It Can’t Happen Here, Right? RIGHT???

The adage is old enough to have been lampooned in the title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel: “It can’t happen here.”

That “it” back then was an imagined fascist takeover of the United States. Writing 13 years after Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy, barely a year after Adolf Hitler installed himself as dictator of Germany and just before Francisco Franco and his Nationalists overthrew the Spanish republic, Lewis spelled out in dystopian detail how it, indeed, could well have happened in America, too.

Nine decades later, that “it” is also what dozens of Republican donors, campaign consultants, pollsters and others interviewed by HuffPost say cannot possibly happen. They scoff at any analogy between former President Donald Trump, a man they support with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and the infamous dictators of the past. They insist that worries about Trump remaking the country as an autocracy are overwrought and designed solely to keep a Democrat in the White House.

“This will be a short period in history and we will swing right back to the middle,” said Hugh Culverhouse, a Miami lawyer who so far has given $500,000 toward Trump’s reelection effort.

While authoritarianism experts and democracy advocates hope Culverhouse is right, they worry – deeply – that he is not.

It is, of course, impossible to know for certain what a second Trump presidency might bring or whether, should he manage to seize absolute power, his rule would come anywhere close to the depravity of the tyrants of the last century.

Still, no other presidential nominee in United States history has behaved with the contempt for democracy that Trump has already demonstrated or even hinted at the sorts of autocratic actions Trump promises if he is returned to power.

As he seeks to regain the White House, Trump has suggested terminating the Constitution and has accused those who have criticized him of committing “treason.” He has vowed to destroy the bureaucracy that might serve as a check on his power and promised to pardon his followers who took part in his Jan. 6, 2021, attempt to remain in office despite his election loss, which authoritarianism experts describe as an attempted auto-golpe, or self-coup. He has even pledged to round up upwards of 20 million people — one in every 15 U.S. residents — for deportation.

“The idea that this couldn’t happen here is a fantasy,” warned Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College history professor.

Despite the ominous echoes from the not-so-distant past, though, Trump supporters say there is no comparison — that Congress and the Supreme Court would never permit a rogue president to exceed his authority or try to stay in office beyond his term, and that American institutions are too strong for a president to break.

“I think it’s a silly premise,” said Mike Davis, a former Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer and now a vocal Trump supporter. He offers as proof the fact that Trump, in the end, voluntarily boarded Marine 1 the morning of Jan. 20, 2021, to vacate the White House. “Trump left office.”

Davis, however, neglects to mention that Trump only left office voluntarily because his attempt to overturn his election loss two weeks earlier — which wounded 140 police officers and led to the deaths of five ― had failed.

To Amanda Carpenter, once an aide to Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and now with the nonprofit United to Protect Democracy, such views are yet more examples of the general “failure of imagination” when assessing the risks Trump would pose should voters choose to return him to the White House despite his previous attempt to end American democracy.

Carpenter said she fails to understand how Republicans can believe that Trump will abide by laws and the Constitution this time around.

“Normalcy bias? Willful blindness? These are the same people who believe Trump is just about to have a policy-focused campaign with a new tone,” she said. “Wish-casting is the most generous explanation.”

‘The Last Real Vote You Ever Get’

Trump’s campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s queries for this story. Instead, his allies complain that critics’ comparisons of him to Hitler sparked the two assassination attempts against him this summer. Trump himself has said criticisms of his actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021, and characterizations of him as a “threat to democracy” have led to the attempts on his life.

“The Rhetoric, Lies, as exemplified by the false statements made by Comrade Kamala Harris during the rigged and highly partisan ABC Debate, and all of the ridiculous lawsuits specifically designed to inflict damage on Joe’s, then Kamala’s, Political Opponent, ME, has taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust. Because of this Communist Left Rhetoric, the bullets are flying, and it will only get worse!” he wrote in a social media post earlier this month.

Clearly, there is no comparison between Trump’s actions to date and those of Germany’s Austrian-born dictator who sparked the bloodiest war in human history and is responsible for the genocide of 6 million Jews and millions of others.

Yet it does not require much imagination to think of scenarios in which Trump could try to remain in office beyond the prescribed four years — merely using his past behavior in several adjacent scenarios as a template.

As president, he suggested that because so much of his term had been consumed dealing with a federal probe into his willing acceptance of Russian help to win in 2016 and then his impeachment by the House over his attempted extortion of Ukraine to cheat in the 2020 election, he actually deserved a third term in office.

As president, he had launched a probe based on his conspiracy theory that migrants in this country had illegally voted en masse in the 2016 election for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. That task force, headed by Vice President Mike Pence, was quietly shut down when it could find zero evidence for his claims.

As president, he routinely accused those who criticized him or who defied his orders as having committed “treason,” and frequently pointed out that the punishment for treason was death.

As president, when polls in the summer of 2020 showed he was likely to lose to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump raised the possibility of postponing the November election because of the COVID pandemic.

