https://mitchthelawyer.substack.com/p/a-historian-spent-30-years-interviewing
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A British historian spent three decades interviewing former Nazis. Former concentration camp guards. Former SS officers. Former members of the Hitler Youth. He sat across from people who participated in the worst crime in the history of the world, and he asked them how it happened. He asked them why it happened. He asked them what they were thinking as it happened.
And then, in January 2025, Laurence Rees published The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History. He laid out the twelve specific patterns, the twelve warning signs, the twelve psychological and political conditions that allowed a cultured, educated, democratic nation to descend into fascism and commit genocide.
Every single one of those twelve warnings is present in Donald Trump’s America. Right now. Today. April 4, 2026.
This is not a comparison I make lightly. I am a California trial lawyer. I have spent my career analyzing evidence, building cases, and presenting facts. I am telling you, as someone who has examined the record with the same rigor I bring to a courtroom, that Donald Trump, his administration, and the people who enable them are operating from the fascist playbook. Not a version of it. Not something that resembles it. The playbook itself.
And before you dismiss that as hyperbole, I need you to read every word of what follows. Because Laurence Rees, one of the most respected historians alive, did not write this book to attack any particular politician. He wrote it as a warning. He structured it around twelve specific conditions. And the evidence that each of those conditions exists in America right now is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of public record.
Let me walk you through all twelve. With real examples. With real facts. And then you tell me what you see.
The Book and Why It Matters
Laurence Rees is a former Head of BBC TV History programs. He was educated at Solihull School and Oxford University. He has won a BAFTA, two Emmy Awards, a George Foster Peabody Award, and the British Book Award for his work on Auschwitz. His Auschwitz book is the bestselling history of the camp in the world and is sold at the Auschwitz memorial itself.
Over three decades, Rees conducted hundreds of interviews with former Nazis and Holocaust survivors. Many of those former Nazis are now dead. Their testimony, much of it previously unpublished, forms the backbone of The Nazi Mind.
Rees chose the word warnings deliberately. He writes that he does not believe history offers precise lessons. He chose warnings because many democracies are under threat, and awareness of the techniques aspiring tyrants use to destroy freedom is essential. He insists his book is history, not political commentary. He does not name names. He does not point fingers at any living politician.
He does not have to. The facts do that on their own.
The book combines history with modern psychology, drawing on research into obedience, authority, the amygdala, and the developing adolescent brain. It traces the rise and fall of Nazi mentalities from the late 1910s through 1945. And it presents twelve warnings, each one a condition that helped fascism take root in Germany.
Here are those twelve warnings. And here is the evidence that every single one of them is alive and thriving in Trump’s America.
Warning One: Conspiracy Theories
Rees opens his book with this warning because conspiracy theories are the foundation on which every other element of fascism is built. In Germany, the “stab in the back” myth, the false idea that Germany’s army was betrayed by politicians and Jews, gave Hitler the narrative fuel he needed. The conspiracy theory came first. Everything else followed.
Trump has promoted conspiracy theories as a governing philosophy. The Wikipedia page tracking his false and misleading statements during his second term alone runs thousands of words. He has claimed the 2020 election was stolen, that voting machines deleted millions of his votes, that COVID death counts were fabricated, that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country, and that a “deep state” conspiracy spanning multiple administrations targeted him personally.
In 2025 and 2026, the Trump Department of Justice empaneled a grand jury in Fort Pierce, Florida, to investigate what Trump allies call the “Grand Conspiracy,” a theory that Obama administration officials, the FBI, and multiple prosecutors coordinated a decade long criminal enterprise against Trump. As the legal journal Lawfare reported in January 2026, the grand conspiracy is a conspiracy theory, not a real legal theory. The evidence, as Lawfare put it, does not even exist. Federal prosecutors are spending taxpayer resources investigating a narrative that exists to validate Trump’s grievances and punish his political opponents.
The Nazis built their movement on a lie about who lost World War I. Trump built his on a lie about who won the 2020 election. The mechanism is identical.
Warning Two: “Them” and “Us” Thinking
Rees identifies the creation of in groups and out groups as the second foundation of fascism. The Nazis divided the world into Aryans and Jews, Germans and enemies. The dividing line was simple, emotional, and absolute.
Trump has made “them and us” the organizing principle of American life. Immigrants, particularly immigrants of color, are the primary “them.” In his 2026 State of the Union Address, fact checkers documented multiple false and misleading statements about immigrants, including the repeated claim that Venezuela’s government coordinated with gangs to send criminals to America. An intelligence assessment found no such coordination.
Trump has gone further than targeting immigrants. He has labeled half of America as the enemy. His own words leave no room for interpretation. In a Veterans Day speech in November 2023, Trump pledged to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He posted the same language on Truth Social, confirming the words were deliberate and not some offhand remark. Historians at NYU and Columbia University immediately compared the language to Hitler and Mussolini. NYU historian Ruth Ben Ghiat stated that calling people “vermin” was used effectively by both dictators to dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence. Columbia scholar Timothy Naftali put it this way: when you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you are saying they are not human.
Trump escalated that language throughout the 2024 campaign and into his presidency. In October 2024, he told Fox News that Democrats were “the enemy from within” and that they posed a greater threat to America than Russia, China, or North Korea. He named specific Democratic members of Congress, including Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. He called them “sick” and “evil.” And then he said the quiet part out loud. He said this internal enemy “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” He followed through. In 2025, Trump deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Memphis, Chicago, and Portland, all cities led by Democrats, overriding the objections of Democratic governors. During a September 2025 meeting with over 800 generals and admirals, he described America as waging “a war from within” and said the threat was “no different than a foreign enemy.” Crime statistics in those cities were falling before the troops arrived. The deployments were not about safety. They were about sending a message: if you live in a city that votes blue, your president considers you the opposition in a war.
You are either with Trump or you are the enemy. That is the division. And it is by design.
Warning Three: The Leader as “Hero”
Rees writes that fascism requires the population to see its leader as a hero figure, a singular person of destiny who alone can rescue the nation. Hitler cultivated this image relentlessly. The cult of personality was not a side effect of Nazism. It was a structural requirement.
Trump told the American people at the 2016 Republican National Convention, “I alone can fix it.” That was not a throwaway line. It was a mission statement. He has governed accordingly, demanding personal loyalty from every person in his orbit, from cabinet secretaries to military officers, from federal judges to members of Congress.
In November 2025, six Democratic lawmakers who had previously served in the military and intelligence communities posted a short video urging current service members to follow the Constitution. Trump responded on social media by calling their words “seditious behavior” and writing that they should be “arrested and put on trial.” He wrote “seditious behavior, punishable by death.” He reposted a third party message that read “hang them.” This is the language of a man who believes criticism of his leadership is treason. That is the hero complex in its most dangerous form.
The hero worship has taken on an openly religious dimension. On April 1, 2026, at a White House Easter lunch attended by more than 100 faith leaders, Trump’s senior spiritual adviser Paula White, head of the White House Faith Office, stood beside the president and compared him directly to Jesus Christ. “No one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us,” she said, before telling Trump that “because of his resurrection, you rose up. Because he was victorious, you were victorious.” White has previously stated that “to say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.” Trump stood behind her and smiled. Theologians across denominations called it blasphemy. Political commentator Lauren Windsor said what many were thinking: “These evangelicals think that Trump is going to usher in the second coming of Christ. That’s why so many are eager for war in Iran, in the Holy Lands.” When the leader’s inner circle tells a nation that their president walks in the footsteps of God, you are no longer in the territory of politics. You are in the territory Rees warned us about.
Warning Four: The Corruption of Youth
Rees draws on neuroscience to explain this warning. The adolescent brain craves novelty and excitement. Critical thinking skills do not fully develop until the mid twenties. The Nazis understood this instinctively. The Hitler Youth existed to capture young minds before they could develop the intellectual defenses to resist propaganda.
Trump’s administration has systematically targeted education. DOGE operatives, working under Elon Musk’s direction, gutted the Department of Education’s civil rights division. A GAO analysis found the layoffs in that division cost 38 million dollars. The administration has pushed to defund public education at the federal level, attacked universities as bastions of liberal indoctrination, and created an environment where young people are told that mainstream institutions cannot be trusted.
At the same time, Trump’s influence on social media platforms reaches millions of young Americans daily. His Truth Social posts, often containing false claims and violent rhetoric, circulate through algorithms designed to reward emotional engagement. He has made conspiracy thinking, distrust of institutions, and loyalty to a single leader feel normal for an entire generation. That is the corruption of youth.
Warning Five: The Embrace of Violence
Rees explains that many Germans, though personally opposed to violence, came to believe that Nazi violence was necessary to protect them from communists. Their desire for order made them support a movement that promised to use force to achieve it. Rees writes that in the right circumstances, most people can become enthusiastic supporters of violence.
Trump pardoned every January 6 defendant on his first day back in office. Let that sink in. People who attacked police officers, who breached the Capitol, who built a gallows on the National Mall and chanted for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence received presidential clemency. That was not an act of mercy. It was an endorsement of political violence.
