We Are Uncomfortably Close to 1933
Acquiescence by Republicans to Trump’s agenda is reminiscent of the Reichstag’s collapse.
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On the evening of March 23, 1933, the German parliament overwhelmingly adopted the “Enabling Act,” a major amendment to the constitution of the Weimar Republic that gave Hitler power to pass legislation without the need to seek approval by the elected members of the Reichstag. In January and February 2025, relevant committees of the United States Senate, and then almost every Republican Senator, voted to approve nominees whose views on foreign policy many of them had rejected only ten months earlier. The evolution of executive power in Germany under the Hitler dictatorship remains the most famous case in modern history of the use of the mechanisms of democracy to destroy a democracy. The relationship between Hitler and the conservative political parties was at the core of that history of democratic failure. The events of the past six weeks raise the issue of similarities and differences between the erosion of the power of parliament in Germany then and the response of Republican Senators to Donald Trump in power in the United States today.
Before dismissing the comparison as unduly alarmist, it is important to very briefly recall elements of Germany’s path to dictatorship. Historians such as Karl Dietrich Bracher, Richard Evans, Hans Mommsen, Anthony McElligott, and Anna Von Der Goltz, among others, have demonstrated that the weakening of the German parliament and the existence of an authoritarian executive was well advanced in the years before Hitler entered power in January 1933. The website of the Bundestag (as the German parliament is called today) succinctly summarizes the political history of the Reichstag during this period. It recalls that the Social Democratic Party (SPD), “the strongest political force from 1919 to 1932,” the Center Party representing the Catholic population, and the German Democratic Party (DDP), the liberal party of the center-left, all supported Weimar democracy and its constitution. Yet following the elections of June 1920, these three parties lost their parliamentary majority so that most governments then included the center-right German People’s Party (DVP), which regarded the Republic with skepticism, and the German National People’s Party (DNVP), representing the conservative monarchist camp. These parties fought the democratic system from the outset, while the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) attacked the Republic from the radical left.
In the face of the economic crisis that led to massive unemployment, and a dramatic decline in business activity, the leaders of the Center Party and the DVP insisted on cuts to social benefits that the SPD found unacceptable. The DVP was crucial to breaking up the coalition led by the SPD. On March 27, 1930, Social Democratic Chancellor Herman Müller resigned. The following day, Heinrich Brüning, a conservative leader of the Center Party, requested that President Paul von Hindenburg entrust him to form “a cabinet that was not bound to the parties” and to do so by invoking Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. That article gave the president the power to “temporarily suspend in whole or in part the fundamental rights” of personal liberty, freedom of assembly, association, and property guaranteed by the constitution, if it were deemed that “public safety and order be seriously disturbed or threatened within the German Reich.” In this instance, Hindenburg and Brüning were able to turn a constitutional clause intended to protect democracy into one that could undermine it and weaken the power of the German parliament. In elections held six months later, on September 14, the Nazi Party expanded its representation in the Reichstag from 12 to 107 and, behind the SPD, became the party with the second most popular support.
While the Reichstag continued to exist from 1930 to 1933, even Brüning was, in Mommsen’s words, “already in the process of relegating it to the role of a rubber-stamp legislature.” The relationship between emergency decrees and normal legislation was reversed insofar as the government began to implement all important measures by means of emergency legislation, which, though contained in only a few sweeping decrees, covered more ground than laws enacted by normal parliamentary procedures. The description of “presidential cabinets” on the website of the Bundestag today recalls the ways in which the weakening of the German parliament from 1930 to 1932 facilitated Hitler’s entry into power in January 1933. “Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, who took office in June 1932 and December 1932 respectively, openly pursued policies designed to put an end to the Weimar Republic,” the Bundestag website asserts. Hindenburg, who had been in office since 1925, appointed Hitler on January 30, 1933, to head “another presidential cabinet,” this one chosen from members of the Nazi Party and its conservative allies in the DNVP. In so doing, “he dealt the final death blow” to Weimar democracy. By the time Papen, together with the DNVP, agreed to form a cabinet with Hitler, the pseudo-constitutional legitimation of a presidential dictatorship, abetted by an emasculated legislature, was already in place. Hitler’s conservative contemporaries thus offered support for, not a bulwark against, his assumption of power.
