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JD Vance, Donald Trump & the Shadow of Fascism: Dorothy Thompson’s 1930's Warning
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May 1, 2025
On the 80th anniversary of Hitler's death, the rise of Donald Trump & JD Vance reflects alarming historical parallels. Steve Schmidt breaks down the dangers, and calls for immediate action to protect our democratic values. Subscribe for more and follow me here: Substack: https://steveschmidt.substack.com/subscribe Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thewarningses.bsky.social Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SteveSchmidtSES/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thewarningses Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thewarningses/ X: https://x.com/SteveSchmidtSES
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It is April 30th, 2025. Trump has passed 100 days in office
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This is the warning. April 30th is a momentous day in world history and in American history
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80 years ago, Adolf Hitler and his thousand-year Reich came to its end in a dank Berlin bunker
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when a bullet blew out the grubby Fuhrer's brains and the back of his skull
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His body, along with Eva Braun's, was wrapped in a blanket. It was taken upstairs, dumped into a crater, and lit on fire
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That body was recovered by Soviet forces. And in April of 1970, the remains of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Joseph and Magda Goebbels
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and their children were ground to dust and dumped in a German river
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And thus ended the Thousand-Year Reich. The lesson is not that Adolf Hitler did these things, these crimes
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which are unprecedented in the history of humanity, and therefore it is not possible for there to be greater criminals or greater crimes
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No, the fundamental lesson of Nazism is the story of a lack of imagination and where it leads
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willful blindness and where it leads, denialism and where it leads, What happens when the truth and the lie meet in the ether and the truth is strangled by the lie and the people can no longer tell the difference between the two
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One of the most important American journalists that has ever been was Dorothy Thompson, the first lady of American journalism
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And in the 1930s, she had the distinction of being the first American who was kicked out of Nazi Germany for being inhospitable in her writings to her Nazi hosts, the Fuhrer, most of all
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You see Dorothy Thompson wasn nice to the Nazis She didn accommodate them And she became a foremost student in the chronicler and the rise of fascism
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And she spread that gospel of warning all across America. Here's something that she wrote, and it is important to comprehend
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No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship
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He always represents himself as the instrument of the incorporated national will
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When Americans think of dictators, they always think of some foreign model
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If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots, and a grim look, he would be recognized and shunned
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Likewise, anyone resembling six Roman emperors or someone you must greet with stiff arm and hail
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But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys
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and he will stand for everything traditionally American. Since the great American tradition is freedom and democracy
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you can bet that our dictator, God help us, will be a great Democrat
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through whose leadership alone democracy can be realized. And nobody will ever say hell to him or Ave Caesar, nor will they call him Fuhrer or Duce
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But they will greet him with one great big universal democratic sheep-like bleat of
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okay, chief, fix it like you wanna, chief. Okay. So let's apply Ms. Dorothy Thompson's powers of observation to J.D. Vance
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and see if the proverbial shoe fits on his Cinderella foot. The Saturine man over there talking with a lovely French émigré is already a Nazi
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Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white trash southern boy a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity His brilliant gifts won for him successively
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government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a
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Wall Street advisor. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the
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periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited
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him or his wife to dinner. He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him
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He despises, for instance, Mr. B, who has risen beyond his abilities by virtue of health, good
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looks, and being a good mixer, because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work
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men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled
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with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he was insecurely risen, does he hate the
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people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being parents. He loathes everything
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that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti because the
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social insecurity reminds him of his own psychological insecurity. Pity he has utterly
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erased from his nature and joy he has never known. He has an ambition bitter and burning
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It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule
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but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains
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Already some of them are talking his language, though they have never met him
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There he sits. He talks awkwardly rather than glibly. He is courteous He commands a distant and cold respect But he is a very dangerous man Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal and a murderer but he is subtle and cruel He would rise high in
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a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him, intellectual and ruthless. Do you sense some of
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those men and some of those ladies around Donald Trump? I do. I see them very clearly. And I see
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a gathering evil. And you should see it clearly too. They are who they are. And their assault on
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the American Constitution and the American Republic is 100 days underway. And it has not
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been opposed very well by America's spoiled, pampered, and out-of-touch elites. But it has
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been met with fierce defiance by the American people. And it is up to the American people
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to stop this cold in its tracks. Canada has sent the world an important message. They have said to
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Donald Trump, no. And Donald Trump's lies have frozen cold at America's northern border. And
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that's the way it must be everywhere all at once. Because J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois
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couldn't be more correct when he says we must fight. We must fight now and we must fight
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everywhere. We must oppose this everywhere all at once. We must stand against the billionaires
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who seek to hollow out the American journalists. We must stand against the tyranny that is coming
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for our liberty. Now, this is the warning. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning. I invite you
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to join this community where I promise to be honest, blunt, and direct about what is happening
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in this country. America is in crisis. Follow and subscribe to this channel and on Substack. Thank you
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