Not long after the Second World War, the Jewish, German-born political philosopher Leo Strauss coined the term reductio ad Hitlerum. It suggests that simply comparing something to Adolf Hitler does not inevitably taint it with the Nazi dictator’s terrible crimes. Hitler was a vegetarian, but that doesn’t make all vegetarians bad people.
When the internet arrived several decades later, attorney Mike Godwin updated Strauss. “As an online discussion grows longer,” he said, “the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler” increases.
These days, few are willing to compare anyone or anything to Hitler, for fear of invalidating their argument. This can have the effect of closing off comparisons that could be illuminating.
Nowhere is this more strikingly illustrated than in the closing scene of Regime Change – Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s excellent, glowingly reviewed book about the first year of the second Trump administration – in which the authors finally gain an interview with the president to fact-check the damning material they have gathered.
Haberman has been reporting on Trump since his New York property developer days, and Swan has covered both his presidencies. The New York Times journalists knew from experience that Trump had two main modes of dealing with journalists: silk-smooth salesman’s patter and outright bullying.
Days before their interview, Trump had unloaded on Haberman via his Truth Social site in personal terms, threatening to add her to his latest lawsuit against the newspaper
When they met at the Oval Office on March 16 this year, 17 days into Trump’s ill-conceived, unlawful war on Iran, the president wanted to talk about the maple trees he was ordering for the White House, as part of the large-scale renovations that were under legal challenge. He wanted to talk about the 339 billion views of Trump TikToks: “That’s some number, huh?”
And he wanted to let them know that, in a historian’s view, he is “without question, the most powerful man that the planet has ever known – by a long way.” More powerful, in the historian’s assessment, than Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Mao, Stalin – and, yes, Hitler.
Leaving aside the only-in-Trumpworld twist that the “historian” turned out to be the caddy of golfer Gary Player, for Trump, what mattered was that while previous leaders had huge power, he had more.
“What was revealing was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis, but the way he inhabited it: the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture and detention – and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear. He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed, between those who liberated and those who enslaved.”
It is a revelation that chills to the bone. And it makes sense of how Trump has behaved in his second term, untrammelled by the adults in the room who advised against or blocked his impulses between 2017 and 2021.
The authors show how Trump has willingly, if not wilfully, upended decades of international law, treaties and conventions to wield as much power as possible – at home and, especially, abroad. This power is being exercised pitilessly, sometimes capriciously, against political enemies, perceived and real. Trump’s targets have ranged from trans people to the news media and entire nations, such as Venezuela, Iran and potentially Greenland.
Trump has also, according to both Regime Change and exhaustive reporting by David Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker, abused his power to enrich himself and his family.
Most alarming is Trump’s deep aversion to any consideration of the morality of his actions. There is little if any evidence that Trump cares about other people’s suffering. His narcissism, plain to see for years, is underscored in Regime Change.
Haberman and Swan report an incident during the 2024 trial over charges that Trump falsified business records before the 2016 presidential election, to conceal a payment to porn actress Stephanie Clifford (aka Stormy Daniels) to cover up his alleged affair with her. On the fourth day, a mentally ill man consumed by conspiracy theories set himself on fire in the park across the street from the courtroom.