By the time a lone arsonist, Martinus van der Lubbe, set fire to the Reichstag on the night of February 27-28, 1933, the habits of acquiescence to authoritarian rule facilitated Hitler’s claims that only suspension of basic political freedoms would make it possible to save Germany from the threat of Communist revolution. Hindenburg agreed to Hitler’s request to approve the Reichstag Fire Decree. The law, which prefigured the Enabling Act, suspended key articles of the Weimar constitution regarding freedom of expression, the press, right of assembly, privacy of postal, telegraphic, and telephonic communications, and warrants for house searches.
The Reichstag elections of March 5, 1933, took place in a climate of terror, with Nazi brownshirts and SS parading through the streets of German cities and towns. Together with their Nationalist allies, the Nazis won 51.9% of the vote, though the Nazis themselves received only 43.9%. On the evening of March 23, 1933, the Reichstag voted overwhelmingly to hand all of its legislative powers to Hitler. Thousands of SA and SS troops inside and outside the meeting hall created a palpable element of threat and coercion.
The Enabling Act was a chapter in what Bracher has called “the legal revolution,” one that used the language of the law and the constitution to facilitate an illegal and unconstitutional seizure of power. The Nazi dictatorship was both a fundamental break with Weimar democracy, as well as an extension of already existing habits of parliamentary acquiescence to the authoritarian presidential cabinets of 1930 to 1933. With the use of the Enabling Act, Hitler had formal legal authority to introduce laws that deviated from the formally still-existing constitution of the Weimar Republic. He could do so without approval of the Reichstag, thus making the constitution meaningless. The law was supposed to last only four years. It was renewed in 1937 and 1941 and made permanent in 1943.
The Enabling Act, the voluntary abandonment by parliament of its powers, remains the classic case of the use of the language of law to facilitate the destruction of the rule of law and democratic institutions. The atmosphere of Germany in those months was full of actual terror and violence, but the voluntary abandonment of legislative power by the conservative political parties was due also to elements of basic agreement with at least part of Hitler’s authoritarian agenda, combined with an anti-parliamentary movement in the streets calling for authoritarian rule.
One of the most resounding conclusions of the historical scholarship on the rise of Nazism and the consolidation of the Hitler dictatorship is that his rise to power could have been prevented if conservative elites had used their power, in combination with other supporters of democracy in Germany, first to prevent him from coming to power, and then once in power to join in resisting his drive for total power. They did just the opposite through a mixture of ideological agreement, short-term political calculation, and fear.
In the years since the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949, a tradition of “militant democracy” emerged, one that implored political parties supportive of liberal democracy not to enter alliances with political parties that used democratic institutions to destroy democracy. That tradition, which Vice President JD Vance attacked in his speech to the Munich Security Conference, persists in the political and moral “firewall” of today, one that urges all parties committed to democracy, including conservative parties, from allying with the Alternative for Germany, some of whose members have spoken favorably of Nazism.
A Note on Making Responsible Comparisons
Making historical comparisons is not synonymous with equating past and present. It involves looking carefully at similarities and differences. The differences between the United States in 2025 and Germany in 1933 are profound. We can take comfort in the fact that our democracy is 249 years old, while the Weimar democracy had existed for only fourteen years when it was destroyed. The Senate and House of Representatives continue to exist and have not formally abandoned their powers to a presidential dictatorship. The frustrations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan pale in comparison to the vast loss of life and the prominence of the “stab in the back” legend that emerged from Germany’s defeat in World War I.
Yet comparative historical analysis requires the ability to imagine that threats to democracy do not come in exact replicas of predecessors. It calls on us to reflect on the forms a distinctly American form of authoritarianism would take. Since 2016, Donald Trump has expressed themes in both foreign and domestic policy that were previously limited to a noisy but limited right-wing fringe. His harsh rhetoric in the 2024 election campaign, the repetition of the lie that he won the 2020 election, and threats of retribution to those who had examined whether he had violated the law recalled warnings about fascist themes he expressed in 2016 and has repeated since then. In Germany and France, a firewall of the parties committed to democracy has prevented the National Rally and the Alternative for Germany parties from gaining national power. In the United States, where there is only one right of center party, Trump’s ability to conquer the GOP prevented the kind of anti-authoritarian firewall that emerged in Europe.
As Trump commands a MAGA voter base that poses a credible threat to Republican politicians who challenge him, the remaining locus of opposition within the Republican Party can come only from U.S. Senators whose six-year terms insulate them to some extent from Trump’s threats of retribution from his supporters. No, Donald Trump is not Hitler, but he does echo the foreign policy aims of “America First,” the isolationist movement of the 1930s that opposed war against Nazi Germany. The responses of Republican members of the U.S. Senate to the second Trump presidency and the specter of his authoritarianism and rejection of long-standing American foreign policy raise the same political and moral issue as did the relationship between the German conservatives and the Nazis in 1933. Trump and Trumpism are not carbon copies of Hitler and the Nazis, but the question for conservatives, then and now, is whether they will serve as enablers of or a bulwark against the danger of an authoritarian government.
