There are, however, far more reasonable historical analogies for the ugly, reactionary, militaristic, and authoritarian elements of what we might be facing in the next four years than interwar Germany and Italy. Woodrow Wilson, for example, was like Trump (the first time) and very unlike Hitler or Mussolini in that he came to power through a democratic election and didn’t then end bourgeois democracy and declare himself President-for-Life. But Wilson acted out some of Trump’s most disturbing promises—sending troops to Mexico, for example, and starting the first Red Scare. The second Red Scare started under Harry Truman and escalated under Dwight D. Eisenhower—who, by the way, used the military in a mass deportation operation. It was called, and I swear I’m not making this up, “Operation Wetback.”
These analogies are not only closer to home than Hitler and Mussolini in a geographical sense but far more realistic in the expectations they set. In many ways, American society was far worse than it is now when these presidents held power. By any sane measure, for example, the United States is culturally a vastly less racist and sexist place now than it was then, and many positive precedents on civil liberties had yet to be set. The oft-quoted phrase about how you don’t have a right to “yell fire in a crowded theater,” for example, comes from a Wilson-era Supreme Court ruling upholding the arrest of a group of socialists for passing out Yiddish-language leaflets opposing World War I and calling for draft resistance. (As bad as we can all agree it would be to literally yell fire in a crowded theater that’s not about to go up in flames, I’d argue that the arrested socialists were, in that analogy, appropriately warning theater-goers about an actual fire. The key question when it comes to all such justifications for limiting free speech is, “Who gets to decide?”) Happily, the Court has long since reversed itself.
None of this is to say that there’s any kind of metaphysical guarantee that the worst things Wilson, Truman, and Eisenhower did will never be surpassed by anything Trump does. There’s simply no way to know that in advance. He conspired to steal the 2020 election, for example—something none of those three did (though George W. Bush did in 2000). Perhaps Trump and his friends will steal the 2028 election for J.D. Vance, or even try somehow to get around the 22nd Amendment’s prohibition of Trump himself seeking a third term. I don’t think that will happen, but after the last decade of bizarre and chaotic occurrences in American politics, it would be foolish to rule anything out too confidently.