A few days ago, I started watching a World War II documentary-series on Netflix titled “Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial.” Mid-watch, I heard a quote that struck me. It was a quote by William Shirer, an American journalist and war correspondent during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. In a publication of his, he wrote, “When I came to live and work in Berlin soon after Hitler came to power, to my surprise, I found that few Germans seemed to mind that their individual liberties had been taken away, and they seemed strangely unaware of how Hitler was tricking them.” 

Then, just a few short hours later, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social something that felt too close to the story of Hitler’s rise to and maintenance of power. In the post, Trump wrote, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again. I don’t want that ‌to ⁠happen, but it probably will.” 

A threat of genocide.

We are living in a world where a modern president can threaten genocide and essentially get away with it. How the hell did we get here? 

In 2016, when Trump won the presidency, Trump voters called their political opponents dramatic. “We’ll be fine,” they said. “The economy will be great,” they said. As Trump proceeded to call entire groups of people murderers and rapists, to tell people that injecting bleach would kill the coronavirus and to claim that groups of immigrants were eating cats and dogs, the threshold for what was unacceptable presidential behavior continued to heighten. Fast forward to now, the President of the United States just hard-launched a threat of genocide on a social media platform. 

I’ve always wondered how Hitler was able to get away with the Holocaust. How could so many people be complacent in the presence of a genocide? Now that I am living in the age of Donald Trump, it seems so clear. 

It was not an aggressive jump from risqué comments to urging his followers to commit ethnic genocide, but rather a slow progression that was already questionable at its beginning, just not enough to drive people away. It started with small economic gains that were likely unsustainable, but they made people happy in the short term. I think of it as trying to dig up a coffin that is already in the ground. Hitler would take out a few scoops of soil at a time, slowly depriving people of certain civil liberties. Before people had time to think, he hit the coffin, and he had all the influence and power he needed to successfully commit a genocide against millions of people. 

We are nearing a point of no return, and maybe we are already there– it’s hard to see it when you are currently living it. But with the Republican party’s slow crumble, Trump’s growing unpopularity at the domestic and foreign levels and the borderline economic recession occurring in the U.S., we literally have to do something now or the moment will pass us by. 

I have heard the question a thousand times in history classes: “could the Holocaust happen today?” I’ve always thought, “of course not.” 

And I could not have been more wrong.