In the first month of Trump’s second presidency, their decisions to support or oppose his nominees devoted to a foreign policy of “America First” offered a test of the ability to create a firewall.
The Bi-Partisan Foreign Policy Consensus of Spring 2024
On April 23, 2024, the United States Senate voted 79 to 18 in favor of the National Security Act, President Biden’s proposal to send $95.3 billion of military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The favorable vote was evidence of staunch support among Republican Senators for Ukraine and for continuing the United States’ role as the leader of the world’s democracies. Forty-six Democrats voted yes, two voted no. Thirty-one Republicans voted yes, only fifteen voted no. The bill included $60.8 billion for Ukraine; $26.4 billion for Israel and humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones, including Gaza; and $8.1 billion for the Indo-Pacific region. As of spring 2024, the Republican Party’s long-standing tradition of support for American global leadership was intact in the Senate.
Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in a passionate address on the Senate floor about the lessons of history, asserted that “our global interests come with global responsibilities.” He declared:
Failure to help Ukraine stand against Russian aggression now means inviting escalation against our closest treaty allies and trading partners. It means greater risk that American forces would become involved in conflict. It means more costly deployments of our military and steeper military requirements to defend against aggression… Colleagues on both sides of the aisle who dismiss the values of our allies and partners ignore what history teaches about times when we lacked such friendships. Our adversaries understand the stakes, and they are responding with a full court press.
The authoritarians of the world may have caught the West flatfooted. They may be betting big that American influence is in decline. But increasingly our friends understand the stakes too.
In Asia, nations with every excuse to be preoccupied by Chinese aggression understand that, in fact, defeating authoritarian conquest halfway around the world is actually in their interests. They know China will benefit from Russian advances, and they know Beijing is waiting for us to waver.
In Europe, allies that had long neglected the responsibilities of collective security are making historic new investments in their own defense….
The holiday from history is over… And in the Middle East, our close ally is locked in a fight for its right to literally exist. The people of Israel require no reminders of the stakes of hard-power competition or deterrence.
The remaining question is whether America does. Do our colleagues share the view of the Japanese Prime Minister that “the leadership of the United States is indispensable?” Or would we abdicate both responsibilities and the benefits of global leadership?
Will the Senate indulge the fantasy of pulling up a drawbridge? Will we persist in the 21st century with an approach that failed in the 20th? Or will we dispense with the myth of isolation and embrace reality?
Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, recalled Russian brutalities against Ukrainians in the suburb of Bucha. “If Russia gets away with any territory it took by force, it will send the message that force pays off,” he said, continuing that Russia was “pinning its hopes on U.S. military aid not coming and Ukraine running out of ammunition. I, for one, am happy to dash Putin’s hopes.” Senator John Thune, the future Republican Majority Leader following the elections of 2024, warned that “if the United States and other free countries abdicate leadership or telegraph weakness on the global stage, bad actors are going to be happy to fill the vacuum … The foreign aid contained in this bill is an important part of telegraphing America’s refusal to cede the global stage to hostile powers.”
When the National Security Act passed, Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer said:
Today, the Senate sends a unified message to the entire world: America will always defend democracy in its hour of need. We tell our allies: We will stand with you. We tell our adversaries: Don’t mess with us. We tell the world: We will do everything to defend democracy and our way of life… Getting this done was one of the greatest achievements the Senate has faced in years, perhaps decades… And to the whole world: Make no mistake, America will deliver on its promise to act like a leader on the world stage, to hold the line against autocratic thugs like Vladimir Putin.
Republican Senators and Trump Since January 2025
Following Trump’s victory in 2024, almost all of the Republican Senators who had voted for the National Security Act of the previous spring voted to confirm a set of Trump cabinet nominees who made clear that their overriding loyalty was to Trump and his America First foreign policy, no matter that it stood in stark contradiction to their recently expressed views and votes. As Republicans gained four seats in the elections of 2024, “no” votes from only four of the fifty-three Republicans in the U.S. Senate could have blocked the nominations of the America First appointments. U.S. Senators cannot be fired by the president. They have six-year terms, some coming due in four or two years. More than the courts, the press, or the defeated and divided Democratic Party with its minority status in both the Senate and the House, the Republican Senators had the power to prevent the administration from destroying the edifice of American power built over the past eight decades. They did not use it.
