Lessons from the Past: How My Great Uncle’s Insights Guided Me into Trump’s Second Adminstration

In the summer of 1992 I traveled to see my great uncle Ernie Lowenstein seeking to better understand my father; the words he spoke during our visit shed light on our democracy’s current crisis.

Dad had just turned 5 years old when he left Germany in July 1939 on the Kindertransport, the British government-sponsored program that gave shelter to close to 10,000 Jewish children from Central Europe. His absence of memory and silence during my childhood left me with a hunger to know him and that time.

I visited elderly relatives to fill that void. Tall and dignified, Ernie was a major inspiration in Dad’s decision to also become a doctor. His thick eyebrows raised and his blue eyes danced with delight whenever he told a joke, but his tone grew serious when he spoke about life in Germany after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis assumed power in January 1933. Antisemitism had always
existed in German culture, but the difference was striking as soon as Hitler was appointed chancellor.

You could tell right away, he recalled.

Ernie’s words have resonated with me in the two months since Donald Trump again took the oath of office. I attended Trump’s first inauguration on a rainy Friday in January 2017. I went because I wanted to see for myself the transition from our nation’s first black president to the Trump era. I left his “American carnage” address deeply unsettled about what would follow.
Here is what I wrote for the Daily Maverick, a South African publication: If there was any doubt before Donald Trump’s searing, angry inaugural address and initial actions as President of the United States, let that be permanently gone.

Everything is on the table:
● America’s role as a leader engaged in transnational alliances;
● A national commitment to fight climate change;
● The right of Americans to healthcare that has been under assault from Republicans
since the passage of the landmark Affordable Care Act in 2010;
● Government agencies that have supported the arts and public for decades;
● The belief that our country’s diversity is an asset to be appreciated and embraced;
● And, according to some, the core and soul of our democratic nation.

Eight years later, all of these and more are on the line-but with a different and more dangerous set of circumstances. I want to be clear that I understand and am not saying that Trump is Adolf Hitler or that we are Germany in the early 1930s. There are many profound differences between the two countries. Weimar Germany was a fledgling democracy formed in the
aftermath of World War I while we have nearly 250 years of entrenched democratic systems. Hitler rose to power on a platform of what some have described as eliminationist antisemitism. While anti-immigrant hatred was a core message of Trump’s successful election campaign, he was not advocating for the murder of an entire people. More generally, I have written before about the all too easy tendency to label figures ranging from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to former President Barack Obama as a Nazi for the actions political opponents deem overly heavy handed or antidemocratic.

At the same time, there are some significant disturbing parallels between the two countries. Like all democracies, they are living entities with laws, practices and norms that require upholding to remain robust and that cannot sustain indefinite blows. On a fundamental level, they depend on trust, faith and support of a majority of the governed. Hitler became chancellor
in January 1933, close to 10 years after the “Beer Hall putsch,” the failed coup that he and other Nazis recast as a heroic effort to save the nation. His ascent came at a time, as historian and friend Steve Cohen noted, when more than half of the German public voted for parties on the far left and the far right that opposed democracy.

Trump’s inauguration last month followed nearly a decade of assaulting our country’s most basic democratic fabric, the legitimacy of elections and the peaceful transfer of power. Starting with his first run in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, he has repeatedly refused to acknowledge election
results unless he won. In 2020, he perpetuated against all evidence and dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits the Big Lie that he beat Joe Biden-a falsehood that has enduring support among about two thirds of Republicans.

He continued the charade on his first day in office, pardoning close to 1,600 supporters who attempted their own coup on January 6, 2021 by storming the Capitol the day Biden’s victory was certified. Trump had called this group, which included people convicted of violently assaulting police officers, hostages. As he has done throughout this phase of his public life, he
has issued a relentless stream of attacks on the media, immigrants and the government that, like body blows on a fighter, have taken an inexorable toll. In a chilling similarity to the weakening of democracy in Weimar Germany, Trump won the popular vote and all of the swing
states.

Already present during his first administration, these currents, like the antisemitism in the early days of Hitler’s reign, have been codified in rapid fashion. Trump has issued a barrage of executive orders that have included unconstitutional measures like banning birthright citizenship, supported Elon Musk and DOGE’s mass firings or layoffs of government workers, and advanced blatantly imperialist aspirations in everywhere from Gaza to Greenland to
Panama. In many cases he has drawn on the personnel, specific planks and general approach toward government articulated in Project 2025-the 900-page tome coordinated by the Heritage Foundation that he disavowed during the campaign.

But in a critical difference from his first term, Trump has no meaningful restraints this time. Operating with a razor-thin majority, House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson appears to have conceded the constitutionally-enshrined power of the purse to the executive branch. The Democrats have continued to struggle to formulate a coherent message beyond being unnerved by their powerless status. The Senate has confirmed all of Trump’s cabinet appointees thus far, including the spectacularly unqualified Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Corporate media owners like Jeff Bezos and the bosses at ABC, apparently eager to curry favor with Trump, have engaged in a craven capitulation by killing editorials, spiking cartoons and settling a defamation lawsuit for $15 million. For his part, Meta’s
Mark Zuckerberg parroted Trump’s language about censorship and political bias in announcing the platform’s decision to eliminate fact checking.

Federal courts have put a check on some of Trump’s actions, but the Supreme Court gave him an astounding level of immunity during last year’s Trump v. United States decision. Aided by Musk, Trump seems to be advancing a strategy of making change on the ground, seeing how he fares in the courts, and, like the elections, defying them if he doesn’t get the result that he likes. Vice President J.D. Vance has already advanced the idea that judges don’t get to control the executive branch’s power, while border czar Tom Homan declared, “I don’t care what the judges think” as he defended the administration’s decision to defy a court order barring the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members.

Perhaps most troubling of all, though, for the future prospects of our democracy, is the reaction of the public. Thus far they have been met with strong approval from supporters and a more subdued response from opponents than during the first Trump administration.

On one level, the muted protest response is understandable. The first Trump term engendered a stomach-churning, teeth-gnashing feeling, a sense of unpredictability that the bottom has not
arrived and may never get here. The second term has brought for many a sense of
bewilderment at the measures’ speed and scope layered with dismay at the Republicans’ control of both houses of Congress until next year’s elections. And the caving to Trump’s demands by leading organizations and institutions have heightened some people’s sense of
visceral fear and powerlessness.

The magnitude of the task ahead is daunting, but the stakes could not be higher. I understand the desire to avoid reading the latest distressing development. I get the weariness and the despair, and we must not give into it. Rather we must gird ourselves to ask ourselves if the price is too high to stop the movement of our country not into the genocide of the Nazi era, but into what scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have called competitive authoritarianism. This is a hollowed out form of government in which the coexistence of meaningful democratic institutions and serious incumbent abuse yields electoral competition that is real but unfair. That unhappy destination is not inevitable, but will not be avoided without sustained and strategic action on a large scale by those of us who see the need for a different way.

The Trump Administration marked two months on Thursday. Heeding the words of my aging uncle from a generation ago, I am proceeding with a deeper knowledge of the stakes for our country and the fervent hope that I will find within myself the fortitude to do what I believe is right.

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is founder and executive director of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) and an associate professor of journalism at Grand Valley State University.