In December 2025, the Trump administration launched Operation Metro Surge, deploying thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents into Minneapolis. Within weeks, ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37 year old American citizen and mother, during an enforcement action on January 7, 2026. Bystander video showed Good’s car reversing, her tires facing away from the agent who fired into the side of her vehicle. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the video directly contradicted federal claims that Good had tried to run over an officer. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, without providing evidence, called the killing “an act of domestic terrorism.” She then announced she was sending hundreds more agents into Minneapolis. Seventeen days later, ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37 year old ICU nurse and American citizen, who had been recording officers with his phone during a protest. Video showed him being sprayed with chemicals and struck in the head before being surrounded by at least six officers who pushed him to the ground and shot him. Governor Tim Walz called it “a campaign of organized brutality against the people of our state.” Noem’s DHS issued a press release blaming “sanctuary politicians” for the violence and calling ICE agents “heroic.” Federal prosecutors dropped charges against another woman initially described as a “domestic terrorist” after court testimony and video evidence suggested federal agents had initiated the confrontation. This is the pattern Rees describes: state violence rebranded as public safety, critics labeled as enemies, and every act of force justified as self defense no matter what the evidence shows.
Now we have the Iran war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on March 13, 2026, that U.S. forces would keep “pushing, keep advancing; no quarter, no mercy for our enemies.” In military terms, “no quarter” means surrendering combatants will be executed rather than taken prisoner. Legal experts immediately identified the statement as a war crime under the Hague Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and the U.S. War Crimes Act. Senator Mark Kelly, a retired Navy officer, stated plainly: “An order to give no quarter would mean to take no prisoners and kill them instead. That would violate the law of armed conflict. It would be an illegal order.” Hegseth did not retract the statement. On April 1, 2026, Trump delivered a prime time address threatening to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age, where they belong.” Minutes later, Hegseth posted three words on X: “Back to the Stone Age.” A U.S. strike had already hit a girls school in southern Iran, killing more than 170 people, most of them children. Hegseth had previously told a gathering of more than 800 generals and admirals that there would be no “stupid rules of engagement” and no “politically correct wars,” language that legal scholars said was designed to strip away the civilian protection frameworks that exist precisely because of what happened during World War II.
The Nuremberg tribunals prosecuted Nazi officials for denying quarter to enemy soldiers. Eighty years later, the U.S. Secretary of Defense is using the same language and calling it strength.
Warning Six: Elite Complicity
Rees identifies one of the most dangerous conditions as the certainty of political and financial elites that they can control the authoritarian leader. In Germany, industrialists, politicians, and military leaders believed they could use Hitler for their purposes and then rein him in. They were wrong.
Elon Musk embedded himself in the federal government through DOGE, gaining access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems, personally directing mass firings of federal workers, and declaring on social media that he had spent a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” He set a target of two trillion dollars in savings and Musk himself admitted in late 2025 that his efforts were only “somewhat successful” and that he would not do it again. A year after the DOGE cuts, more than a dozen lawsuits challenged the legality of his actions, and a GAO analysis showed some layoffs actually cost the government money.
Republican members of Congress, who swore oaths to defend the Constitution, have largely remained silent or actively supported the administration’s defiance of court orders, its attacks on judges, and its purges of government employees. They are the modern equivalent of the German elites who thought they could control Hitler. They traded their constitutional obligations for political survival. History tells us exactly how that calculation ends.
Warning Seven: Suppression of Free Speech and the Press
Rees documents how the Nazis systematically took control of the media to shape public perception and suppress dissent. The free press was one of the first targets.
Trump’s administration has waged the most aggressive assault on press freedom in modern American history. By December 2025, Poynter documented 76 federal actions against journalists, 13 lawsuits filed by media organizations, 215 anti media posts by Trump on social media, and 170 reported assaults on journalists in the United States in 2025 alone, 160 of them at the hands of law enforcement.
In May 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” directing federal agencies to cut funding to NPR and PBS. The FCC, under Trump appointee Brendan Carr, opened investigations into ABC, NBC, and CBS. The Associated Press and The New York Times were kicked out of federal spaces. Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, which reached 427 million people weekly in countries with repressive regimes, had their programming gutted through withheld funds and mass layoffs. Tim Richardson of PEN America said it plainly. This assault on the press is probably the most aggressive we have seen in modern times.
