and the freedom of science and the arts. He is uprooting from universities and public discourse everything that until now has been called American values: diversity, inclusion, equality, rights, and freedom.
We see this mixed model being built in Trump’s second term. He began the violence against undocumented immigrants when he empowered ICE’s masked, unmarked armed men for unlimited violence, arbitrariness, and lawlessness.
The legal phalanx found an old statute to twist for this as well. The Supreme Court majority appointed by Trump is consciously and deliberately working to dismantle the constitutional rule of law. They do not protect the Constitution; they are rewriting it ideologically.
But Trump’s rhetoric and personality made it foreseeable that it wouldn’t stop there. Alongside dismantling and ignoring legal constraints, physical violence is escalating. He has prepared the military to have to attack American cities, using them as training grounds.
Trump has targeted Democratic-led cities and states, obviously in order to intimidate, occupy, and take them over, or to provoke violent resistance that would authorize him to unleash the harshest violence and lawlessness.
Some say he wants to use this to prevent elections if defeat looms. But the most important goal is to stigmatize, criminalize, present as enemies of America, intimidate, crush, and place outside the law the rule-of-law political opposition.
Longing for Hitler’s generals
To understand the situation, two background points must be noted. First, the targeted cities gave no reason for military intervention, but without exception they are Democratic-led. Second is an old desire: Trump wants to use the military to wield violence against political opponents in order to build and keep unlimited power.
In October 2024, The Atlantic quoted Trump saying, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” He then explained, “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”
On the campaign trail Trump denied he’d said this, just as he denied having anything to do with Project 2025, which he now openly embraces. Trump lies, even though several people heard the quoted words and all confirmed them consistently.
These are the antecedents to what is now happening in America. The American president’s role model is Hitler, and he wants generals who are loyal not to the Constitution but to him. This is necessary so he can deploy the military against Americans, his political enemies.
It is important that Trump pined for “Hitler’s generals” when the generals said no to using the military to keep him in power after he lost the election. He also disliked it when the military refused to fire into crowds of American demonstrators.
These antecedents show exactly what Trump is preparing for and what he is capable of. He is inflaming tensions against Democratic-led states and cities so he can use the harshest violence and introduce an open, total dictatorship. This recalls classic fascism.
Trump himself creates a “state of emergency,” chaos, and turmoil to find a pretext for “restoring order.” Trump has no right to deploy the National Guard against the will of the states, but he does it. The military cannot be used domestically for law enforcement. He does it anyway.
Trump wants to use the rules on “insurrection” to deploy the military, labeling protests and demonstrations, sparked by the inhumane violence used by ICE, as insurrection. But protesting and demonstrating are constitutional rights in America. For now.
ICE has already been compared in America to the Nazis, to the Gestapo, and with full justification, but such comparisons are unnecessary. ICE has already earned, on its own terms, a place among the world’s most hated organizations; it needs no analogy.
The cruelty and inhumanity that Trump encouraged and empowered within the agency has shocked and outraged humane, welcoming, peaceful Americans. Many stand with the persecuted and demonstrate against ICE. Trump crushes this with force.
With the same false rhetoric he tries to threaten with violence and seize Democratic-led cities he dislikes as he used to rally support for terror against immigrants, claiming he is acting against crime. It has since become clear that that too is untrue.
The terror against immigrants is not aimed only at criminals and no longer only at undocumented immigrants. The same is true of the occupation of American cities. In Washington, law-enforcement statistics had not been this good in decades as when Trump occupied the city.
Trump labeled parts of Chicago “war zones,” where Americans are protesting against violence and lawlessness incompatible with the Constitution. Trump speaks of internal enemies and war. To him, some Americans are enemies against whom he wages war.
His aides call peaceful protesters who oppose ICE “street terrorists,” but the truth is that Trump is terrorizing Democratic-led cities. He launches military attacks against them, occupies them, and military vehicles march through the streets.
To achieve full dictatorship, one more thing is needed: to break the military’s resistance and harness it to political terror.
Breaking the military’s resistance
For generals and admirals summoned from all over the world to Virginia, this template has already begun to be sketched out by the loyal, order-following dilettante “war minister” Hegseth, when they were called to pledge loyalty to Trump.