It was the second time that Republican Senators, with the power to stop or put checks on Trump and Trumpism, declined to do so. The first was their decision to vote to acquit him in the impeachment proceedings following the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Of the fifty Republican Senators, only seven voted for conviction. Forty-three voted for acquittal on the charge of “incitement to insurrection.” A mere ten more Republican votes were needed to reach the necessary sixty-seven votes to convict him. I wrote then that, in declining to do so, the forty-three Republican Senators “reaffirmed the Faustian bargain they had made with him in 2016”: that in exchange for tax cuts, conservative judicial nominations, and access to a working and lower-middle-class voter base that had voted for Democrats or did not vote at all, the Senators “enabled, supported, tolerated, and lent mainstream conservative legitimacy to Trump.”
On January 19, 2021, McConnell delivered a blistering denunciation of Trump’s central role in the attack of January 6. It bears citing again.
There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their President. And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated President kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth.
The issue is not only the President’s intemperate language on January 6th. It is not just his endorsement of remarks in which an associate urged ‘trial by combat.’ It was also the entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe; the increasingly wild myths about a reverse landslide election that was being stolen in some secret coup by our now-President.
Yet at a moment when Trump was vulnerable, McConnell was either unwilling or unable to gather the ten additional votes that would have found Trump guilty and thus would have ended his ability to run for president again.
Senator Mitt Romney, who was one of seven Republicans that voted to convict Trump, told a biographer that physical threats from Trump’s base were a factor in the decision of some of his colleagues to vote to acquit. “When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. ‘You can’t do that,’ Romney recalled someone saying. ‘Think of your personal safety,’ said another. ‘Think of your children.’ The senator eventually decided they were right.” In 2024, the U.S. Capitol police reported 9,474 threats against members of Congress as well as their family and staff—an increase from 8,008 in 2003, and only slightly fewer than the 9,625 threats made in 2021. Romney said he was spending $5,000 a day on security services for himself and his family. Not all Senators had the large fortune at Romney’s disposal.
Trump’s Campaign of Retribution
Four years later, the Republican Senators who had refused to convict Trump when he was defeated and vulnerable were even less likely to oppose him when he was at the peak of power following his election victory in 2024. The price for opposing him had increased as Trump made good on a campaign promise of retribution toward enemies and reward to allies. On his first day in office, he granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” Four days later, Brendan Ballou, one of the Department of Justice lawyers who prosecuted the rioters, wrote that many of the released “are emboldened by the termination of what they see as unjust prosecution. Freed by the president, they have never been more dangerous.” Ballou added that, in the future, Trump could again “put those loyal to him above the law” and thus foster more violence and threats of violence at members of Congress, including Republican Senators. Trump’s pardon created a cadre of people convicted of violent felonies on January 6 who owed their freedom to him.
On January 5, 2025, John Bolton, who served as National Security Adviser in the first Trump term, expressed his views in The New York Times about the qualifications of cabinet members in a second Trump term. Despite their differences “in philosophy, competence and character, one requirement for them is unfortunately consistent: the likelihood that they will carry out Mr. Trump’s orders blind to norms and standards underlying effective governance or perhaps even to legality,” Bolton wrote. On January 21, his second day in office, Trump revoked Bolton’s protection from the U.S. Secret Service.
On January 23, his third day in office, Trump also revoked security protection for his former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and for Brian Hook, a former top aide. He did so despite warnings from the Biden administration that both men faced ongoing threats from Iran because of decisions they had taken on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Asked by a reporter why he took this action, Mr. Trump said: “When you have protection, you can’t have it for the rest of your life … I mean, there’s risks to everything.” He did not respond to a question about whether presidents should have protection for the rest of their lives.
On January 28, Pete Hegseth, newly appointed Secretary of Defense, told General Mark A. Milley, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he was removing his security detail, revoking his security clearance, and ordering an inspector general inquiry into his record. At a ceremony marking his retirement in 2023, Milley had reminded troops that they took an oath to the constitution and not to a “a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator.” Just days earlier, Mr. Trump, then still planning a political comeback, suggested that the general had committed treason and should be put to death. In his first week back in the White House, Mr. Trump had the general’s portrait in the Pentagon removed from outside the chairman’s offices, and, on February 5, he revoked the security clearance for his former Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, who, like Pompeo, Kirk and Milley, faced threats from Iran for decisions he had made while serving in Trump’s administration.
