1930s Redux: Stoking Resentments, a Demagogue Does His Thing

Jeff Robbins on Jun 3, 2025

Hillary Clinton took quite a lambasting in 2016 when she used the word "deplorable" to describe the Donald Trump phenomenon that had captivated so much of America, but the word choice has long since proved apt, even perfect. Oxford Dictionary suggests that the word's best synonyms are "disgraceful" and "shameful," which do seem to fit pretty neatly.

When the period in which America has debased itself comes to a close, should we all live so long, historians will have a difficult job selecting the most resonant illustration of what made the man twice elected by our countrymen so repugnant. There are just so many to choose from. In the 2016 campaign, the winner has to be the crude, humiliating mimicking of a reporter's disabilities. But Trump plowed new ground this past week. Asked about the metastatic cancer diagnosis that obviously threatens Joe Biden's life, America's choice to be its leader replied, "I really don't feel sorry for him."

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the president of the United States and the leader of the free world. In seven words.

A carefully selected team of scientists tasked with constructing a living thing with fewer redeeming personal qualities and more repellent ones than Donald Trump would be sorely tested, but for America, this is no science experiment. It's existential. Though fresh examples of our president's personal thuggishness emerge daily, we're confronted far more importantly by a carefully planned attempt to dismantle the civic and democratic institutions about which we congratulate ourselves every Fourth of July. And we're only in month five of a 48-month presidency.

There's the attack on the lawyers who have had the temerity to oppose him, or to expose his phony claims. After all, who doesn't hate lawyers? The famous exhortation by Shakespeare's Dick the Butcher in "Henry VI, Part II" -- "The first thing we do is, let's kill all the lawyers" -- reflected, as Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens once wrote, the realization "that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government."

The executive orders aimed at intimidating law firms into letting Trump override federal law is, let's be honest, the stuff of would-be totalitarians. Not that Trump has been subtle on this point.

Intimidating lawyers, of course, is only part of the job. You've also got to make the federal judges who hear the challenges to Trump administration actions fearful for their own well-being and that of their families as they consider whether to rule against the government. The guy who knows he has some seriously unhinged supporters at his beck and call, and who knows that the judges know it too, took in characteristically sober fashion to hurling a fastball at the judiciary's head after a series of rulings that he'd acted unconstitutionally. "USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK," he posted in all-caps after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade -- two of whom were Republicans, one appointed by Trump himself -- found that Trump had likely unlawfully arrogated to himself the right to unilaterally impose sweeping tariffs on other nations.

Those who have dismissed comparisons between the opening months of Trump 2.0 and 1930s Germany are looking increasingly foolish, and dangerously so. The support on Ivy League campuses for Hamas' genocidal slaughter of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, reflects a disease in American academia, to be sure. But the Trump administration's attempt to capitalize on resentment against Harvard University and to pulverize it by cutting billions of dollars in research funds and blocking international students from enrolling there on the ground that Harvard does not "promote and champion principles of ... the national interest" is straight out of the Third Reich. And for American families struggling with diseases like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other conditions and hoping that the medical research that these funds make possible will extend or improve their lives, the American government's termination of the funding for medical research isn't merely a self-inflicted wound. It's a disaster.

But Trump and Team know that in the America we live in, it's all about spreading poison, all about stoking resentments, all about ginning up the very worst in us and among us. And they also know this: At the moment, at least, they're winning.

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Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.