Does Trump or Stephen Miller love tariffs because their hero Hitler used them?

[Attilatheblond]

Monkey see/monkey do? In many ways it all sounds familiar with today, starting with this:

Hitler had what one might call a diffident, occasionally felonious disregard for financial matters. He owed 400,000 reichsmarks in back taxes. His understanding of economics was primitive. “You have inflation only if you want it,” Hitler once said. “Inflation is a lack of discipline. I will see to it that prices remain stable. I have my S.A. for that.” (The S.A., or Brownshirts, were the original paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party.) Hitler held Jews responsible for most of Germany’s financial woes.

Feel free to insert any minority Trump loves to deport in place of Hitler and German Jews. The story still plays all too similarly.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/nazi-germany-tariffs-trade/682521/]

“National Socialism demands that the needs of German workers no longer be supplied by Soviet slaves, Chinese coolies, and Negroes,” Feder wrote. Germany needed German workers and farmers producing German goods for German consumers. Feder saw “import restrictions” as key to returning the German economy to the Germans. “National Socialism opposes the liberal world economy, as well as the Marxist world economy,” Feder wrote. Our fellow Germans must “be protected from foreign competition.”

Even though Hitler’s own foreign minister, Konstantin von Neurath, was concerned that the strategy would spark a trade war, and could drive up the price of imported eggs by 600 percent, Feder’s tariffs fit into Hitler’s larger vision for “liberating” the German people from the shackles of a globalized world order.

Again insert any ethnic group Trump likes to use to rile up his magas in place of the ethnic groups Hitler didn't want in Germany.

But Hitler made no effort to reassure the markets, insisting that the tariffs were necessary and that he needed time to fix the ruined country his predecessors had left him. “Within four years the German farmer must be saved from destitution,” Hitler said in his first national radio address as chancellor. “Within four years unemployment must be completely overcome.” Hitler provided scant details as to how this was to be accomplished. By this point, he had broken even with the tariff cheerleader Feder, and had abandoned most of the action items for developing a nationalist and socialist economy. These items had included increased taxation of the wealthy; state supervision of large corporations; and the prohibition of “new department stores, low-priced shops, and chain stores.”

Yep, Trump wants taxation, especially for the wealthiest, abandoned. Wants deregulation and destruction of watchdog agencies that keep an eye on large corporations. Obviously he is all for allowing retail monopolies.

Those who refuse to learn from history....

One more question just because there was mention of Barron/Harvard in some morning reports: Is Trump going hard against Harvard due to Barron not getting into that august institution? Did admissions bruise his ego?

[Nictuku]

1. Thank you for taking the time to post this.

[Cirsium]

2. Almost identical

What Hitler said and what Trump is saying are almost identical.

But elsewhere today we are being lectured about comparing MAGAs to Nazis.

[Attilatheblond]

3. Not all compliant Germans were Nazis, many just ignorant, gullible bigots.

Same can be said about MAGAs. Not all are Nazis, but the people using them are probably Nazis.

[Cirsium]

5. Up to a point

Maybe. Read what the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich discovered when he returned to Germany after the war.

"There was so much that was true that did not make sense: the monumental apathy of the German people and their deep regret, not that they had started the war, but merely that they had lost it; their whining complaints at the lack of food and fuel and their total lack of sympathy or even interest in the worse plight of the occupied peoples, for which they bore so much responsibility; their boredom at the very mention of the Nuremberg trial, which they were convinced was only an Allied propaganda stunt; their striking unreadiness for, or interest in, democracy, which we, with typical Anglo-Saxon fervor and blindness, were trying to shove down their throats."

― William L. Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary

[thought crime]

4. Fascists tend to prefer autarky (self-sufficient economy). n/t

[tanyev]

6. I still find it hard to believe Trump has studied any topic that thoroughly.

Reincarnation seems more plausible.