TRIUMPH OF THE WILL 2025

Abstract: This week Arne Werchick examines the escalating authoritarian trajectory of the Trump administration through a series of recent executive actions and policy changes that parallel historical fascist movements. The analysis draws connections between Trump's consolidation of power and Hitler's rise, noting similarities in rhetoric, the establishment of rapid-deployment military forces for domestic use, the militarization of federal law enforcement, and the systematic undermining of judicial independence. Key developments include the renaming of the Defense Department, the creation of specialized federal units and National Guard quick reaction forces, the use of military force against suspected drug smugglers in international waters, and the increasing persecution of critics through FBI searches and prosecutions. Tthese actions, combined with attacks on voting rights, the judiciary, and international relationships, represent a crossing of the line from republic to fascist state, though it acknowledges that upcoming midterm elections could potentially provide a democratic check on this authoritarian consolidation if they proceed without disruption.

“The government will henceforth exercise the powers which hitherto belonged to the Reichstag. The authority of the Reich government will henceforth be unlimited.” -- Adolph Hitler, March 23, 1933

“The authority of the Führer now stands above every law. He is responsible only to his conscience and to the German people.”-- Adolph Hitler, August 19, 1934

“I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.” -- Donald Trump, August 26, 2025

In 1935 Adolph Hitler commissioned his good friend Leni Riefenstahl to produce and direct what became one of the great propaganda films of all time, Triumph of the Will, a powerful record of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally. Every cinematic device in the book was put to work: from the opening scenes with Hitler’s plane descending from the clouds,landing to cheering crowds -- mainly children and young women!, filming Hitler’s open car from the back and from above as it passes the adoring mobs,then only briefly a profile view, upshooting closeups of soldiers’ faces, the marshal music, massive architecture . . .

In 1936, Janet Flanner in a famous three-part essay in the New Yorker observed,

“In over sixteen years’ struggle for power and its maintenance, the Führer has been loyal only to one man—Adolf Hitler.” “[H]e dislikes paper reports and loves oral information. He is garrulous; in interviews, the interviewer often fails to get in a word edgewise. Momentarily influenced by colder, harder minds, he is ultimately convinced only by himself. His moods change often, his opinions never.”

Surprise: these precise words describe Donald Trump nine decades later. Rumors that Trump kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside echo eerily; whether by design or coincidence, the playbook is most definitely in play.

On September 5^th by order of our Leader the Defense Department has become the Department of War, the name abandoned in 1947 shortly after the conclusion of World War II!

Not content to brutalize the shape of government, Trump is putting his imperial imprint on the nation’s public buildings as well. He has signed an executive order establishing classical architecture as the “preferred and default” style for federal buildings. Trump’s order, titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” requires that he be notified 30 days in advance if government officials intend to approve a design for a federal building that veers into ”brutalist or deconstructive” architecture. As part of his D.C. beautification program, Trump has also taken to hanging large photo-banners of himself on the facades of federal government buildings (presently the Labor Department and the Department of Agriculture, one shown above); almost comical dictator emulation.

The Constitution be damned: “No Mail-In Voting, Except For Those That Are Very Ill, And The Far Away Military,” [Last month I wrote about the Constitutional issues in abruptly disenfranchising Fifty Million voters but also pointed out how he may subvert those constraints as well.] “Voter I.D. Must Be Part of Every Single Vote. NO EXCEPTIONS! I Will Be Doing An Executive Order To That End!!!,” Trump said last Saturday.

This is but another clear move to establish the almost comical dictatorship of Führer Trump. On August 25^th he issued a new Executive Order expanding the training and use of national guard to deal with the “Crime Emergency”, “rampant violence and disorder that have undermined the proper and safe functioning of the Federal Government, and therefore, the Nation, and that have led to disgraceful conditions n our Nation’s capital.” But he didn’t stop there. Buried in the Order is Sec. 2(c):

The D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force established in Executive Order 14252 of March 27, 2025 (Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful), shall establish an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join Federal law enforcement entities to support the policy goals described in Executive Order 14333. Each law enforcement agency that is a member of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, as well as other relevant components of the Department of Justice as the Attorney General determines, shall further, subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law, immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.

Sec. 2(d)(ii) amplifies:

The Secretary of Defense shall immediately begin ensuring that each State’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law. In coordination with the respective adjutants general, the Secretary of Defense shall designate an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes. In addition, the Secretary of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.

Having already declared himself the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, he now has effectively created a rapid deployment national military police force of armed masked Trumpen-troopers his personal disposal ready to grab people off the streets. He has even declared flag burning a crime with a guaranteed year in jail, even while acknowledging it is protected speech.

It is particularly scary that -- as crazy people sometimes do -- he is escalating. He started arbitrarily and illegally slapping tariffs on Canada and Mexico in violation of what used to be called NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. (Yes, the name changed to USMCA, but it is still designated a free trade area.)

More recently he has destroyed our relationship with Brazil because their independent judiciary is permitting the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, former president and Trump-buddy who attempted to remain in office via a military coup reminiscent of Trump-2020. When in the history of the United States -- or even any dictatorship of the past century -- has a nation thrown the full weight of it’s power and economy against the political leadership of another country in an effort to block its justice system and alter the internal electoral politics of that country.