On January 27, in an article summarizing Trump’s campaign of retribution, a team of New York Times reporters wrote: “In his first week in office, President Trump made clear that his promises to exact revenge on his perceived enemies were not empty campaign pledges—and that his retribution is intended not just to impose punishment for the past but also to intimidate anyone who might cross him in the future.” Republican Senators Lindsay Graham and Tom Cotton urged Trump to rethink revoking the security protection for former officials, as doing so would have a chilling effect on the willingness of current officials to take decisions to use force against dangerous adversaries. Trump was unmoved.
One way for the President of the United States to prevent Iran from attempting to murder former or present American officials would be to send a clear message of deterrence. On February 4, Trump signed an executive order to impose maximum pressure on Iran to, among other things, prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon. He said that he wanted to ensure that Tehran faced payback should it harm him. “If they did that, they would be obliterated,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I’ve left instructions if they do it, they get obliterated, there won’t be anything left.” But he said nothing about what consequences Iran would face if it targeted the officials whose security protection he had revoked.
The Musk Factor
Then there is Musk. There are two reasons that what Elon Musk thinks about politics matters. First, and most importantly, he has gained Trump’s favor. Trump has allowed Musk to eviscerate the power of Congress by creating a Department of Government Efficiency, to which he has given the authority to fire federal workers and destroy government programs without the slightest input from Congress and no matter that Congress created, oversaw, and funded them in the first place. Second, Musk uses his social media company X to obsessively express his very right-wing opinions about politics and attack politicians whose views he does not like. Musk’s blend of hard-right politics conveyed via social media, and enabled by advanced technology, recalls what I have called “reactionary modernism” in Weimar and Nazi Germany—that is, the celebration of modern technology combined with a rejection of liberalism.
In August 2024, The Washington Post reported that Musk’s X feed had become a “megaphone for his far right politics.” On December 17, 2024, the Post reported that “Musk’s influence on X eclipses all members of the incoming Congress combined.” By early November, Musk had about 200 million followers. From July to November 2024, his posts had been viewed 127.6 billion times, compared to 7.1 billion views for all posts by members of Congress, and twice as many as those by then president-elect Trump.
Whatever he is opining about, Musk does so within the limits of an X post, that is, so briefly that it precludes presenting a cogent argument with supporting evidence. Its truth content has everything to do with the fact that it was Musk who uttered the statement rather than its intrinsic plausibility or the merit of the argument and evidence. Musk has learned from Trump that using social media to circumvent serious arguments can be turned into a huge political asset.
It is understandable that millions of laypeople think that because Musk became very rich by profiting from his talents as an engineer and entrepreneur, they should pay attention to his opinions about public policy. But why should the one hundred members of an inherently elitist institution, the U.S. Senate, care what Musk thinks about anything? Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, when asked why his Republican colleagues in the Senate did not speak out against Musk’s chainsaw approach to cutting government programs, replied that Musk posed “a credible electoral threat” to finance primary opponents. By early March 2025, fear of Trump’s retribution was one factor that contributed to the refusal of the Republican Senators who disagreed with Trump’s foreign policy to oppose his America First nominees.
The Republican Senators and America First in Power
Trump’s election victory raised the risks of opposing his policies. The ideas of America First, a long-standing but previously marginal current in Republican politics since before World War II, were now in power. Taken together, Vice President JD Vance’s scolding speech on February 14 to the Munich Security Conference; his meeting with a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party and refusal to meet with Germany’s Chancellor, Olaf Scholz; Trump’s Orwellian denunciation of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a “dictator”; his extortionist demands for access to Ukraine’s minerals; the bullying of Zelensky in the Oval Office, cutoff of military assistance already approved by Congress, and repetition of the lies of Vladimir Putin all amounted to the most profound break with core principles of American foreign policy since World War II. If a Democrat in the White House were parroting Russian propaganda, the Republican Party would be denouncing “Communism in the Oval Office.” Yet the Republican Senators, who voted against America First in spring 2024, were strangely silent.
Those reversing their views and supporting Trump’s nominees included the leading Republicans in the Senate. Votes in favor of the National Security Act last April came not only from McConnell, Thune, and Grassley but also from John Cornyn, a member of the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees; Roger Wicker, Senior Member of the Armed Services Committee; and Jim Risch, senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.