Much has been reported about this chilling meeting. We would highlight that the previously impartial, above-party national military is to be turned into a force tailored to MAGA ideology, serving the Republican Party, loyal to Trump.
The reason is that Trump wants to subordinate the military not only to himself but to his aims. He wants to eradicate every trace of humanity from the military; he told them not to follow any rules. He wants to turn them into killing machines stripped of their humanity.
Trump convened the generals and admirals to break them to total obedience, the loyalty he admired in Hitler’s ranks, and empowered them to step over every law and rule, even to commit war crimes.
The sole objective is to annihilate every enemy. Trump will decide who the enemy is. He is carrying out a purge in the U.S. military until it becomes an obedient instrument of his vengeful, bloody impulses and his unlimited despotism.
And for that, any means is permitted. Trump has already created a culture of violence. Americans can now daily see on social media the kind of videos that appear in the most brutal military dictatorships. For now, they turn their heads away, as if this weren’t here.
Trump’s chief tools are threats, intimidation, and terror, which he relishes. He expects the military leadership to obey him in every illegality. And, contrary to what America has stood for until now, he expects this even when it targets Americans.
This is a renunciation of the Constitution, an incitement to commit crimes. The ethos of this military is exactly the opposite. It is as if the devil himself had appeared and ordered them to commit lawlessness and killing. Like a bad dream.
For a hundred years, every American film has told the opposite story. Every film that portrays the American military and its pathos says this army stands against such attempts, from private to general. Now is the time to show this in reality too.
The silence of the assembled American generals and admirals said everything about what they thought. The words of two far-right dilettante civilians urging criminality were alien to them. Never before has the military failed to trample a president who behaved like this.
But we cannot know what they will do when they are fired one by one and puppets like Secretary Hegseth are appointed in their place, when their livelihoods are threatened. Will anyone remain to stop them from being deployed against Americans?
Does America take the danger seriously?
Trump’s chosen model is well known: Adolf Hitler and Nazism. As we said, every American film says the U.S. military is not like this and resists it. America is the opposite of this. It is as if a foreign enemy had occupied the country.
Generations have grown up in America believing the military stands for the opposite.
If Trump splits the military and the country, what will protect us from civil war if Trump brands Americans loyal to the Constitution, his lawful, elected political opponents, and those who reject tyrannical violence, as the nation’s internal enemies, criminals, and terrorists?
Trump and his puppet Hegseth have made it clear that anyone who resists will be fired or should resign. In this spirit, Hegseth has continued the beheading of the military. The goal is clear: to cleanse the military of every general loyal to the Constitution rather than to Trump.
If this happens, Trump will use the U.S. military for his own purposes. America will have a fascist dictatorship in the classic sense, where the law does not matter. No one and nothing protects anyone. Where the violence and dictatorship are not operetta-style like Orbán’s.
Trump is already shamelessly using the Justice Department, the government, and the congressional majority as his own tools. He takes revenge on judges, lawyers, the FBI director, politicians. He crushes everyone. He deports or arrests anyone without lawful judgment.
Trump behaves as if he himself were the law. He threatens those who burn the American flag, as a statement that what he is doing is not America, with one year in prison. But there is no such law. And Trump already announces the sentence: he imposes one year in prison.
At the border, they are already looking to see whether those seeking entry have negative or critical comments about Trump. This is already dictatorship, and in line with the trend it will be extended to the American population as well. Criticizing Trump becomes a national-security attack.
ICE is a fearsome, lawless shock force, a private army, that can in an instant be turned against Americans too. The open, total dictatorship being built in America already appears more frightening than what exists in Putin’s Russia.
This really does recall Hitler. The question is whether intimidation and fear will be stronger in Americans’ lives, or the American democratic and civic spirit. Will they rely on submission and hiding to survive, or will they defend and save freedom while they still can?
Trump backs down if people resist him. But if he takes total control of the military, the state, and the justice system, if legal and physical violence merge, then the darkest Nazi and fascist dictatorship could come to pass in the homeland of democracy.
The question is how seriously Americans take this, or whether they will wait until it is too late. We believe people should speak of this much more openly and bravely and stop it in time. That is now every American’s task and responsibility.
They can step into their own Hollywood films. They can fight embodied evil.