As Trump said in his West Point commencement address, “The job of the U.S. armed forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, but to spread democracy to everybody around the world, at the point of a gun.”

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters. OK?” (Trump, January 23, 2016, during a campaign stop in Sioux Center).

Well folks he did it. This week Trump ordered the U.S. military to attack a ship at sea and kill all aboard. No crime had been committed but Trump claims he was sure it was about to be -- drugs were going to be delivered to a third country a port in the U.S. (I use the strike-out font advisedly; it was first claimed the ship was en route to a Caribbean nation then amended to say it was an unidentified U.S. port, the revised destination obviously a clumsy effort to dress up what was a blatant unauthorized act of war.) Trump thus in a flash of anger acted as arresting officer, judge, jury and executioner of at least eleven people! For just a minute let’s give Trump the benefit of the doubt and presume his unverified suspicions were correct: suppose the ship had left Venezuela with drugs on board (not a crime); it was in the sea, not menacing any other shipping (obviously not a crime); even if it was destined for the U.S. but had not brought any illegal drugs ashore (no crime); if they had made port and sold marijuana or cocaine (crime: penalty varies but likely around ten years if in quantity). We don’t legally execute drug importers even if Trump wants us to. Donald Trump’s actions, on the other hand, dispatching armed forces in an unprovoked murderous assault on an unarmed naval vessel on the open seas clearly constituted criminal conduct probably rising to the level of a crime against humanity.

Trump’s wild gyrations, hiring and firing federal officials who whisper the slightest doubts about his absolute authority have become almost a daily event. The courts be damned, he’s going to do as he pleases: fire a governor of the independent Federal Reserve; oust his own new head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, provoking subsequent resignations of several senior officials in protest the administration’s anti-vaccine policies; expanding his militarization of domestic policing from Washington to other Democratic-run cities; Friday-evening purges of senior officials in the intelligence community who contradicted the Administration’s propaganda; and the President personally demanding the prosecution of his former friend Chris Christie after Christie said something he did not like on television. And that’s the partial list. Having already declared himself the nation’s “chief law enforcement officer” (2020), he now has granted himself the power to dispatch the FBI to search the homes of anyone who criticizes the president, even the homes of his former associates.

Repeatedly and increasingly attacking sitting judges with language directed at the bench which is plainly contumacious (punishable contempt of court), Trump’s brazen evasion of the law is now a primary subject in dozens of judicial opinions --

“Over the past several months, principal officers of the executive (and their spokespersons) have described federal district judges across the country as ‘left-wing,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘activists,’ ‘radical,’ ‘politically minded,’ ‘rogue,’ ‘unhinged,’ ‘outrageous, overzealous, [and] unconstitutional, [c]rooked,’ and worse,”

So wrote Judge Thomas Cullen on August 27^th dismissing the administration’s outrageous lawsuit targeting the entire Maryland federal bench. He concluded,

“Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate.”

For the record, Cullen was appointed to the bench by DONALD TRUMP.

Personally, I fear the dangerous line separating a republic from a fascist state has already been crossed. Jamelle Bouie, a NY Times editorialist whom I greatly admire, says we’re still one step away and could yet be redeemed by an overwhelming victory in the midterms:

“The photo [part of which I’ve reproduced at the top of this essay] is clearly meant to evoke the imagery we associate with authoritarianism, or to be a little more precise, show the ways the administration has chosen to associate itself with that visual language. The White House wants you to see its kitschy displays of the president and its militarization of the nation’s capital and conclude that the game is over and that they have already won.

“But as much as the situation might feel that way, it isn’t true. The president and his allies have made real strides toward authoritarian power in some areas — using broad executive discretion over immigration enforcement to turn ICE into a personal goon squad, for example —and suffered real setbacks in others. The president must also contend with his steady unpopularity and the real possibility that no amount of cultivated chaos from the White House will prevent a wipeout at the ballot box next year.”

Indeed the numbers do look auspicious if the polls are accurate and if the Administration permits the midterms to proceed without disruption; Trump daily does alienate more and more people including many of his previously ardent believers with his increasingly evident confusion, his irrationality, and his selfish belligerency. On the other hand, if MAGA -- by hook or by crook (definitely a possibility as I’ve pointed out earlier) -- retains or even increases its grip on the government, I say sadly that we’ve crossed the Rubicon, and one can reasonably ask, if the Republic is going to be saved where’s the opposition -- we’re still waiting.

Arne Werchick, after fifty years as a California litigation attorney, pro tem judge, law lecturer, former Presiding Arbitrator of the State Bar of California, and past president of the California Trial Lawyers Association, moved to Hawaii and lives with his wife Ruth and their rescue dog Topaz. His prior community service included two years as Special Counsel to California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (CANHR), Adjunct Assistant Professor of Law at Hastings College of the Law, Administrative Law Judge pro tem, Chair of the Palm Desert Rent Review Commission, and numerous professional and civic organizations, and he was frequently an invited lecturer at continuing education programs. He now writes and publishes OUT OF MY LIBERAL MIND to provide a progressive perspective on current politics and provide a forum for liberal conversation.