This article, lightly edited for style, was previously published on January 28, 2025 in the News-Gazette as a “My Turn” guest column, under the title “Echoes of William Shirer’s Berlin Diary.” Used with permission.
One of the first acts of Donald Trump’s presidency was to pardon more than 1500 federal prisoners serving sentences for the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2020, including the leaders of 14 far-right militias and white supremacy groups. This, combined with an executive order authorizing an inquiry into the alleged politicization of the Department of Justice under the Biden administration, delivered a succinct message to American would-be brownshirts: extralegal violence supporting Trump’s political projects would be not merely tolerated, but protected.
If it doesn’t scare you to think about empowered militias roaming America, then perhaps think about the setting in which these actions took place. It wasn’t enough for Trump to hold a marathon of political revenge in the hours after he assumed the presidency—he had to design it as a public spectacle reminiscent of the Nuremburg rallies. Seated before thousands of cheering acolytes in the Capitol One Arena, Trump signed executive orders removing protections for the environment, for the underrepresented, and for those facing violence in distant countries or here at home because of their racial or sexual or gender identities. If he could have burned copies of the policies he was disemboweling, he would have; but even without that touch the echoes of fascist theater were unmistakable. The invention of a national crisis justifying extraordinary measures, the demonization of scapegoated groups, the hollowing out of institutions capable of challenging political power . . . Trump, not the border, is the real national crisis threatening our lives.
A book that weighs heavily on my mind these days is William Shirer’s Berlin Diary (1941), a record of Germany’s passage into fascism told through Shirer’s daily observations. Berlin Diary is less well known than Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), but to me the Diary is the more intellectually chastening. Shirer was an American foreign correspondent based in Berlin for much of the late 1930s, and even though he enjoyed privileged access to government sources and a varied social circle, he was unable to recognize what he was seeing until the monster was fully formed.
For the modern reader of the Diary, precursors to the Holocaust are painfully obvious. Shirer described the manipulation of public sentiment, the justifications for violating policy norms, and the new tools of control in his recounting of conversations, speeches, and sightings. Shirer loathed what he saw but also dismissed it as a temporary aberration from the German culture he thought he knew. When German Jewish friends asked his help in acquiring visas to escape, he even encouraged them not to abandon their careers or communities and to wait it out instead. He could not believe the new regime capable of putting in place permanent legal discrimination, let alone the cultural and later physical elimination of its own citizens. He was wrong. Only in 1940 did he acknowledge that those he had dismissed as alarmist had been right, and the Diary was published both as atonement for his intellectual failure and as a warning to others who refuse to see what is developing before their eyes.
I’m worried now, and not just for the immigrants but for all of us. When I speak up, I’m told that my profession (historian) has darkened my perspective and made me an alarmist. I am told that constitutional protections, or the costs of mass deportation, or the better angels of our nature will somehow protect us from abuses; that we are “not like that.” As a historian I have no trust in this argument. It is only possible to believe that America is “not like that” by overlooking great swaths of American history and current life spattered with violent oppression. It is better to guard against becoming the monster ourselves not by imagining that we are innately exceptional, but by remembering that we are also imperfect—and zealously watching for the abuse of power.
The implications of the first hours of the new administration should put us all on alert. Trump has moved from demonizing immigrants to declaring a national emergency, justifying expansions of executive power. He has threatened the Justice Department and other government and media institutions with a loyalty witch hunt, and proposes dismantling the policies and legal machinery designed to protect us all. And he has sanctioned violent intimidation by pardoning the January 6 felons.
Concern with the trajectory of Trump’s policies isn’t alarmist, it’s a rational response to the evidence before our eyes.
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