After that February vote on a version of the assistance package, Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, said, “The thread that binds that group together is national security. America’s national security, the belief that what happens in Ukraine matters to the United States, the belief that what happens in Israel matters and the belief that what happens in the South Pacific matters.” Other prominent Republicans who supported the aid included Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Joni Ernst, John Kennedy, Lisa Markowski, Jerry Moran, Mitt Romney, and Thom Tillis. Marco Rubio was one of fifteen Republican Senators to vote against military aid to Ukraine, a decision that presumably figured in Trump’s decision to appoint him as Secretary of State.
The thirty-one Republicans who voted for aid to Ukraine in April 2024 were expressing views they had been voicing since the Russian invasion of 2022 and some since Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. On February 22, 2022, Thune said, “The only thing Putin responds to is strength, so the United States must send a strong and unified message that this aggression will not be tolerated.” On February 13, 2024, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma issued a press release in which he advocated both for aiding Ukraine and protecting the southern border of the United States; one did not preclude the other. On February 23, 2024, Risch stated that on the “second anniversary of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine … right now, most urgently, we need a plan of action that will bring the war in Ukraine to a decisive end and deny Russia a victory. If we do not, we will only invite more aggressors to challenge the United States and our allies in the years to come.”
On March 20, 2024, Cornyn spoke on the Senate floor in support of the Ukraine Democracy Lend-Lease Act, a bill co-sponsored with Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He referred to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program to aid Britain in 1941:
The circumstances we find ourselves in today are not the equal of March 1941, thank goodness. But they could be. In fact, the circumstances today look eerily similar to the circumstances in 1939 when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia for many of the same reasons Putin claims he has a right to invade Ukraine.
If the world had stood up to Germany then, we may have avoided the global calamity and prevented the loss of millions of innocent lives.
The lessons of the past must inform the present. And I believe we have a duty to exercise our role—America’s unique role—as the arsenal of democracy to help Ukraine defend its sovereignty and to prevent further spread of military aggression and Russian desires to restore the Soviet Union, which is what Vladimir Putin said in 1991: The failure of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the last 100 years.
Ukraine, he added, was “willing to fight. President Zelenskyy is willing to lead the Ukrainian people in that fight. But it needs additional assistance from the United States and our NATO allies to fend off the Russian invasion.”
In short, the vote by Republican Senators in April displayed the continuing presence of traditional Republican views on foreign and military policy. The New York Times’ Carl Hulse emphasized the key role that McConnell played in opposing isolationism within the GOP.
McConnell told Hulse, “For most of this time”—that is, from 2023 into spring 2024—“I sort of felt like I was the only Reagan Republican left.” Hulse wrote that it was “a stark observation coming from a leader who presided over the rightward lurch of his party under former President Donald J. Trump, whose ‘America First’ viewpoint drove the opposition in Congress to aiding Ukraine.” Having bolstered Mr. Trump during his presidency, Mr. McConnell found himself having to push back on the very forces he helped to legitimize.” Yet McConnell exaggerated his minority status. In spring 2024, he could not force thirty Republican Senators to vote for the assistance that Trump was loudly denouncing. However deeply the roots of “America First” thinking had persisted on the right wing of the Republican Party, the votes in the Senate of spring 2024 indicated that support for American international leadership of the democracies remained by far the majority sentiment among Republican Senators.
The Election, the Power Shift, and the Tulsi Gabbard Nomination
Following Trump’s clear but not overwhelming victory in 2024, the United States Senate became the most consequential political body in Washington that could defy Trump’s effort to implement a policy of America First and acquiescence to Russian demands in Ukraine. For such opposition to take place, the Republican internationalists of spring 2024 would have had to raise their voices together to defend what had been Republican foreign policy orthodoxy since World War II and the Cold War. While all Democratic Senators rejected “America First” isolationism, they were now in the minority, having lost four seats to the Republicans who, as a result, entered 2025 with a 53 to 47 majority against the Democrats plus two independents who vote regularly with them.
The result of Trump’s victory and the Republican gains in the Senate meant that the only group of political actors in Washington who had the power to effectively oppose Trump’s “America First” foreign policy were members of the Senate. Whether they would do so now depended on whether the thirty-one Republicans who had supported aid to Ukraine ten months earlier would continue to do so after Trump’s return to the White House.
Rejection of Trump’s nominees committed to an “America First” view of the world was the Senate’s most important way of voicing opposition to Trump’s threats to abandon Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. Only four Republican votes were needed to block such nominees on the Senate floor. Trump’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence was the clearest test case of the willingness of Republican Senators to support an official who had made clear her opposition to the views many of them had expressed on foreign policy in recent years. Only one Republican “no” vote on the Senate Intelligence Committee would suffice to prevent her nomination from moving to the Senate floor, but no one stepped forward.
