Donald Trump (National Socialist*)

President Donald Trump is nominally a Republican, but in reality, he is putting us on the road to an American version of the national socialism of the 1930’s. Domestically he is attempting to seize the commanding heights of the economy by taking ownership positions in Intel and U.S. Steel and by taking a 15% cut from NVIDIA’s sales to China. ( https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2025/07/on-road-to-serfdom.html ) Remember that under national socialism businesses remain under private ownership but are under the control of the government. This is a far cry from capitalism. 

 

Further Trump is challenging the independence of the Federal Reserve by demanding the removal of Lisa Cook from the board for allegedly committing mortgage fraud. How did this come about? His minion Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, pulled the mortgage of files of Lisa Cook as well as the files from such Trump adversaries as New York Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff. Let us be clear, this was no accident and soon the IRS and other federal agencies will get into the act.

 

To enhance his powers domestically Trump has appointed his cronies in the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the regulatory agencies and on the courts. Indeed, one of his private attorneys, Todd Blanche is now a deputy attorney general, and another, Eric Bove, was just confirmed to the Court of Appeals. Perhaps more serious is that he has purged a host of officers in the military and the CIA who might be more loyal to the constitution than to him. A defining feature of national socialism is loyalty to the leader, not to the law.

 

In keeping with his national socialist tendencies Trump is in the process of establishing a 150,000-member national police force in the form of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. These officers could at the stoke of a pen be empowered to engage in broader law enforcement activity and unlike the military they would not be subject to the strictures of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. Indeed, Trump seems to be using the military in violation of that act anyway. Meantime many U.S. citizens have been caught up in the roundup of illegal immigrants.

 

Internationally Trump through his tariff policies is attempting to turn the open economy of the United States into more of an autarky where domestic production would be sheltered from international competition. In imposing his tariff regime Trump ignored Congress which has near exclusive power over tariffs and taxation. Trump has now lost twice the courts on his tariffs; and it will soon be up to the Supreme Court to rule on them. Further Trump has imposed punitive tariffs on our allies all while cozying up to dictators Putin and Xi. This all part of the national socialist playbook. It might be stretch, but could there be a Trump, Putin, Xi axis?

 

All the while the moral eunuchs of the Republican Party have either cheered Trump on or silently acquiesced. ( See from 2019:  https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-republican-moral-eunuchs-and.html ) Similarly, fearful of retaliation, the business community has remained silent and bowed to his wishes. Thus, in eight short months Trump has seized control of a good part of the economy and the security apparatus of the state.

 

To be sure this not the first time the U.S. experimented with national socialism in peacetime. In 1933 President Roosevelt used the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to take control of a good part of the economy. Fortunately, the NIRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935 and the RFC withered away. Let us hope the Supreme Court does the same thing to Trump’s tariffs.

 

Later in 1971 President Nixon imposed a system of price, wage, rent and dividend controls on the entire economy. Nixon also used the IRS against his enemies and spied on his political opponents. The Nixon controls expired in early 1973 and he was impeached in 1974. Say what you will about Nixon; he respected the process. I doubt that can be said of Trump. In 2009 President Obama temporarily took control of the banking and automobile industries.

 

To conclude Trump is in the process of creating an American version of national socialism. I am not going to use the polite words of state capitalism or American Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics. Forewarned is forearmed!

 

*- The reference to national socialism is derived from Germany’s Nazi Party. The official name of the Nazi Party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei  or NSDAP which in English is the National Socialist German Workers Party. The Italian version of national socialism was called Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF which in English is the National Fascist Party.

My Amazon Review of Mike Davis' and John Wiener's "Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties"

1960's LA Through Red-Tinted Glasses

Mike Davis and John Wiener have given us a way too long (800 pages in the print edition) history of the rise of the Left in the Los Angeles of the 1960's. In telling us everything they researched and remembered it is hard for the lay reader to separate the important from the incidental. The book would have been greatly helped by a sharp-penciled editor.

In the interests of full disclosure I knew Mike Davis in the early 1970's and had more than a passing participation in the political and cultural events the authors discuss. In May 1965 I watched the late and great Little Richard perform at the California Club in Watts. Two months later Watts burned in the rebellion. The small group I was with were the only white people in the audience. Later in January 1967 I watched The Doors at Whisky-A-Go-Go “set the night on fire.”  To be sure I lived in the sun, sand and surf Los Angeles, not in its racism plagued underbellies of South Central and East Los Angeles.

