Of course Trump hasn’t moved as quickly to suppress dissent. We live in a long-established democracy, whereas Germany then had a very weak democracy that was pretty much falling apart anyway. But don’t kid yourself; Trump has (and continues to) encourage violence — and incidents of right-wing violence against minorities have spiked under his leadership. He talks about “looking into” news outlets that publish things he doesn’t like and calls the free press “the enemy of the people.” He has begun saying the Democrats are “too dangerous to govern.” Not only has he begun denying asylum-seekers entry — he’s actually detaining them as criminals, ripping their children away from them with no system of finding them again, both of which are violations of the Geneva convention. And he’s now looking at trying to find ways to *revoke* naturalized citizens’ citizenship. *And* his ICE agents have done massive round-ups of those of Hispanic descent, sending people — including children and American citizens who just happen to have Hispanic heritage — into actual detention camps. Make no mistake, these are the first steps to fascism.

I hope that you are right, and that the strength of our democratic system of checks and balances will hold him in rein, and not allow us to devolve into a fascist state. However, the complicity of the Vichy Republicans, who now control all three branches of government, does not inspire confidence that that will be the case.

We should not shrug these troubling developments off. Those who have survived Hitler’s Germany have been sounding the alarm: we as a country have taken more than one step down a very dark path.