As the Associated Press reported in November 2024 and again in January 2025, Gabbard’s trail of public comments made her “an unconventional pick to lead the nation’s intelligence service.” She had repeated Russia’s arguments about its invasion of Ukraine, suggesting Moscow had justification to send troops into the neighboring country. She also endorsed Russian claims that the United States and Ukraine were involved in dangerous biological research. An article published in November 2024 in RIA Novosti, a major Russian state-controlled news agency, called Gabbard “superwoman” and noted her past appearances on Russian TV, claiming that Ukrainian intelligence views her as “probably an agent of the Russian special services.”
On January 30, AP journalist David Klepper wrote that Gabbard had repeatedly praised Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who fled to Russia after he was charged in 2013 with illegally exposing government surveillance methods. Considered a traitor by many security officials, Gabbard called him a “brave whistleblower” and as a lawmaker sponsored legislation to pardon him. Snowden received Russian citizenship in 2022. At her confirmation hearing on January 30, Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat from Colorado asked Gabbard, “Is Edward Snowden a traitor to the United States of America? That is not a hard question to answer.” Gabbard refused to answer directly. Instead, she limited her response to saying merely that Snowden broke the law, and she would ensure that future intelligence officers knew how to properly make a whistle-blower complaint. If a Democratic president had nominated someone with Gabbard’s public record, the Republican opposition would likely have been overwhelming. Yet the Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to send her nomination to the Senate floor.
On February 4, 2025, The Times’ veteran Washington correspondent Carl Hulse wrote, “After early signs that some of President Trump’s unconventional cabinet choices could be derailed by Republicans alarmed at their character, disturbing paper trails and lack of expertise, the resistance has collapsed.” The party-line votes in favor of Gabbard and of Robert F. Kennedy Jr as Secretary of Health and Human Services “provided the clearest evidence yet that Mr. Trump’s pressure tactics and the threat of a barrage of abuse by his allies against would-be defectors had sapped whatever remained of a G.O.P. impulse to balk. And they suggested a broader impulse among Republicans on Capitol Hill—even the few who have maintained some degree of independence from Mr. Trump—to shrink from confrontation with him and allow him to have his way at the dawn of his second term.” On February 12, 2025, the U.S. Senate voted 52 to 48 to confirm Gabbard’s nomination. McConnell was the only Republican to vote no. On February 19, The Times’ Aishvarya Kavi wrote that Republican members of Congress who had been “some of the strongest critics of Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin” and who supported aid to Ukraine “have stayed silent or moderated their tone” as Trump moved to normalize relations with Russia.
Conclusion
In November 2023, in the pages of The Washington Post, Robert Kagan wrote, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” Kagan’s warning was prescient. Trump, so far, has succeeded in thwarting efforts to check his power. He added that “a paralyzing psychology of appeasement has also been at work.” There was “no reason” that the fear Republican Senators expressed during the impeachment trial in 2021 “should be any less” if Trump’s domination over the Republican Party and presence in the White House were again to become realities. He wrote:
But wait until Trump returns to power and the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom. Will those who balked at resisting Trump when the risk was merely political oblivion suddenly discover their courage when the cost might be the ruin of oneself and one’s family? We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy. As the man said, we are going out not with a bang but a whimper.
The response of Republican Senators to the power shift in Washington has confirmed Kagan’s fears. When they had the power to do so, only one of the thirty-one Republican Senators who had previously voted for aid to Ukraine voted against Gabbard. The lesson that Trump could learn from the actions of Republican Senators was that he faced no serious opposition from them. On the contrary, he was dealing with people who bent with the prevailing winds.
We do not know what mixture of fear, opportunism, short-term interest and/or ideological agreement went into the collapse of Republican opposition to America First in the first weeks of the second Trump presidency. Was it the possibility of facing a Trump-endorsed candidate in a GOP primary election, or losing federal funding for one’s state? Was there a barrage of threats of violence to themselves and their families via anonymous emails or social media posts? What we do know is that Republican Senators, who only ten months earlier had voted to support military assistance to Ukraine, denounced Russian aggression and supported continuation of American leadership of the world’s democracies, gave their votes to Trump appointees who opposed those very policies.
This brings us back to the similarities and differences between spring 1933 in Germany and winter/spring in the United States in 2025.
