Exactly 10 Years Ago This Month, I Was Right About Trump

Author

Adam Brown
October 06, 2025

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This month marks the ten year anniversary of the most consequential article I’ve ever written. It was called “5 Ways Donald Trump Perfectly Mirrors Hitler’s Rise to Power”.

If you’ve already crunched the numbers, then you know “ten years ago this month” translates to “more than a year before Trump was elected.” I think I’m not exaggerating when I say I was one of maybe ten people in the country at the time who had an actual platform to say crazy things from and used it to shout about how Trump was a legitimate threat to democracy.

For the most part, anyone who dealt in political commentary at the time treated Trump’s campaign as a literal joke.

Now, here we are a decade later, still making jokes while America is building concentration camps, increasing the budget for our burgeoning secret police force by 400 percent, and threatening to kick entire television networks off the air if they don’t stop saying mean things about the president, and even all of that represents just a small fraction of the blatantly Nazi-inspired moves this administration has made since retaking power in 2024.

So, in “celebration” of me nailing the threat a decade ago, let’s talk about some updated reasons why the Trump administration still mirrors the Nazis’ rise to power.

Paraphrasing Hitler

Well before the 2024 election even happened, Trump raised eyebrows by using phrases in his public speeches that blatantly echoed the words of Adolf Hitler. Like how during a November 2023 speech in Claremont, New Hampshire, he said this:

“On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

His use of the word “vermin” is especially concerning when you consider that Hitler is credited with the following quote:

“When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?” 

Trump also said this at the same 2023 New Hampshire rally:

“The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left and it’s growing every day, every single day. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.” 

Surely it’s mere coincidence, but when selling the German public on the notion that Jews needed to be eliminated from society, Hitler referred to them as “the enemy within.” It’s also a phrase Trump has returned to several times since that 2023 rally to describe the vague assemblage of Americans he’s decided are “terrorist threats” to the nation, most notoriously during the pep rally he and “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth subjected top military generals and admirals to recently.

Military Funeral Honors For January 6th Rioter

Back in August, the Air Force offered full military funeral honors to Ashli Babbitt, the January 6th rioter who was shot and killed by police while storming the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Several Democratic lawmakers vehemently opposed the decision, including Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, a Marine Corps veteran, who said this:

“Ashli Babbitt was a traitor. She didn’t die protecting our country. She died trying to tear it down. Military honors are sacred. They are reserved for the men and women who swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution and the rule of law, and actually live up to it. To give them to Babbitt would be a spit in the face to all of them and to every veteran who died defending this country.”

Making martyrs out of people who’d previously attempted to overthrow the government is another page straight out of the Nazi Germany playbook, where the participants of Hitler’s notorious coup attempt known as the Beer Hall Putsch were celebrated as martyrs who fired the first shots in the war to save the soul of the country.

Deploying Occupation Troops In Defiance of the Law

One of Hitler’s first acts of military aggression was to deploy German troops to the Rhineland, a violation of the Treaty of Versailles. That none of the countries with a stake in that treaty did anything about it gave the Fuhrer all the confidence he needed to launch a whole bunch of increasingly bold military actions that eventually ended in … America dropping two nukes on Japan and absorbing a bunch of Nazis into our own government? Weird!

Meanwhile, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, Trump is feverishly deploying National Guard troops to American cities that only he believes are overrun with violent criminal terrorists who are making life a living hell for the normal folk, a violation of this country’s whole entire brand.

As extreme as that is, it seems like it might just be the confidence building exercise for the inevitable day when he sends the full force of the military after “the enemy within” here at home.

The First Camps Opened Really Fast

It took less than three months after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 for the first concentration camp at Dachau to open for business.

Things didn’t move quite that fast here. The already notorious Alligator Ausch … sorry … Alcatraz took a comparatively sloth-like six months after Trump’s inauguration to open its doors.

In this country’s defense, we didn’t need to build quite so fast because that guy in El Salvador was nice enough to let us use his gulag until we could get our own up and running. It takes a village, you know?

If you were wondering how long it would take for people to enter Alligator Alcatraz and mysteriously disappear forever, we are apparently already there.

Purging the Civil Service

For the Nazis and Team Project 2025 both, one of the first orders of business was mass firings of civil service employees deemed to be at odds with the party’s ideology.

In Nazi Germany, that happened by way of the 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which aggressively culled Jews and other undesirables from the ranks of government employment.

Here in America, we mostly just let Elon Musk do it. It’s expected that by the end of the year some 300,000 federal workers will have been let go, most of them thanks to the Tesla supervillain’s DOGE initiatives.

Charlie Kirk, Horst Wessel, and the Reichstag Fire

Did you hear White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s speech at the Charlie Kirk memorial service? Lots of people who’ve studied Nazi Germany did, and they couldn’t help but notice that his words were hauntingly similar to those of a 1932 Joseph Goebbels speech titled “The Storm Is Coming”.

Not only is the content similar, but the context is as well. The Goebbels speech was delivered in the wake of the 1930 murder of Nazi SA member Horst Wessel, a death that was blamed on “degenerate communist subhumans” before anyone was even sure who’d done the shooting.

Another Nazi-era crime of murky origins, the Reichstag Fire, led to the passage of laws that allowed for the arrest and incarceration of political opponents without specific charges. Does the Trump administration’s terrifying NSPM-7 order that designates Antifa as a terrorist organization, passed in the wake of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, allow for the same thing? Time will tell, but a whole lot of concerned groups seem to think it does.

Firing Comedians Who Say Mean Things About the Regime

It will surprise no one to learn that, much like the sanctioning of comedian Jimmy Kimmel for the crime of saying mean things about Trump, the Nazi government acted harshly toward those who dared make jokes about them.

In February 1939, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels “ended the professional careers” of five comedians by expelling them from the Chamber of Culture on accusations that “in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades.”

On the bright side, things haven’t reached Nazi levels here when it comes to freedom of the press just yet. Germany passed the “Editor’s Law” in 1933 that required party approval to work as a journalist in the country, with approvals limited mostly to Aryans.

So far, the Trump administration has only asked that journalists agree to seek government approval before reporting on anything related to the Department of Defense, even if the information is unclassified. At least that was the impression the involved journalists seemed to get. The Pentagon later issued a statement, on Twitter currently known as X, of course, calling those claims a straight up lie.

So don’t fret, media, America’s status as the 57th freest country on the planet is safe and secure for now!

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