And as president, even after Pence and congressional leaders blocked the Jan. 6 coup attempt, Trump took meetings in the Oval Office with those advocating he declare martial law to remain in power.

Carpenter and others point out that those in the White House and the administration who had checked Trump’s worst autocratic impulses during his first term — among them former chief of staff John Kelly, former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Pat Philbin and, on Jan. 6, Pence himself — will not be anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in a second Trump term. Instead, Trump will almost certainly be surrounded by those whose first loyalty is to him personally, not to the Constitution.

So what, then, would prevent Trump from announcing in say, mid-2028, that radical Marxists had infiltrated the U.S. election systems and that he was declaring a national emergency and postponing the November election until such time that he could ensure that it could be carried out securely?

“Zero,” acknowledged one six-figure Trump donor, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Indeed, the potential danger of putting Trump back in charge of the executive branch of the federal government, and particularly the national security agencies and the armed forces, has moved two of the most conservative leaders in Washington over the past several decades, former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, into endorsing Democratic nominee Kamala Harris for president in November.

In remarks to students at Dartmouth College earlier this year, Liz Cheney warned that an election that produces a Trump victory could be the nation’s last.

“He won’t leave office,” she said. “He already tried not to leave office once. … It may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast. It will be that bad.”

A Beneficiary Of Godwin’s Law

There is among pop historians a maxim known as “Godwin’s Law,” after the lawyer and writer who came up with it 35 years ago, a corollary of which is that one should never compare anyone to Adolf Hitler because no one in history was as evil and demented, and to do so trivializes the Holocaust.

The idea that only Hitler was capable of systematic mass murder, though, is disproven by history — some of it relatively recent. Joseph Stalin murdered as many as 9 million Soviet citizens during his quarter-century in power. Cambodian dictator Pol Pot murdered 2 million of his own people — 25% of the country’s population — during his reign. And in the summer of 1994, militias allied with the Hutu-led government of Rwanda slaughtered more than a half million Tutsis, or 75% of the ethnic minority’s population in that country.

The never-compare-anyone-to-Hitler dictum further elides basic logic: Hitler had also never seized absolute power — right up until he did in 1934. He also had not committed mass murder — until he did, starting in 1941.

Indeed, in the years prior to taking power, Hitler had claimed he merely wanted to deport all Jews from Germany. The plan transformed into outright genocide only later.

The wealthy financiers of Hitler’s Nazi Party campaign had no reason to imagine that his electoral success would mean the wholesale murder of 6 million Jews and the start of another world war.

“No one could, or did, foresee such things,” said Benjamin Hett, a historian at Hunter College in New York and author of “The Nazi Menace.”

There are, certainly, enormous differences between Germany of 1933 and the United States today.

That country was in the throes of the Great Depression, exacerbated by the requirement to pay hefty reparations for having started World War I two decades earlier. The United States, in contrast, today enjoys a relatively strong economy, with a booming stock market and low unemployment.

What’s more, the United States has maintained a constitutional republic for 236 years, even withstanding the four-year Civil War. The Weimar Republic was only a dozen years old when the Nazis came to power. In a Feb. 20, 1933, meeting with two dozen business leaders called to raise millions of reichsmarks for the coming parliamentary elections, ending German democracy and returning to an autocracy was a key point in the soon-to-be-tyrant’s rambling, 90-minute speech.

“They had no qualms about taking out their checkbooks,” said David de Jong, author of “Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties.”

While there are American political donors who are open about their disdain for democracy — Peter Thiel, for instance, and like-minded tech entrepreneurs who believe self-rule is not compatible with capitalism — most appear not to have even considered the possibility that supporting Trump might lead to an end of the American experiment.

That wholehearted support for Trump, in fact, creates another point of correlation with those German captains of industry nearly a century ago, Hett said.

Now, as then, he sees Republican donors and elites not particularly liking the “radical nationalist movement” that Trump has consolidated.

“Establishment conservatives … don’t like this movement and think it might be dangerous, but know that otherwise, they can’t get votes for their agenda, and working with the radical movement might be a way of getting those votes, so they take the chance,” he said.

For the German industrialists, that meant becoming party to Nazi death camps and the subsequent destruction of much of the country by the end of World War II. “They did not want, and certainly did not foresee, the other consequences,” Hett said.

‘America’s Hitler’

Godwin’s Law notwithstanding, among the first wave of Americans to see in Trump some of the same qualities as Nazi Germany’s “führer,” back in 2016 when Trump was still just the developer-turned-game show host who had improbably won the Republican nomination, was JD Vance.

“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler. How’s that for discouraging?” Vance wrote to a law school classmate.

Vance later won election to the U.S. Senate thanks to Trump’s endorsement in the 2022 Ohio Republican primary, is now Trump’s running mate, and years ago repudiated that and all of his other criticisms of Trump. Nevertheless, the remainder of that 2016 campaign, followed by Trump’s four years in office and especially the years since Jan. 6, have only added to the Hitler comparison data points.