The German conservative political parties of the Weimar Republic, especially the German National People’s Party, were hostile to the principles of liberal democracy and to the Weimar Republic. The desire to replace it with an authoritarian alternative went well beyond the Nazi Party. The same is not the case of the Republican Party establishment which Trump defeated. Its defeated leaders, and the majority of its Senators, have not advocated revoking basic elements of the U.S. Constitution, nor have they, on the whole, adopted radical theories that expand the power of the presidency at the expense of Congress. Rather, they are reminiscent of the politicians of Germany’s center and center-right parties, who swallowed their doubts and voted for the Enabling Act.
Republican Senators’ approval of Trump’s nominees in February 2025 is not comparable to the complete abandonment of legislative authority by the German parliament in the Enabling Act in 1933. The formal institutions of American democracy remain intact. But their concession of the power to reject nominees is comparable to the step-by-step erosion of parliamentary power that preceded the descent into dictatorship in Germany. On March 14, with the actions in mind of the Senate and the House of Representatives regarding a host of decisions in domestic policy, Hulse and Catie Edmondson wrote in The Times, “The Republican-led Congress isn’t just watching the Trump administration gobble up its constitutional powers. It is enthusiastically turning them over to the White House.” Two elements connect the era of presidential cabinets at the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginnings of the second Trump presidency. First, the willingness of elected representatives to abandon their prerogatives in the face of invented emergencies and an authoritarian leader with a base of loyal supporters. Second, the absence of a political firewall against the authoritarian right.
In Germany in 1933 and in the United States today, there were no problems, however serious, that could not be addressed through the normal functioning of representative democracy. The exaggeration of the proclaimed genius and intelligence of authoritarian leaders has been central to their self-presentation, but historians have demonstrated that their genius turned out to be a myth. In every case, then and now, it was the failures of their contemporaries to use the power at their disposal that ruined liberal democracy. It was the blunders of Hitler’s contemporaries, just as much if not more than his own political talents, which made his rise to power and his exercise of it possible.
Reference to emergencies accompanied the path to dictatorship in Germany and towards authoritarianism in the United States. In 1933, the economic emergency in Germany was profound. That was not the case in the United States in 2024. When Hitler took power the German economy was still in the depths of the most serious economic disaster in the history of modern capitalism. One-third of the German workforce was unemployed, and industrial production was one-half of what it had been before the Wall Street crash in 1929.
By contrast, during the fall and winter of 2024, the American economy was the envy of all other advanced societies. By then, the consumer price index, the measure of the rate of inflation, which had reached up to 9% especially for food in 2023, had declined to less than 3%. The economy was growing at a rate of 2.7%, a remarkable rebound after the pandemic and far outpacing the advanced economies of Japan and major economies in Europe. The unemployment rate of 4.1% was the lowest in fifty years. Trump managed to convince millions of voters that these economic realities were a myth, that the American economy was in terrible shape, and that the words “crisis” and “disaster” applied to a reality that, though full of problems and frustrations, was one that did not at all call for a turn to an authoritarian leader who would diminish the power of Congress. In this matter as well, the traditional, conservative Republican establishment, with the interesting exception of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, failed to loudly dissent from the conspiracy theories and economic fallacies coming from Trump and his supporters.
The powers of the United States Senate in 2025 are vastly greater than were those of the beleaguered Reichstag in 1933. We have not experienced an erosion of the power of Congress comparable to that of the Reichstag before 1933. Trump’s campaign of retribution pales in comparison to the terror and violence of Germany in the early 1930s. There is less excuse for the passivity and silence of Republican Senators who have failed to check Trump’s authoritarianism and his extortion and threats to our friends and allies. The consequences of their silence are proliferating in pointless trade wars, attacks on the professional civil service, erosion of scientific and medical expertise in the government, and destruction of government institutions created and funded by Congress. The Faustian bargain they have made with Trump was always a bad one. The time is long overdue for them to summon their courage, reassert their rights and prerogatives, and to use the powers they possess to defend principles and institutions that, for many years, most of them claimed to support. Despite very important differences, the history of Germany’s gradual descent into dictatorship in the 1930s remains an urgent and essential warning.
Jeffrey Herf is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History, Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent book is Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left, and Islamist (Routledge, 2024).
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I didn't realize until recently how much the story of Hitler and WW2 had become a sort of sacred mythos (especially to the older generations), and how heavily people rely on that mythos to understand the modern world. Once you see it though, you can't unsee it.