To me the main theme of the book is that Los Angeles was in the vanguard of the peace, women’s, gay rights, African-American and Chicano movements of the 1960's and that members, of which Davis was one, former members and friends of the Communist Party were in the leadership vanguard. Indeed Davis was mentored by the doyenne of Los Angeles communists, Dorothy Healey. As an aside why anyone would join the Communist Party in 1968 is beyond me. From my small vantage point I just didn’t see all that communist influence and if it were true it would make believable all of the right wing paranoid fantasies of that era.

Where the book is good is its description of the US-Black Panther rivalry of that time that led to the assassination of two members of the Panthers on the UCLA campus and the intense pressure put on the Panthers by the F.B.I. It is particularly good at describing the risings in African-American and Latino high schools protesting the racism of their teachers and administrators. The authors also note that the police raid on the gay Black Cat Tavern predated Stonewall by two years.

What the book lacks is the music. It misses the spirit of the age which was typified by sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. It is way too serious because many of us had smiles on our faces and songs in our hearts. Importantly the book lacks any discussion on the impact of the SDS split on 1969 on the overall movement and there is no after-action report as to why things fell apart. To use the language of the day there is really no criticism/self-criticism. Simply put what went wrong?

Further many of the ideas promoted by the Left of today and now I view as reactionary. Davis and Wiener talk about the coming of the Crawford decision which implemented crosstown busing in Los Angeles which intensified the racial polarization of the city. Instead of advocating for ethnic studies programs in the universities which led the way to marginal degrees, the movement should have advocated for stronger curriculums with emphasis on math, science and economics.  But alas that did not happen.

I am sure better books will be written on the Los Angeles of the 1960's, but if a reader wants to slog through all 800 pages they will get the big picture with way too much minutia thrown in.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R46U3E2PHN8UW/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review Steven Ross' "Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America"

Nazi Hunters

USC history professor Steven Ross has written a way too detailed account of how a small group of Jews set up a spying operation on Nazi activity in Los Angeles. The protagonist of his story is Leon Lewis who was a WWI vet, a founder of the Anti-Defamation League and a Chicago lawyer who moved to Los Angeles. He is assisted by Joseph Roos and Joseph Klein. Through Lewis’ involvement with veterans’ organization he was able to recruit non-Jewish German Americans to infiltrate and sew divisions within the Nazi oriented organizations operating in Los Angeles. In this activity he was extraordinarily successful. His work led to the rounding up of Nazi operatives along the west coast when the U.S. entered WW II. He was light years ahead of the F.B.I.

Los Angeles was a focus of Nazi activity in the United States because of the importance Joseph Goebbels viewed the propaganda potential of the motion picture industry. Although Hollywood was loaded with Jewish senior executives they did little or nothing to warn the American public of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews in Germany and Germany’s growing geopolitical threat. Simply put the executives feared the loss of the German market.

Enforcing Hitler’s de facto censorship of Hollywood was the German Consul Georg Gyssling. Gyssling was prominent in Los Angeles social circles in the 1930s and was very effective in promoting the “New Germany.” However his real role was to prevent a negative view of Germany in Hollywood’s films. In that task he was extraordinarily successful and as a result there were no anti-Nazi films made until 1939.

Although the Hollywood studios kowtowed to Gyssling, behind the scenes they funded Lewis’ spying operation. The key figure here was entertainment lawyer Mendel Silberberg who founded the still very successful law firm of Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp.

Along the way we learn about the “Silver Shirts,” the U.S. equivalent of the brown shirts and we learn about the pro-Nazi sympathies in the Los Angeles Police Department which made cooperation between Lewis and the police difficult.

What is new here is that we learned that Gyssling actually had back channel conversations with Morton Klein. Further after returning to Germany Gyssling remained a diplomat and at war’s end he worked with Allen Dulles to arrange the German surrender. Simply put Gyssling was more a patriotic German than a Nazi.

What troubled me about the book is that Nazi’s knew about Lewis and viewed him as there most prominent enemy in the Jewish community. Why wasn’t he assassinated? In a footnote Ross believes they feared severe reprisals. To me that does not wash. Perhaps both Lewis and the Nazis overestimated the strength of the Nazis in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless Ross presents an interesting history of how and why all too many Americans got sucked into the racist ideology of Nazism. A scary reminder for today.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2TDUFKDGNZ82G/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv