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The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem

With the Felon openly longing to be a dictator and the Republican Party welcoming even the ugliest elements of the far right into the party, the GOP's drift towards open fascism has intensified,  Indeed, within today's GOP even open admiration of Hitler is not a disqualification for not only party membership but leadership as well. Meanwhile too many old school Republicans cling to the fantasy that the GOP is the same party as in the 1980's or 1990's.  Nothing could be further from the truth and, as a lengthy piece at The Atlantic lays out, the Republican Party has a Nazi problem and, by extension, so does the nation as a whole.  The piece traces the rise of open anti-Semites in the GOP and the growing use of slightly revised Nazi memes in GOP talking points and propaganda (aided and abetted by Fox News and its imitators). In its quest to win at any cost and disregard of whom that goal has made political bedfellows, the GOP has both lost its moral compass and any sense of shame as to whom one is empowering. Throw the openly racist and totally immoral Felon into the mix and the descent to moral bankruptcy and acceptance of Nazi  devotees into the GOP became all too assured.  Here are column highlights and a description of what moral Americans must do:

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party.

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. . . . But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem.

As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. . . . Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.

So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such people?  When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. . . . I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants . . .  .

I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.

The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. Bush, in turn, gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.

By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

[R]acism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States. . . . years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. . . . . Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.

What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.

When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods.

Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.

The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.

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 A very distant cousin of mine.

The Supreme Court Delivers the Felon a Humiliating Defeat

The economy under the Felon continues to deteriorate with few new jobs created during 2025, consumer prices continuing to rise, and the USA had a record trade deficit - something the Felon's tariffs were supposed to end - and economic malaise being felt by a majority of Americans. Indeed, new polling indicates that 60% of Americans disapprove of the Felon and his policies. Even on immigration enforcement, a majority of Americans oppose the Felon's brutal and illegal actions which have violated literally thousands of judicial rulings. Then, of course, there is the Epstein scandal that shows no signs of going away despite the Felon's bald faced lie that he has been "completely exonerated."  Now, the heretofore complaint U.S. Supreme court has handed the Felon another humiliating defeat by ruling that his tariffs are illegal and cannot be imposed without action by Congress.  In typical lying and contemptuous form, the Felon has lashed out at the six justices ruling against him like a spoiled child and has spewed lies - what else is new? The ruling by SCOTUS is a victory for Americans and constitutional government and, with luck may be a turning point for the Court that seemingly belatedly realizes that its former rulings favorable to the Felon (which I strongly disagree with) have created a monster. Two pieces in The Atlantic look at the Courts rejection of the Felon's illegal tariffs. Here is a summation from one piece:

The ruling is a major victory for the constitutional separation of powers, rule of law, and millions of American consumers and businesses harmed by these tariffs. . . . This decision spared America from a dangerous, unconstitutional path. Under [the Felon's] President Trump’s interpretation of the law, the president would have had nearly unlimited tariff authority, similar to that of an absolute monarch. That undermines basic constitutional principles. The Framers of the Constitution had sought to ensure that the president would not be able to repeat the abuses of English kings, who imposed taxes without legislative authorization.

Here are longer excerpts for the second piece:

In the 1630s, King Charles I tried to tax English people without the consent of their legislature. He lost his head. In the 2020s, Donald Trump tried to tax Americans without the consent of Congress. He just lost his case.

A tariff is a tax. The Trump tariffs imposed in and after April 2025 were projected to raise as much as $2.3 trillion over 10 years. The Constitution assigns authority over taxes, including tariffs, to Congress. It does so for reasons that date back to English constitutional history: An executive who can tax without permission from elected representatives is on his way to becoming a tyrant.

[The Felon] President Trump has had lots of ideas for how to spend the money he collected without Congress. He has offered it to farmers. He has mused about direct cash payments to taxpayers. He has speculated about creating a sovereign wealth fund to invest in companies. He has disregarded the fundamental principle that spending, like taxing, is a power the Constitution assigns to Congress, not the president.

Now we may be on the verge of a regime-changing war against Iran. War-making is also supposed to be a congressional power—but there’s no sign that Trump will allow Congress to vote on his war. In the past, the ultimate check on the president’s war-making powers was Congress’s power over the purse. . . . . if Trump were allowed to tax without Congress, then he might reasonably conclude that he could fight wars without Congress.