Hitler demonized communists. He embraced the use of violence as a political tool with his Sturmabteilung “Brownshirts” militia and eventually the dreaded “SS” Schutzstaffel secret police force. He was lazy and undisciplined, and gave long, meandering speeches to tens of thousands of his adoring followers.

Trump has also begun labeling all who oppose him as “Marxists” and “communists.” He praises, even salutes, the Jan. 6 rioters convicted of assaulting police officers. When, as the sitting president, he was asked to denounce the Proud Boys militia group, he instead instructed them to “stand back and stand by,” as if he were their leader. He rarely made it to the West Wing before noon or bothered to read briefing material. His typical rally speech clocks in at an hour and a half and, in recent years, has become increasingly incoherent.

Hitler scapegoated Jews as the cause of all of Germany’s woes, and in the years before he came to power had pushed for their deportation.

Trump blames immigrants, both undocumented migrants as well as those here legally — such as the Haitians who have made a home in Springfield, Ohio — as the main reason that America is, in his view, “a nation in decline,” blaming them for everything from crime to higher housing costs. He has used Nazi-era language in his attacks, claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and is promising to round up and deport all migrants here illegally, a number he claims is at least 21 million.

Hitler used his personal security force to silence domestic dissent. As president, Trump pushed the military and police agencies under his command to use lethal force against both migrants attempting to enter the country as well as American citizens protesting in the streets of American cities.

The Country Is Stronger Than Trump… Maybe.

A second six-figure GOP donor, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said Trump’s history and statements over the course of his current White House run do indeed trouble him.

“I’ve struggled with this,” he said, but added that he ultimately decided to contribute to Trump’s campaign. “I feel like the guy hijacked my party and I’m kind of stuck with him.”

For the vast majority of the Republican political machine, though, Trump’s autocratic tendencies and open admiration for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un are far outweighed by his promise to further cut business taxes and slash regulations.

“The two parties are sufficiently different that there is no Democrat who wouldn’t raise taxes on businesses to the point that it’s not sustainable,” said anti-tax activist Grover Norquist. “The hysterics about Trump being a dictator, that’s just silly.”

Major donors appear to agree.

According to Federal Election Commission records, 388 of them gave checks of at least $100,000 to the “Trump 47” committee through the end of June, accounting for $113.8 million, according to a HuffPost analysis.

Another 128 donors gave at least $100,000 to Trump’s “Make America Great Again Inc.” super PAC, totaling $249.4 million. More than half of that sum came from just one person: Timothy Mellon, a billionaire benefactor of right-wing causes who in his 2015 autobiography repeated racist stereotypes of Black people and called social welfare programs “slavery redux.”

A number of the donors initially gave to the super PAC backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Republican primaries but have since given to Trump after he clinched the nomination.

The most generous of that group is hotel and aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, who gave DeSantis’ Never Back Down committee $20 million and has subsequently sent Trump’s MAGA Inc. $14.2 million.

Bigelow did not respond to HuffPost’s queries, but in an interview with Reuters, he made it clear his donation to DeSantis was based on his post-Jan. 6 analysis that Trump would wind up going to prison and that a donation to him would be wasted money. “I have to be sure that he does not have a position where the prosecution has a path to send him to jail,” he told the wire service.

When the GOP primaries came and went and Trump still walked free, Bigelow sent eight figures his way, too.

Culverhouse, who also had previously given to DeSantis’ super PAC, said that he was personally horrified by the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — but nonetheless does not blame Trump for it. “I don’t know if I can make a connection between Trump saying something and that causing extreme people to crash in,” he said.

Like Culverhouse, Republicans backing Trump said that others in the federal government, even those in his own administration, would in the end stop him from running amok.

“I don’t think the Supreme Court would give him a pass. I don’t think Congress would give him a pass,” said talk radio host Erick Erickson, who would have preferred someone other than Trump to win the nomination. “The system is stronger than him.”

And beyond the institutions are everyday Americans, who simply would not tolerate an attempt by Trump to remain in power beyond the four years of a second term, the GOP donor who felt he was “stuck” with Trump said.

“The middle 20 percent of the country is not going to want more Trump in 2028,” he said. “They barely want him now.”

Richardson and other critics said Republicans’ faith in the system — in the courts and in the federal bureaucracy ― is misplaced. They argue that Trump already defied the U.S. Supreme Court once when he tried to stay in office after justices had already refused to take up a lawsuit overturning the election. They point out that his running mate, Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, has praised Andrew Jackson’s open defiance of the courts as a model to emulate.

They also point out that the career Justice Department prosecutors and Pentagon officials who in theory would refuse to carry out Trump’s potentially illegal directives would likely all be fired in the first days and weeks of a second Trump administration and replaced with Trump loyalists, whom Trump could also offer pardons.

“The institutions are not going to hold,” Richardson said. “I don’t think people understand how badly things can turn, and how quickly.”