And there’s more. The suppression goes deeper than government action. Pro-Trump billionaires are buying the networks themselves and silencing critics from the inside. In 1983, fifty companies owned 90 percent of American media. Today it is five. Paramount, now controlled by David Ellison, son of pro-Trump billionaire Larry Ellison, settled Trump’s frivolous $16 million lawsuit against CBS and canceled Stephen Colbert, the network’s most successful late night host, days after Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe” on air. Trump celebrated publicly. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, then approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. In September 2025, Carr publicly threatened ABC and its affiliates over Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and within hours, Nexstar, a station group with a $6.2 billion merger awaiting Carr’s FCC approval, pulled Kimmel from its ABC stations, followed minutes later by ABC suspending the show entirely. Trump celebrated that too and then called on NBC to take action against Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon. The Guardian reported that Larry Ellison told Trump that if Paramount gains control of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, Paramount will fire CNN hosts Trump does not like.
Elon Musk already owns X. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. If the Ellison deals go through, Trump aligned billionaires will control TikTok, X, Facebook, CBS, CNN, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. That is not a free press. That is a captured press.
The Nazis did not need to buy the newspapers. They just needed the owners to stop printing the truth. We are watching the same outcome delivered through different means.
Warning Eight: Purging Opponents
The Nazis systematically eliminated political rivals, dissenting voices within their own ranks, and anyone who threatened the leader’s power. Rees identifies this pattern as a core feature of the fascist state.
Trump has executed mass purges of the federal workforce on a scale without precedent. The February 2025 “Valentine’s Day Massacre” fired thousands of probationary federal employees across multiple agencies. By March 2026, nine percent of the civilian federal workforce had been eliminated. Federal judges ordered reinstatements, calling the firings illegal. The administration appealed and, in many cases, ignored the orders.
The purges extend to the people specifically designed to hold the government accountable and the military leaders charged with defending the nation. On the night of January 24, 2025, just four days into his second term, Trump fired at least 17 inspectors general across federal agencies, the independent watchdogs whose sole job is to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. They received termination emails at night citing “changing priorities.” Federal law requires 30 days notice to Congress before removing an inspector general. Trump gave zero days. A federal judge later ruled the firings were unlawful. Among those fired was the Defense Department’s inspector general, whose office had opened a review of SpaceX’s compliance with federal reporting protocols, and the Agriculture Department’s inspector general, whose office had been investigating Elon Musk’s Neuralink startup. By late 2025, over 75 percent of presidentially appointed inspector general positions sat vacant.
Trump then turned to the military itself. His administration fired senior military officers, with the firings disproportionately targeting women, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told more than 800 generals and admirals that the military inspector general process “has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver’s seat.” Read that sentence again. The man running the Pentagon told the entire senior military leadership that the accountability system protecting service members and taxpayers was the enemy. When you fire the watchdogs and then tell the generals that oversight itself is the problem, you are not reforming government. You are removing every person and every system that could say no. The pattern matches Rees’s description with chilling precision. Loyalty to the leader, not competence, determines who stays and who goes.
Warning Nine: Extinguishing the Rule of Law and Controlling Judges
Rees warns about the destruction of legal norms and the subordination of the judiciary to the executive. In Nazi Germany, judges who did not serve the regime’s interests were removed or intimidated into compliance.
In March 2025, the Trump administration deported approximately 200 Venezuelan immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime statute not invoked since World War II, and continued the deportations after a federal judge ordered them to stop. Chief Judge James Boasberg found probable cause that the administration’s actions constituted contempt of court. Trump responded by calling for Boasberg’s impeachment.
Throughout 2025, roughly a third of the federal judiciary received threats. Data showed these threats spiked each time Trump used hostile rhetoric against judges. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson stated publicly that the attacks appeared designed to intimidate the judiciary. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy adviser, shared photos and biographies of three judges who ruled against Trump’s tariff authority, labeling it “judicial tyranny.” The administration described itself as being at “war” with judges whose rulings it opposed. In February 2026, Trump attacked his own Supreme Court appointees after they ruled against his tariff power, saying they “openly disrespect the Presidents who nominate them.”
The New York City Bar Association issued a statement condemning the attacks, calling them a threat to the constitutional system of government and a danger to the physical safety of judges.
Warning Ten: Scapegoating and the Perpetual Search for Enemies
Rees writes that Hitler always needed enemies. He understood that bonding people together requires convincing them who to hate. And shrewd dictators know that the search for enemies must never end. If you lack enemies, you create them.
Immigrants are Trump’s primary scapegoats. He has called them an “invasion.” He has said they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” language that echoes white supremacist rhetoric and, as multiple journalists and scholars have noted, language that echoes Hitler’s own words. The Human Rights Watch 2026 report documented racial and ethnic scapegoating as a defining characteristic of Trump’s second term.
