The Deranged And The Drowned

A Few Thoughts From Hitler's America

Trump remains the wordsmith from hell. “Great” to mean “not stupid enough.” “Lock her up” to point the arrow of criminality away from himself or, most recently, “insubordinate” to describe FBI agents who would only fit that bill had they not taken the January 6th cases assigned to them. Meanwhile, it is all the norms of process, laws of the land, and human decencies to which Mr. Trump will never subordinate himself.

The notion of decency is worth a moment of emphasis. Want to fire everyone who has ever done anything in the name of America? Uhm O.K. Might they get a two-week notice rather than three hours? If your boss treated you this way you would be appalled. “Shit, I did not realize I was working at Twitter,” you might say.

Even if you put aside appointing the entirely incompetent into key positions, as if NASA should be run by a flat-earther, or embracing obvious ideologues (Vought, Miller, etc), the playbook of tyranny is now being run word for word. Fire the Inspectors General, get rid of any cops (the FBI) who might call you to account in the future, remove journalists you dislike from the Pentagon, and dismiss the Election Commission Chair all while you propose and practice expansionist and bullying Foreign Policy. Naturally, you go after anyone anywhere who ever did anything that demonstrated they were not complete loyalists, those “enemies” within.

All of this and Musk.

“Of course, it is a coup,” Timothy Snyder writes:

Imagine if it had gone like this:

Ten Tesla cybertrucks, painted in camouflage colors with a giant X on each roof, drive noisily through Washington DC. Tires screech. Out jump a couple of dozen young men, dressed in red and black Devil’s Champion armored costumes. After giving Nazi salutes, they grab guns and run to one government departmental after another, calling out slogans like “all power to Supreme Leader Skibidi Hitler.”

Nowadays, Snyder points out, “power is more digital than physical,” and that gaining control of the computer systems is more important than gaining control of actual buildings. So now, without the trucks screeching into town, thugs have the power.

About the USAID dismantling enough cannot be said. Samantha Power, who spent her whole career taking on the world’s worst problems, begins her recent Op-Ed in the Times this way: “We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in U.S. history.” In the spirit of Snyder casting things in the image of a more familiar military coup, I see this dismantling not just as a withdrawal from but as an assertion of. That is, we might imagine Mr. Trump as having created a program designed to punch people around the world in the face. “Here, this is from America.” Bam. “Our job is to cause you pain, laugh at your starvation, and insult you because you are sick. If an earthquake happens or you suffered in war or Ebola begins to spread, at best we will snigger, should we notice at all.”

Cruelty: Made in America. That is the force and effect of what we are doing.

(Putting people who wanted to come to this country in cells we built to torture terrorists is just a flag-waving footnote now. All past hypocrisies and current problems aside, stack this reality up against the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of who we are.)

And do not forget that the so-called justification for shutting down USAID is that the people who did its work of feeding, healing, and going into areas of strife were called “radical lunatics” by Mr. Trump and that Mr. Miller said, “'We looked at USAID as an example, 98 percent either donated to Kamala Harris or another left-wing candidate.” It is perhaps absurd to note, only because she was my previous example, that Samantha Power once got in hot water for calling Hilary Clinton a liar. She’s an independent thinker, in other words, not a lunatic. Not that we need any such evidence to see Miller's claim as more Us v. Them thinking, a mania that does not stand up to even the most cursory review of the facts. Yet even if his complete lunacy was off by two percent and you could somehow prove 100% of people were so evil as to be Democrats while working in the government, it should not matter. What once helped America ascend beyond the degradations of Soviet Russia or those banana republics we scoffed at was the idea you did not need to be loyal to a party to serve your country.

For as long as Mr. Trump has been on the scene those who have feared all this would be where he might take us have been called “deranged.” O.K. since average citizens have not yet been put into camps because of their religion or lined up against a wall for prosecutorial convenience, one could still say comparing Mr. Trump to Hitler is a sign of ongoing derrangment.

But on what other evidence does that charge still stand? And who, reflecting on the last few weeks, should we label sick?

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Perhaps insultingly, I borrow my title from Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. A survivor of Auschwitz, Levi’s book of essays does not just argue that the Nazis knew what they were doing but also comes to the terrible point that those who somehow found a way to survive—in his case through luck and speaking German but also being able to trade goods for food he did not always share—are the drowned. Those who died, in other words, were saved from a lifetime of guilt. Levi’s last book, he threw himself down a flight of stairs not long after finishing it.