Trump’s tariffs were advertised as a revenue source liberated from the restraints imposed by Article I of the Constitution. Had the Supreme Court upheld the tariffs, it would have wrought a constitutional revolution. Instead, the court quashed Trump’s scheme. Like every president before him, if he wants money—for an Iran war or any other purpose—he will have to ask Congress for it.

Trump’s theory was that an emergency-powers law passed in the 1970s allowed him to impose permanent revenue-raising tariffs on anyone for any reason. This argument was always far-fetched. The law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, was part of the post-Watergate reform to reduce presidential emergency powers. The IEEPA reformed the Trading With the Enemy Act passed during World War I. President Franklin Roosevelt had used that law to ban most private ownership of gold bullion in 1933, which even supporters had to concede was a fantastic legal reach. After Watergate, Congress sought to restrain the president by limiting the IEEPA to “unusual and extraordinary” threats to “the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” The law’s powers can be invoked only after a formal declaration of national emergency, and the word tariff appears nowhere among the powers conferred upon the president by the law.

Trump gets very impatient when he’s asked about “affordability.” You can understand why he squirms. The price increases Americans have felt in 2025 and 2026 can be blamed in no small part on Trump’s tariffs. Power bill up? Trump imposed a tariff on the equipment used to generate and transmit electricity. Six-pack of beer more expensive? Trump taxed the beer cans. Kids need new shoes? Trump’s tariffs raised the cost.

The ironic political question for 2026 is whether the U.S. Supreme Court acted in time to save Trump from himself. Whether or not it was the justices’ intention to help Trump, a generally Trump-friendly Supreme Court has offered the president an exit from one of his most unpopular domestic policies. Will he accept the handout? Acceptance would be smart, but humiliating. Trump holds other legal means to disrupt international trade, some of which he used in his first term. But those powers have tighter legal limits than Trump wants. . . . Until and unless a future Congress acts to protect Americans from Trump protectionism, the outlook for U.S. prosperity and security will remain clouded.

While shadows dim the future, the sun shone today. U.S. stocks surged after Trump’s Supreme Court defeat. American consumers may soon feel the benefit. Liberated from this approach to economic warfare, relations with allies may recover some of their former cordiality. And unlike the case of Charles I, all of this was accomplished while allowing America’s president to lay his unsevered head on his pillow tonight.

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CBS Is Being Destroyed Before Our Eyes

Like Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime, one of the goals of the notoriously thin-skinned Felon is to censor journalists and news outlets to prevent unflattering true and accurate, and often damning coverage of the Felon's misdeeds and horrific and cruel policies.  Part of this effort is being done by threatening bogus lawsuits, intimidation by the Felon stacked FCC, and threatening to impede mergers unless the desired censorship is achieved.  Sadly, some billionaires who are either pro-Trumpers or simply soulless and greedy individuals who put increasing their already staggering wealth above all else.  Hence we see Jeff Bezos destroying the Washington Post - I canceled my subscription some time ago - and David Ellison seemingly similarly destroying CBS as his right wing appointee, Bari Weiss pushes to turn the network into another Fox News imitator.   The irony is that CBS, which already in last place of the big three networks, is shedding both respected journalists and viewers (other than CBS Sunday Morning, we no longer watch the network).  All of the focus of these billionaires is aimed at pleasing the Felon with no thought to the longer term after the Felon has exited the scene - he will be 80 in June - and what censorship now may mean in the future. A piece at Salon looks at the destruction of CBS.  Here are excerpts:

In the span of months, one of America’s most storied broadcast institutions has managed to alienate its most recognizable late-night host and lose one of its most respected journalists, all while inviting scrutiny over whether it is voluntarily bending the knee to political pressure from the Trump administration. The optics are catastrophic.

CBS looks to have made a strategic blunder when it announced plans last year to cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” but decided to keep host Stephen Colbert on air until May 2026. The decision created a lame-duck host with a nightly platform and a growing sense of grievance. On Monday, Colbert told his studio audience that CBS lawyers had called his show “in no uncertain terms” to block an interview with Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. According to Colbert, the network didn’t just want to censor the content — it wanted to censor the censorship itself, informing him that he couldn’t even mention that he’d been prohibited from airing it. 

“Because my network clearly doesn’t want us to talk about this,” he told his audience, “let’s talk about this.” He ultimately posted the interview to YouTube, where it has since drawn more than 5.2 million views — far more than it ever would have attracted as a routine late-night segment.