Trump does not limit his scapegoating to immigrants. Federal judges who rule against him are “rogue” and “deranged.” Media outlets that report critically are “the enemy of the people.” Democrats are “traitors.” Universities are “indoctrination centers.” Federal employees are “deep state” operatives. The circle of enemies grows wider each month. That expansion is not a failure of discipline. It is the strategy itself. The enemy list must always grow because the leader’s power depends on the public’s fear.
Warning Eleven: The Escalation of Racism
Rees traces a direct line from casual prejudice to legal discrimination to genocide. The escalation was gradual. Each step made the next one feel more acceptable. By the time the killing began, the population had been conditioned to dehumanize the victims through years of incremental escalation.
Trump told the American people that immigrants from Latin America are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He used the Alien Enemies Act, a law designed for wartime use against foreign nationals of enemy nations, to deport Venezuelans to a mega prison in El Salvador notorious for its inhumane conditions. The administration conducted immigration raids in churches, courthouses, and schools, places that had traditionally been off limits. ICE custody deaths in 2025 reached the highest number in more than two decades, with at least 32 people dying and additional deaths in early 2026.
In his 2026 State of the Union Address, Trump again targeted both immigrants and transgender Americans with false claims, feeding the escalation cycle that Rees describes. Each speech pushes the boundary of acceptable dehumanization a little further. Each executive order normalizes treatment that would have been unthinkable five years ago. That is how escalation works. You do not wake up one morning in a fascist state. You slide into it, one normalized cruelty at a time.
Warning Twelve: Killing at a Distance and the Mechanisms of Mass Harm
Rees’s final warning examines how the Nazis structured their killing operations to create psychological distance between the perpetrators and the victims. Gas chambers replaced face to face executions. Bureaucratic language replaced honest descriptions of murder. The system was designed so that no single person felt fully responsible for the outcome.
The Trump administration has created its own mechanisms of distance. DOGE eliminated agencies and programs from behind computer screens, sending termination emails to hundreds of people at a time. Musk celebrated the destruction of USAID, an agency that operated in more than two dozen conflict zones, as if it were a game. Within two hours on a single evening in March 2025, over 300 staffers at the U.S. Institute of Peace received termination notices in their personal emails. The people making those decisions never looked into the eyes of the people whose lives they destroyed.
The administration’s immigration enforcement operates the same way. Deportation flights carry people to foreign prisons. Strikes on boats in international waters kill unnamed people based on unverified intelligence. Executive orders revoke legal status for entire categories of people with the stroke of a pen. The human cost is enormous.
The Iran war is the most extreme expression of killing at a distance in the Trump era. Operation Epic Fury has killed over 2,000 Iranians including more than 170 children in a single strike on a girls school in southern Iran, all ordered from Washington by leaders who will never see the bodies, never smell the smoke, never hear the screams. Trump announced the strikes on Truth Social, Hegseth posted “Back to the Stone Age” on X, and somewhere on the other side of the world, a school full of children ceased to exist.
The psychological distance between the decision makers and the consequences of their decisions is by design.
What This Means for You
Laurence Rees wrote this book because the terrible crimes he spent three decades studying did not happen because the perpetrators were German. They happened because the perpetrators were human beings. That is his most chilling warning.
Every single one of the twelve conditions Rees identified is present in the United States right now. Conspiracy theories are the foundation of government policy. “Them and us” thinking divides the country along racial, ethnic, and political lines. The leader demands to be treated as a hero and calls for the punishment of those who criticize him. Young people are being fed a diet of propaganda through social media. Political violence has been pardoned and endorsed. Elites have enabled every step of the descent. The free press is under direct assault. Political opponents are purged. The rule of law is being dismantled. Scapegoating drives the news cycle. Racism is escalating. And the mechanisms of harm operate at a distance designed to minimize accountability.
You are not powerless in the face of this.
You can register to vote and make sure everyone in your life is registered. You can show up at the 2026 midterm elections in November and bring every person you know. You can support independent journalism. You can call your representatives and demand they defend the Constitution. You can refuse to normalize what is happening. You can talk about this at your kitchen table, at your workplace, and in your community.
The Nazis were defeated. Rees ends his book with those four words. They are a reminder that fascism is not inevitable. It is not unstoppable. It rises when good people stay quiet. It falls when good people stand up.
You need to stand up. Right now. Today. Before it is too late.
Share this piece. Talk about it. And vote like your democracy depends on it. Because it does.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
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