Donald Trump: “Make America Great Again

CLARIFICATION: This post is NOT in support of Donald Trump. To the contrary, it places on Trump’s lips the speech of Adolf Hitler after Hitler’s election in order to demonstrate the language and tactics of demagoguery. Scroll to the end to read explanatory notes on Hitler’s speech and playbook.

Imaginary Presidential Inauguration, Washington, D.C, January 20, 2017. [Please read to the end, including explanatory note.]

Eight years have passed since that unhappy day when the American people, blinded by promises made, forgot the highest values of our past, of American exceptionalism, of its honor and its freedom, and lost everything.

Since those days of treason, when a foreign-born citizen was sworn into this office, the Almighty has withdrawn his blessing from our nation. Discord and hatred have moved in. Filled with the deepest distress, millions of the best American men and women from all walks of life see the unity of the nation disintegrating in a welter of egoistical political opinions, economic interests, and ideological conflicts.

As so often in our history, America today presents a picture of heartbreaking disunity. We did not receive the equality and fraternity which was promised us; instead we lost our freedom. The breakdown of the unity of mind and will of our nation at home was followed by the collapse of its political position abroad.

In the appalling fate that has dogged us since 9/11 and has been made worse by the weakness of both the my predecessor’s administration and the Congress, we see only the consequence of our inward collapse. But the rest of the world is no less shaken by great crises. The historical balance of power, which at one time contributed not a little to the understanding of the necessity for solidarity among the nations, with all the economic advantages resulting therefrom, has been destroyed.

The misery of our people is terrible! Our industrial workers have become unemployed in the millions, while the whole middle and working class have been made paupers. If the American farmer also is involved in this collapse we will be faced with a catastrophe of vast proportions. For in that case, there will collapse not only a nation, but also a 2000-year-old inheritance of the highest works of human culture and civilization.

All around us are symptoms portending this breakdown. With an unparalleled effort of will and of brute force the Liberal method of madness is trying as a last resort to poison and undermine an inwardly shaken and uprooted nation.

Starting with the family, and including all notions of honor and loyalty, nation and fatherland, culture and economy, even the eternal foundations of our morals and our faith—nothing is spared by this negative, totally destructive ideology. The last eight years of so called Progressive ideology have undermined the United States of America.

One more year of terrorism would destroy America. The richest and most beautiful areas of world civilization would be transformed into chaos and a heap of ruins. Even the misery of the past decade could not be compared with the affliction of what might have happened without change. The thousands of injured, the countless dead which this battle has already cost America may stand as a presage of the disaster.

It is an appalling inheritance which this Administration is taking over.

The task before us is the most difficult which has faced American statesmen in living memory. But we all have unbounded confidence, for we believe in our nation and in its eternal values. Farmers, workers, and the middle class must unite to contribute the bricks to build the new Nation.

The National Government will therefore regard it as its first and supreme task to restore to the American people unity of mind and will. It will preserve and defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests. It will take under its firm protection Christianity as the basis of our morality, and the family as the nucleus of our nation and our state.

Standing above estates and classes, it will bring back to our people the consciousness of its racial and political unity and the obligations arising from them. It wishes to base the education of American youth on respect for our great past and pride in our old traditions. It will therefore declare merciless war on spiritual, political and cultural nihilism. The United States of America  must not and will not sink further into anarchy.

In place of our turbulent instincts, it will make national discipline govern our life. In the process it will take into account all the institutions which are the true safeguards of the strength and power of our nation….

NOTE: This speech is a re-rendering of Adolf Hitler’s radio “Appeal to the Nation” in January, 1933, the turning of Germany from the democratic Weimar Republic to the fascist Third Reich.Except for substitutions of ‘American’, ‘America’, and ‘the United States of America’ for the original script’s ‘German’ and ‘Germany’, and several deletions and additions to move the speech to the U.S.A in the year 2017, the speech is a word-for-word English translation of Hitler’s address.

Click HERE for the original speech to the German people.

The Nazi emphasis on family, Christianity, and national unity as the essentials of the new nation sounds familiar in the current campaigns for the Presidential nomination. But behind it all, there was another essential: that the nation place its trust in the Leader (the Fuhrer) to make the nation great again.

• Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, December 16, 2015