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Front Burner Transcript for May 21, 2025

Host: Jayme Poisson

[Music: Theme]

JAYME POISSON: Hey everyone, it's Jayme. Today on the show, historian Timothy Ryback is with me. Timothy is a historian, author, and writer with The Atlantic and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. Last year he published Takeover, which documents the ways that Hitler and his enablers in the German establishment cleared the pathway to Nazism through constitutional means. And we wanted to bring him on to discuss some of what he refers to as disturbing echoes between Nazi Germany and contemporary America, particularly between Adolf Hitler and U.S. President Donald Trump. Democratic governor of Minnesota and former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz made one of these comparisons just the other day.

SOUNDCLIP

TIM WALZ: Donald Trump's modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets. They're in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons. No chance to mount a defence, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye. Just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans and disappeared. To be clear, there's no way for us to know whether they were actually criminals or not, because they refused to give them a trial. We're supposed to just take their word for it.

JP: Historians and political journalists have long made these same parallels, including but not limited to Trump's attacks on the media, an assault on the federal bureaucracy, threatening to deploy U.S. soldiers on citizens, and potentially arbitrary detention by removing the right of habeas corpus. Trump and his supporters like Steve Bannon have also openly discussed how he could bend the law in order to run for a third term.

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STEVE BANNON: President Trump is going to run for a third term, and President Trump is going to be elected again. On the afternoon of January 20th of 2029, he's going to be president of the United States.

JP: I'll be talking about much of this and more with Timothy today.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Mr. Ryback, thank you very much for coming onto the show.

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Hi Jayme, it's great to be on Front Burner.

JP: So I think that we should begin this by addressing a major question many listeners of this episode are likely to have about the salience or legitimacy of this historical link between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. Many might think of the so-called Godwin's Law, this idea that nothing can be compared to the unique evil and depravity of Hitler or the Nazis. And just what do you make of that argument, as a scholar on Germany and as an American, that these comparisons between Trump and Hitler are inherently inappropriate?

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Well, I'd say as a historian -- and I am a historian, not a political scientist or political theorist -- um, I would never draw a direct line from one historical figure to a contemporary political figure. Because, you know, as we know, history doesn't repeat itself. Um, every individual is unique. Every context in which they're functioning is unique. Now, can we talk about resonances, absolutely, and some disturbing echoes? Those, there certainly are.

JP: You've written authoritatively about how Hitler essentially used democracy, the Constitution, and the law to clear the pathway to Nazism, that he was intent on destroying democracy using the democratic system itself. I know that this is a big question, but um, can you talk about Hitler's relationship with democracy and how he went about using it?

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Well, I think as we know [unclear] remember, in 1923, Hitler staged this Beer Hall Putsch. He tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic through violent means. He failed, he ended up in prison, then he began reflecting on political systems. He read extensively; he wrote Mein Kampf. And he emerged from, um, the Landsberg prison in 1924, December of 1924, vowing to destroy democracy through democratic means. And I think what, what I find interesting, A, about Hitler, but also the people around him, especially his legal advisors, is that as much as they hated democracy, they understood democratic processes and structures as well as anyone. And over the course of the next six, eight years, they learned how to use this system against itself. You know, one of Hitler's closest aides was a, or one of his closest lieutenants was Joseph Goebbels, who went on to become minister of propaganda. But Goebbles wrote early on in this process, the big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction. And I think... and the national socialists, Hitler in particular, understood this, um, and they exploited every dimension of democracy to bring down the system. I think one of the key moments was in September, 1930, when Adolf Hitler appeared before the constitutional court -- basically the highest court in the land -- and he told the judges in court that Article 1 of our Constitution states that the government is an expression of the will of the people. Hitler speaking says, When I come to power, he says, I will represent the will of the people and I will pour the system, I will shape the system to my own vision, which everyone understood was a fascist dictatorship. Um, which was an astonishing admission in court. I think even more astonishing was the judge's response, which was, 'So, only through constitutional means?', to which Hitler crisply replied, 'Jawohl.' Um, so he made it very clear from the outset that he was going to function within the parameters of the legal system, but was going to exploit it and use every aspect of it, um, to lead to its own destruction.

[music]

JP: So when you look at the current moment that we're in, where does your mind go? What are some of those troubling echoes that, that you see here?

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Well, I think there are a number of them in which we hear about this intention of going after political enemies.

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DONALD TRUMP: What a difference a rigged and crooked election had on our country, when you think about it. And the people who did this to us should go to jail. They should go to jail.

TIMOTHY RYBACK: And using the government to pursue those.

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DONALD TRUMP: We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the big-- and and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by national guard, or if really necessary, by the military.

TIMOTHY RYBACK: The attacks on the press.

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DONALD TRUMP: A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people. And they are. They are the enemy of the people.

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Our current concern is to what degree will Trump ignore decisions of the courts. And we've seen this happen.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER: District Court Judge James Boasberg said he found, quote, "probable cause" to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt after its willful disregard of his order last month to halt flights transferring immigration detainees from the U.S. to El Salvador, where they ended up at the notorious CECOT mega-prison.

TIMOTHY RYBACK: In some ways, Trump is functioning, I think, with a broader mandate than Hitler had when he came to power. And Hitler's first day in office, at his first cabinet meeting, he sat down and he wanted to be dictator on day one. He's sitting there with his cabinet. He outlines the measures he's going to take. And every time he turned around, he was told why he couldn't do this. He wanted to go after the Communist Party. They said, you can't, you're functioning in a democratic system. It's a legitimate party. You just can't, um, you know, abolish them. There were constitutional constraints. There were foreign policy constraints. And it took Hitler 53 days to batter his way through this. Um, the most immediate resonances I think I see: one was the purging of the civil service. Um, one of the first things Hitler did, literally within minutes of this first cabinet meeting, he fired several very respected, long-serving, um, senior officials in the government. He then assigned Hermann Göring, who later became Herr der Luftwaffe, but he basically sent Hermann Göring in to purge the civil service. And the man went in there and basically said -- he sent around a memo to the entire civil service, and he said, anyone who does not have absolute loyalty to the new government, do the, quote unquote, "honourable thing" and resign. Um, they went into the police departments, they fired the heads of the police departments. They cleared out senior people at state radio. They were clearing house, as it were.

JP: You know, it makes me think of this quote, when I'm thinking about the contemporary moment that we're in. Um, it's from Project 2025, which is a document that we've covered on the show a lot. One of Project 2025's authors said: "We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains." Um, and of course, we know what Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has been doing as well.

TIMOTHY RYBACK: The interesting thing here, [chuckles] Jayme, is that, you know, the symbol used by Elon Musk with this, was the chainsaw.

SOUNDCLIP

[electronic music playing over loudspeakers at an event]

[Elon Musk roars?]

ELON MUSK: This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw!

[individuals in the crowd yell out]

ELON MUSK: Wooaaah!

TIMOTHY RYBACK: What was used at that time -- and the New York Times reported on this. They said that Hitler is taking a steamroller to the civil service, or the government in general. But it really was a, a compl-- a clearing out of the civil service, a real purge of the government.

[music]

JP: The entire body of U.S. law rests on this idea of due process, right. That a person has the right to challenge the legality of their detention in a court of law. And it is this very idea that Donald Trump's senior advisor, Stephen Miller, has called into question. Last week, he said:

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STEPHEN MILLER: Well, the Constitution is clear -- and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land -- that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So it is a, it's an option we're actively looking at.

JP: ...in a bid to deport more alleged illegal immigrants without interference from the courts. Miller has framed this as an emergency measure, saying that the United States is under, quote, "invasion by illegal immigrants." They have also invoked or openly discussed obscure wartime laws.

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STEPHEN MILLER: This is settled law. Alien Enemies Act has been on the books and has been upheld for over 200 years.