It’s amazing how long we’ve known about the Streisand effect, the phenomenon where an attempt to censor or suppress information ends up drawing more attention to it, yet institutions still can’t resist stepping on the rake. CBS handed the shovel to the very man they were trying to bury, and he dug himself out. Colbert knows he has nothing to lose now. It’s worth noting that his public criticism of CBS parent company Paramount Skydance’s $16 million to settle Donald Trump’s lawsuit over a 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris — a lawsuit that legal scholars widely regarded as meritless —  is widely believed to be the real reason CBS canceled “The Late Show.” 

The pretext CBS used to object to Colbert’s interview with Talarico originated from a January notice from the Federal Communications Commission issued by the agency’s chairman, Brendan Carr, a Trump ally who has spent his tenure weaponizing regulatory ambiguity to intimidate broadcasters. The notice warned that late-night and daytime talk shows could no longer assume they qualify for the “bona fide news exemption” from the equal time rule, a protection that has been in place since Jay Leno’s producers won it in 1996. Carr hasn’t formally repealed the exemption. He has merely threatened to — and watched as networks trip over themselves to comply with a rule that doesn’t yet exist. Colbert put it plainly on air: CBS was “unilaterally enforcing” guidance that had not been made law. No one forced their hand; they just folded.

The FCC’s lone Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, also called out both the network and the Trump administration. Gomez wrote on X that CBS’s decision is “yet another troubling example of corporate capitulation in the face of this Administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech” and made clear that “the FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes or to create a climate that chills free expression.” 

Layered on top of all of this is the arrival of Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Weiss built her brand at The Free Press as a contrarian voice fluent in the grievances of people who believe mainstream media has become too liberal. She was installed by David Ellison after his acquisition of Paramount and almost immediately began leaving her mark with shifts in content and reports of chaotic decision-making behind the scenes. 

In January, Weiss announced 19 new paid contributors to CBS News with evident excitement, describing them as experts who would appear across the network’s broadcasts and digital platforms. Among them was Dr. Peter Attia, a wellness influencer and longevity podcaster with a large online following and a heterodox approach to medicine that has made him popular in right-leaning media. Three days after Weiss announced Attia’s hire, the Department of Justice released a new trove of the Jeffrey Epstein files — in which Attia’s name appeared more than 1,700 times. The emails were not ambiguous. In a June 2015 message, the wellness influencer wrote to Epstein that the worst part about being his friend was that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.” In another exchange from 2016, Attia made a crude sexual joke directed at the convicted sex offender. The files also revealed that Attia had, on at least one occasion, chosen to spend time with Epstein rather than visit his infant son, who had been hospitalized after entering cardiac arrest.

What followed inside CBS News was, according to multiple reports, a battle. Weiss refused to fire Attia because she saw it as “giving in to the ‘mob,'” while senior Paramount executives took the position that a man with hundreds of documented email exchanges with an accused child sex trafficker could not function as a credible expert contributor on a broadcast network. The situation reportedly required escalation to Ellison himself to resolve. (Notably, Weiss reports directly to Ellison — not to the head of CBS News nor to the president of Paramount.) Weiss’ reported rationale — that Attia’s “contrarian voice” was too valuable to lose — reveals that in her editorial calculus, the network’s credibility with its audience is less important than her commitment to a particular brand of heterodoxy.

Early on, Weiss also expressed interest in wooing “60 Minutes” contributor Anderson Cooper away from his full-time role at CNN to anchor the “CBS Evening News,” before she settled on Tony Dokoupil. Cooper, in the end, chose to leave CBS entirely. . . . As one insider put it, Cooper “wasn’t comfortable with the direction the show was taking under Bari, and is in a position where he doesn’t have to put up with it.” 

Cooper’s reported judgment is a devastating verdict on the Weiss era from a nationally-known and widely-respected veteran correspondent, and comes one week after producer Alicia Hastey walked out of CBS News with a damning farewell note calling the newsroom atmosphere one of “fear and uncertainty.”

Cooper’s exit raises questions about the future of “60 Minutes.” Other veterans like Lesley Stahl and Scott Pelley have already spoken publicly about concerns over the state of CBS News and its changing newsroom standards. Longtime “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens resigned months earlier, making it clear that he believed the program’s editorial independence was under strain. The institution is not just losing talent; it is losing the credibility built over decades that no roster of podcasters can replace.

What we are watching is the systematic dismantling of institutional independence in real time at one of the most historically significant news and entertainment corporations in America. Stephen Colbert is leaving in May. Anderson Cooper is already gone. What CBS should be asking itself is not how to manage the departure of the people who made it matter, but whether anyone left in the building still believes the mission is worth defending.

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