Vice President Kamala Harris must—not should but must—be elected president of the United States next month. If there was any question of that, former President Donald Trump‘s repeated resurrection and propagation of malignant Hitlerian conspiracy race theories make it abundantly clear.
I never knew my grandparents or my brother, my mother’s son, because they were murdered in an Auschwitz gas chamber in the implementation of precisely that vile pseudoscience.
“You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes,” Trump declared most recently, referring to undocumented immigrants. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump speaks to reporters in the spin room after debating Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center on Sept. 10, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Since I doubt that even Trump could figure out a way of differentiating between the genotype of an undocumented immigrant and that of their parent or sibling who entered the United States legally, one can extrapolate that the former president is attributing “bad genes” to immigrants generally.
Good to know.
This is not a one-off on Trump’s part. Last December, he told a New Hampshire rally that immigrants entering the U.S. from “all over the world” are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Trump is an unrepentant race-baiter. We also know that even if he is not an actual fascist, then he has all the markings of a crypto fascist.
But there’s no need to reach back to Nazi Germany to discover the deep seams of racism Trump is trying to mine. Trump is tapping into an American vein that found its full expression both here and across the ocean more than a century ago, targeting outsiders, targeting the “other.”
On Dec. 20, 1922, The New York Times reported on speculation in German political circles that the American Ford was “financing Adolph [sic.] Hitler’s nationalist and anti-Semitic movement in Munich.” This was the Times‘ very first mention of a then still obscure far-right Bavarian politician named Adolf Hitler, before his failed “Beer Hall Putsch,” before he wrote—or, more accurately, dictated—Mein Kampf while an inmate in the Landsberg Prison, and before he and his Nazi Party emerged as the preeminent ultranationalist force of interwar Germany. According to this article, “there is some ground for suspicion that Hitler is spending foreign money” to pay for his “spacious” and “splendidly furnished” Munich headquarters. The article further highlighted that:
“The wall beside his desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford. In the antechamber there is a large table covered with books, nearly all of which are a translation of a book written and published by Henry Ford. If you ask one of Hitler’s underlings for the reason of Ford’s popularity in these circles, he will smile knowingly but say nothing.”
At that time, Ford was the most vociferous antisemite in the United States. Repeating falsehoods about Jews previously set forth in a notorious Russian forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, he disseminated conspiracy theories about a non-existent secret Jewish plot to dominate the world through his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and in a four-volume series titled The International Jew—The World’s Foremost Problem. It was the German translation of The International Jew that Hitler displayed outside his Munich office.
Far from demonstrating any original thought, Hitler merely regurgitated The Protocols and Ford’s International Jew in depicting “the Jew” in Mein Kampf simultaneously as the capitalist, the communist, the liberal, and everything else he abhorred as inimical to or incompatible with Germany and the German or Aryan people or race. Equally important, he saw Jews as a threat to German or Aryan racial purity.
According to Hitler, “the racial poisoning of our national body creates a cultural decline which even now is terrifyingly manifest,” with “the principle of Aryan humanity” replaced “by the destructive principle of the Jew” who becomes ‘a ferment of decomposition’ among peoples and races, and in the broader sense a dissolver of human culture.”
It should be noted that Ford was the only American mentioned by name in Mein Kampf as “the single great man” who “maintains full independence” in the United States to the “fury” of the “Jews who govern the stock exchange forces in the American Union.”
Thus, it was not Hitler and the Nazis who inspired American racists and antisemites in the 1920s and early 1930s but the reverse.
Who could be more American than Henry Ford, a man whose career is celebrated, and his grievous faults forgiven? Perhaps it is somewhat reminiscent of a Teflon Trump, glorified by his MAGA followers for deeds he rarely performed, but whose sins are studiously ignored, regardless. Ford clearly understood, and Trump understands that nothing is easier than to tap into the hatred and fear of people in any way different from us.
So, Trump is not building anything new. In his rhetoric on race he is a traditionalist—a tradition brought to its apotheosis in Nazi Germany but rooted in a shameful past dimension of American jurisprudence.
When Hitler came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, he did not have in place an intellectual, political, or legal framework to enact novel antisemitic legislation. What the Nazis did was crib shamelessly from the one already existing body of discriminatory laws. An influential German legal memorandum circulated in September 1933 pointedly noted that “It is well known . . . that the southern states of North America maintain the most stringent separation between the white population and coloreds in both public and personal interactions.”
As Yale Law School Professor James Q. Whitman argued persuasively in his 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model, however, the German jurists who conceived of and drafted the notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws that turned German Jews into legal and social pariahs looked to the American Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation statutes both as inspiration and as templates.
In other words, the Third Reich’s purportedly legal discrimination against and persecution of German Jews and, subsequently, of all Jews under German control or influence was inspired by and paralleled the racist judicial framework that kept enormous numbers of Black and Colored Americans in what amounted to a state of de facto, if not de jure, disenfranchisement and worse.
And it is important to bear in mind that in 1935, marriages between whites and non-whites were illegal in 30 American states. It would not be until 1967—22 years after the collapse of the Third Reich and the end of the Holocaust—that the U.S. Supreme Court held in Loving v. Virginia that such bans on interracial marriages were unconstitutional.
We appear to have come full circle. Where Hitler once imitated Ford’s antisemitism, Trump seems to have trouble focusing on a single “race,” mouthing tropes taken straight out of Hitler’s playbook to cast a wider net of prejudice while somehow voicing support for Israel. But Trump doesn’t have to reach back to Ford—or Hitler for that matter—to find grounding for his views, they have always been breathed in with America’s air. Certainly, his racist exhortations are finding fertile ground here and now among more than a few.
Still, if Trump truly believes that bad behavior can be inherited, perhaps he should ask himself whether he absorbed his unseemly prejudices genetically from his father, Fred Trump, who was arrested (but not charged) at a 1927 Ku Klux Klan parade.
Just saying.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