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DONALD TRUMP: If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.

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REPORTER: To do this, the president would need to invoke a group of laws known as the Insurrection Act, which dates from 1807.

JP: Habeas corpus is older than the U.S. Constitution. It has been present in the English-speaking world since the 15th century. And just what do you make of this idea, the possible suspension of habeas corpus, and does it conjure anything up for you from the past?

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Well, unfortunately, it does. And the German word that comes to mind is 'Schutzhaft,' which means 'protective custody.' This was embedded, going back into Prussian law, back into the 1850s, was there. And what Schutzhaft was, was the ability for the police to take someone into, quote unquote, "protective custody," either to protect them harm from the public or to protect the public from harm from this individual. Now, it was a vaguely conceived process because you were not supposed to detain anyone for an extended amount of time. The idea was you take them briefly into custody, you see if they're gonna be a threat to society or not, and then you either let them go or you present them with a charge, and then you-- they enter the legal process. What the Nazis did was to take this protective custody and begin rounding up hundreds and then thousands of individuals. And because of this ill-defined timeframe, um, this protective custody became a permanent state in which people found themselves in a legal grey zone. Because you're not charged with anything, you have no legal recourse. Where this led to, and this was by late March, they had taken thousands and thousands of people -- mostly communist social democrats, um, and Jews -- into protective custody. They were packed into gymnasiums, they were packed into schools. Um, they -- and eventually they had to start concentrating them in certain places. Um, and these became known as concentration camps. And this is where-- these became collecting points for people who were under protect-- or taken in under protective custody.

JP: Right. So when you hear about a case, like um, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an immigrant who was wrongly sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador recently, despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation due to fear of persecution...

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WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY LEAVITT: Abrego Garcia will never be a Maryland father. He will never live in the United States of America again.

SOUNDCLIP

STEPHEN MILLER: He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador. [CROSS-TALK]

FOX NEWS HOST: Okay, so do you still believe that he is a member--

STEPHEN MILLER: He's an illegal alien...

SOUNDCLIP

PRESIDENT NAYIB BUKELE: How can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States, or what do I do? Of course, I'm not going to do it.

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INTERVIEWER: You could get him back. There's a phone on this desk.

DONALD TRUMP: I could.

INTERVIEWER: You could pick it up, [TRUMP: I could.] and with all the power of the presidency, you could call up the president of El Salvador and say, send him back right now.

DONALD TRUMP: And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that.

INTERVIEWER: But the court has [TRUMP: But he's not.] ordered you to facilitate...

JP: ...what are you thinking? You know, of course, the Supreme Court filed a unanimous decision ruling that Garcia's return to the U.S. needed to be facilitated. But Trump himself has described it as a 9-0 decision in his favour.

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DONALD TRUMP: ...after we get out all of the fake news from CNN and all these other people, we won that case nine to nothing.

JP: Saying that the Supreme Court has actually, has actually agreed with him, right?

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Based-- Having watched the processes in the Weimar Republic, when a democracy is under threat, you basically have, to my mind, three levels of defence. The first is at the voting booth, where each of us cast a vote. We either like the person who's elected or not. Um. And they then head the government. But your next line of defence are your elected representatives. In Germany, it was in the Reichstag. In the United States, it's in Congress. And it's up, then, to the elected representatives. The checks and balance system, as it exists, is there to keep the executive in check from exceeding. Now, that is the role of Congress. And let-- And we have midterm elections that either reset this or move ahead. And to my mind, you know, the midterm elections coming up will tell us a lot about the future direction of America. But the third and final line of defence -- and you've mentioned this -- are the courts, the judicial system. And to what degree the courts will hold these processes in check, A; but B, if the president or the chancellor decides to ignore the courts, what happens after that? And the interesting thing in Germany was when Hitler came to power, the courts began coming up with incredibly contorted decisions on certain cases, because they were afraid that if they contradicted the gov-- if they ruled against the government and the government simply ignored them, the courts would lose all legitimacy. So you sort of watch them doing this, this final dance of death with democracy, as it were, as the court struggled to maintain some semblance of rule of law, even as the democratic system was collapsing.

[music]

JP: You know, we've been wanting to have a conversation like this on the show for some time now. We've spoken with fascism scholars about the threat of American fascism, we've spoken to politicians and authors and economists. And many have left us with the impression that American democracy is indeed under threat in an unprecedented way. But I think there will be many in our audience who hear that and they think that incursions on democracy means tanks in the streets and soldiers at polling stations, when really, political revolutions or authoritarianism can also be introduced via paperwork. That coups can also mean lawyers and constitutional experts and bureaucrats quietly strategizing ways to use the established legal order to subvert the government. But... you know, what some have referred to as legal nihilism or legal revolution. And to what degree do you believe this was present in Nazi Germany? Do you see elements of it in contemporary America too?

TIMOTHY RYBACK: I would say [clears throat] that this is one of the more disturbing and possibly even disheartening aspects. Um. Even at this point, I -- you know, when you, when you watch Hitler's actions, he functioned within the parameters of the law. As Goebbels said, you know, democracy gives itself, you know, gives its enemies the tools to its own destruction. But you watched how carefully Adolf Hitler was using this to dissemble the democratic system piece by piece, um, using constitutional means, sometimes coercion and threats toward political enemies. Um, and I think the, probably one of the key moments for Hitler was the March 5th election in 1933. What happened was Hitler, at his best, in an open and free election, only received 37% of the vote. So frankly, Donald Trump is polling numbers that Adolf Hitler could never have dreamed of in a, in a free and open, um, election. But Hitler wanted to reach a 51% absolute majority. He never did this, even in this March 5th election, when the political system, when he had control over the, over the radio, when he had suppressed a lot of the political parties, there had been this, you know, this famous Reichstag fire in which basically Congress went up in flames. They declared a national emergency. This was a week before the elections. Even with all of that, Hitler only managed 44% of the vote. That's the most he ever did. However, he used the parliamentary system of multiple parties to basically begin to dissemble, um, the Weimar Republic. The final moment came on March 23rd, when he put before the Reichstag, the Congress, 600-member body, um, he wanted an enabling act which would give him four years of dictatorial power, basically suspended everything in the Constitution. Made Hitler dictator.

JP: A question many have through periods like this is how and why establishment figures accommodate and even conspire with authoritarian leaders. Just going through your work, I found it interesting the degree to which German elites, uh, believed Hitler to be crazy or fascisic [ph], and yet found ways to justify continuing to work with him. Like German president Hindenburg, who accommodated Hitler despite understanding him to be dangerous, or former chancellor Schleicher, who had a strategy he referred to as a taming process, which was supposed to be a way to sideline the radicals of the Nazi party and bring the movement into mainstream politics. And how did Germany's political establishment fail to stop or even conspire with Hitler?

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Well, this is where he was just massively underestimated. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in January of '33, the operative phrases were, you know, soup is never eaten as hot as it's cooked, so that he will be, he'll be much calmer once he's in office. He was boxed in, he only had three seats in the cabinets. And, you know, one of the operative phrases was, you know, in two months we'll have him in such a tight corner, he'll squeak. Um, and the idea was that they could contain him. Oh, the other person -- the other thing I might mention here, I think is important, is, (one?) is the politicians, but the others are the industrialists. And this is also where I do see some unfortunate parallels, um, with what happened in the United States. Um. You know, keep in mind, when you hear the word national socialism, okay, this was the Nazi Party. They were nationalists, but they were also socialists. Now, this is not something that the industrial elite or the bankers wanted anything to do with. And Hitler really was considered a pariah. Um, there were a couple of individuals, but for the most part, the the the German business community kept their distance from Hitler. But then once he comes to power, suddenly you see these companies, one after the other, lining up behind him. The most chilling, to my mind, is the company called IG Farben, which was the ultimate product of the Weimar Republic. It was founded in the mid-1920s, became the largest pharmaceutical and chemical company in the world. A lot of Nobel Prize laureates, a lot of Jewish individuals, scientists. Not a single Nazi on the board of directors. Um. Hitler comes to power, and within a decade, IG Farben is the company that's producing the Zyklon B gas for the extermination facilities at Auschwitz. So, it's how these companies get on board with certain things. But how, how you get off this train once it's rolling down the tracks, um, into this nightmare moment, is not... I think if anything, corporations should be cautious about what they find themselves committing to as these things move forward.

JP: So just when you saw the head of all those tech companies -- Zuckerberg, Bezos, Elon -- all lined up at the inauguration, what was kind of briefly going through your head?

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Well, that was-- what was going through my head when I watched this were the corporate executives who were lining up, um, back in 1933. And the justification at that time was, our primary obligation is to our shareholders. And they needed to be in alignment with the government if they were to get government contracts. The problem is what direction your government heads in, and when you do get the government contract for producing Zyklon B gas for Auschwitz, I'm not sure that's any place any corporation really wants to be.

[music]

JP: It's been reported in mainstream media that Trump has for years now floated the idea of deploying active soldiers onto the streets of American cities to deal with protesters, or what he has referred to as the, quote, "enemy within." This plan is reported to include the invocation of the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad powers to use the military for domestic law enforcement. One senior member of the team behind Project 2025 said, quote, "We want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defence community come in and say, 'That's an inappropriate use of what you're trying to do.'" You've written about, um, similar ongoings in Germany, where Hitler desired to use the army to crush public unrest, eventually developing what was called a shooting degree, right? And what, what do you make of Trump's impulses to deploy active duty soldiers against Americans?

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Well, I, I have to put on my historian's cap here and say, [laughs] you know, I, I'm not a political commentator of contemporary events, but what I will tell you is, one moment in one of Hitler's first cabinet meetings, when he talks about wanting to take on some fairly draconian policies, and some-- one of the cabinet members says, well, this may cause a lot of social unrest. And Hitler then says, well, let's-- can we call in the army to quell this? The Blomberg, who was the equivalent of the secretary of defence, says to Hitler, I'm sorry, Mr. Chancellor, but German soldiers are trained to fight an external enemy. It is unimaginable to me that a German soldier would ever be ordered to shoot a German citizen. And Hitler was told that to his face directly at the very beginning. Um. One might hope that a similar ethic might prevail 80 years later, 9-- almost 100 years later, I'm sorry. I can't believe we're having this conversation almost a century later.

JP: You have already spoken throughout this conversation about the Weimar Republic, which are the democratic years in Germany just before the introduction of Nazism. Um. But I just wonder if you wanted to expand a little more on what you think made it an era that could be exploited by radicals and revolutionaries in government, and whether you see sort of any viable, any more viable comparisons between that time and modern-day America.

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Well, I... I guess what I would say on this, um. Back in the 1980s, I was, I was a graduate student at Harvard University and was teaching a class on Weimar and Nazi Germany as a teaching fellow. And I was always an apologist for the Weimar Republic. Um, I used to tell the students, look, this was a democracy that only lasted-- was in existence for 13 years, basically a half a generation, um, of, you know, experience with democratic processes and values. I said, you can't compare that with the United States of America, which at that time, we'd had more than 10, what, 12 generations of Americans with this democratic experience. Um. And at that moment, it was inconceivable to me that we could be in a moment like this. Um. In retrospect, it's incredible how naive that assessment was. Where this goes, I cannot say, but I think for us to look into the past for examples, for resonances, for cautionary tales, I think it's definitely worth doing. There are lessons to be learned from the past.

JP: Mr. RYBACK, thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure.

TIMOTHY RYBACK: Thank you very much, Jayme. It was very nice being on Front Burner.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right, that is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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Trump, Hitler and how democracies die - Transcript

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