BY JEFFREY C. ISAAC

This week Donald Trump held a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, promoting the themes of “Make America Great Again,” “America First,” and, of course, “The Greatness of Trump.” According to a New York Times headline, it was “A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny, and Racism.” Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigrant consigliere, declared that “America is for America and Americans only.” And Trump himself declared that “the United States is now an occupied country,” promising to inaugurate “America’s new Golden Age” with “the largest deportation program in American history” and that he “will invoke the Enemy Aliens Act of 1798,” Twenty thousand MAGA enthusiasts cheered.

Reminded of Trump’s recent promise to “protect students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions,” I flashed back to a lesson I taught in November 2023 for a course on “Making Democracy Work.” The syllabus topic centered on FDR’s 1932 “Commonwealth Club Address” and 1941 “Four Freedoms” speeches. Thanksgiving break was fast approaching, the students showed signs of burnout, and I wrestled with how I might bring the week’s material alive.

And then there was Trump. Trump on steroids, pledging to exterminate the “vermin” that are his political opponents and everyone else who refuses to bend the knee. A long tirade, Trump’s 2023 Veterans Day speech, with its obvious historical resonances, reached new lows in its cynical contempt for both democracy and human decency.

The headlines immediately took note: from The Washington Post, “Trump Calls Political Enemies Vermin, Echoes Dictators Hitler, Mussolini”; from The New York Times, “In Veterans Day Speech, Trump Promises to ‘Root Out the Left’”; and from The New Republic, “It’s Official: With ‘Vermin,’ Trump Is Now Using Straight-Up Nazi Talk.” And thus Donald Trump furnished me with the perfect teaching moment.

I shared the links to those pieces with my students and then showed the students one of the most powerful films I have ever seen, A Night at the Garden, aptly described by Margot Talbot as “a seven-minute documentary composed entirely of archival footage that is, in its way, as chilling and disorienting as the most inventive full-length horror movie.”

US Department of Defense photo of the 1939 German American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden. In the public domain.

The students sat dumbfounded as they watched newsreel footage of the now infamous German American Bund rally at New York’s famed Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. A standing-room-only crowd of twenty thousand Nazis—not “neo-Nazis” but actual Nazis—standing in unison with arms raised in Sieg Heil salutes. A large group of clean-cut, Aryan-looking children, decked out in little Nazi uniforms, laughing and cheering when a lone Jewish protester is gang-tackled and beaten by Nazi thugs before being dragged off stage by equally thuggish policemen. The Bund leader, Fritz Julius Kuhn, holding forth from an elevated stage, with an enormous mural of George Washington draped from the ceiling behind him, with Nazi swastikas and emblems interspersed with the Stars and Stripes on either side.

With American flags everywhere, the local führer leads the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, mocks the “Jewish controlled press,” and addresses the crowd of “patriots.” “We, with American ideals,” he declares, “demand that the American government be returned to the American people who founded it . . . a socially just, white, Gentile-ruled United States . . . [with] Gentile-controlled labor unions free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.”

“The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung. And the film ends—an actual three-hour Nazi extravaganza reduced to seven minutes. When the film ended, there was a deafening silence in the classroom. The students were shocked, confused, dismayed. Then their comments came. “I can’t believe that was actually real. At first I thought it was AI-generated.” “It’s crazy that such a thing could happen.” “Did that really happen?” “Oh, my God.”

Many students expressed incredulity that they could possibly have taken American history courses and never learned of this. “Do I have your attention, now?” I asked with a smile. The students’ faces made clear that I did.

I then proceeded to discuss the crises to which FDR’s presidency was a response, and the fact that in the 1930s and ‘40s, the continuation of American democracy—highly attenuated and infused with racism—was placed in doubt. We talked about fascism and “America First,” about what their own grandparents or great-grandparents might have been doing while all of this was unfolding and about what all of this meant to them and for them.

One of my students then volunteered a serious and sincere question: “I wonder what would happen if a rally like the one at the Garden in 1939 happened today.” Unprompted, the question allowed me to bring the class exactly where I wanted it to go: the clear and present danger that currently plagues us. “Are you sure,” I replied, “that such a rally is not happening today?”

Silence.

Can someone please read the titles of the three articles I shared with you this morning? The links between 1939 and 2023 then became immediately clear. We discussed Trump’s speech and his fascistic rhetoric more generally, the connections to Mussolini and Hitler and to Charlottesville, and whether it can happen here and now.

The class ran ten minutes past its allotted time, and not a student moved until I ended it. And students were reminded why history matters and that the question they had about what their ancestors did back then might one day be asked of them: What did you know, and what did you do?

In the wake of the recent attacks on Trump, many MAGA ideologues have asserted that liberal talk about Trump’s fascism caused the attacks and endangers our democracy (Vance seems to have forgotten that back in 2016 he himself called Trump “America’s Hitler”). The fact that Generals Mark Milley and John Kelly—neither a liberal!—have recently called Trump a fascist give the lie to such claims.

While not a single Democratic leader has incited violence, Trump has repeatedly done so—against immigrants, election workers, Democratic politicians, and even Republican officials who refused to overthrow the 2020 election. It is not the talk of Trump’s fascism that it is irresponsible. It is Trump’s fascism—and its craven support by Republican leaders—that is irresponsible.

Trump is not Hitler; the current Republican Party, extremist to the core, is not the Nazi party; and the United States today is not Weimar Germany in 1933.

But Trump’s fascist resonances and affinities are clear. So too are the parallels between Trump’s night at the Garden—the crowd intoxicated by an angry, xenophobic version of “Americanism”—and that now-infamous night in 1939.

Back then fascism was kept at bay. Whether we will meet the test before us today is an open question.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University.