I remember President Donald Trump’s first inauguration like it was yesterday. A freshman in high school, I sat in chemistry class as we watched a livestream of it unfolding. I neither understood what was happening at the time, nor did I take Trump seriously. When I look back on the year prior, during which I laughed at Trump memes, I was ashamed at how much I regurgitated Trump talking points.

I have hindsight and more life experiences under my belt. Now that I am 23 years old, I understand the importance of masculinity adopting a social justice-oriented approach to its protector instincts and of institutions being stalwart defenders for the most vulnerable among us. With a more humanitarian worldview and a richer understanding of history, I am better equipped to judge this new Trump era because I understand what the president ultimately represents.

Looking back at the campaign announcement that started it all, one would see a vision for the country that is thoroughly laced with anti-establishment, populist rage. From saying that “China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs” to looking at the world stage as a matter of “stronger” enemies and a “weaker” America, Trump’s worldview is clear. The United States “used to have victories” but has since become “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” Trump took a look at Americans’ anger over economic strife and broader national decline and saw political opportunity. He gave the nation an easy target: the immigrants that “caused” their suffering. In an age where “the American dream is dead,” a vote for Trump would fix the suffering and Make America Great Again (MAGA). 

From kitchen table issues to global affairs, the MAGA movement could then be described as a vengeful wrecking ball. It looks at the nation’s norms and institutions like they are buildings to demolish to make room for the coming working-class paradise.

In 2016, Trump repeatedly condemned the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Then-President Bill Clinton, who signed the deal into law in 1993, said that NAFTA was the one and only way to “reap the rewards of international competition” because it broke down trade barriers and made global competition easier. And yet, our economy’s post-NAFTA reality has, unfortunately, been a status quo of mass outsourcing, depressed labor rights and slavish service of capital interests. Trump, channeling labor rage and branding NAFTA as “economic surrender,” succeeded in labelling his 2016 opponent — former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — as the face of “a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism.”  

The betrayal of American workers gave rise to their anti-institutionalist rage and laid the foundation for Trump’s promise to make the nation work for them again. This rage is what made the victory of Trump — the man who said, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now” — much easier to understand. His opponent spat in the face of working class grievances and the people that held them. Clinton failed to capitalize on the nation’s angry distrustful shift away from our institutions of power, and so the rest is history.

Trump has persevered in his brand — despite his oligarchic allegiances — of working class appeal. But this is something we can’t view in a vacuum. Yes, through his wins in 2016 and 2024, he pledged to “remove the rust” and usher in the “Golden Age of America.” What cannot be ignored is Trump strengthening hatred towards marginalized groups.

There is no perfect correlation between economic frustrations and animus towards marginalized groups, but it is an important matter to endeavor to understand nonetheless. For example, a study on the relationship between post-Great Recession economic hardship and racial animus suggests that, with more hardship, there came more anti-Black Google searches and hate crimes. Seeking to explain the Tea Party’s post-Recession rise, another study focused on group position theory, or the idea that “you see the greatest levels of racial animosity from majority group members during times when the hierarchy appears unstable.” Looking at the more historic ties between economic hardship and racial hierarchy, we ought to understand why hateful rhetoric, and eventually policy, manifest in the first place.

As a matter of perception and policy action, economic strife grants political credibility to those who target and scapegoat certain groups as “the Other.” This hateful portrayal of minorities seeps over into the broader ideologies and institutions that have “wronged” polite society. The historical case study on just how evil this can be should be obvious to us all: Nazi Germany.

Looking at the Nazis, what do we see? Neither the slaughter of 6 million Jews nor the erection of Auschwitz happened out of nowhere. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles imposed upon Germany stringent terms of significant disarmament, deprivation of territories, massive debt payments and complete blame for the war breaking out. Rage against the treaty’s terms and the hyperinflation in the years that followed exacerbated Germany’s democratic backsliding. The German people grew angrier towards the Weimar Republic by the day, condemning it as a danger to the future of German livelihood. These sentiments gave rise to the riots and instability that ushered in Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship in 1933.

In a speech condemning the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler branded it as the “humiliation” preventing the “resurrection of the German people,” establishing the foundation for a movement that would “make the German one more National, that his Fatherland shall stand for him above everything else.” This restoration of German greatness became a powerful rallying cry with an inhumane cost.

Hitler demonized the Jewish people as the root cause for German collapse, writing that the Jew “always manages to secure new license to plunder his victims” and “poisons the blood of others.” Trump similarly has stated that he thinks the undocumented steal our jobs and are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Hitler’s top propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, villainized Bolsheviks as a “Jewish-Marxist” danger that made “nations suspicious of one another and hate one another, thus spreading a general spirit of unrest.” In that same anti-intellectual vein, Vice President J.D. Vance called professors “the enemy” and universities “fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies.”

Schutzstaffel leader Heinrich Himmler vilified gay people as a “plague” of “depravity.” Breathing new life into anti-LGBTQIA+ hatred, Trump’s party tirelessly paints the community as pedophiles, criminal savages and violators of “biological truth.”

I believe the ideological similarities between Hitler and Trump are irrefutable. Yes, their initial mandates were heavily rooted in the anti-institutionalist rage that economic strife brought. However, they became something much more sinister. Through deliberate lies and manipulation, they became evil strongmen that suspended moral constraints at every turn. The Holocaust was made possible by the step-by-step dehumanization that started with post-Versailles rage. With Trump following that playbook at every turn, we must sound the alarms on what has clearly turned into a national purification agenda.

For the moral clarity that this calls for, we must look to people like California State Sen. Scott Wiener, a co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus and former chair of the LGBTQ Caucus. On Trump’s defiance of the Supreme Court’s order to return an innocent, wrongfully detained man from El Salvador, Wiener wasted no time in denouncing the El Salvador’s prison at issue as a “prison concentration camp.”

Furthermore, years before he put political ascendancy ahead of historical awareness, Vance privately wrote that Trump was “America’s Hitler.” Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., prior to being the Cabinet official enacting Trump’s vision for a “healthy” society, repeatedly criticized Trump’s Nazi-adjacence.

Numerous historians have also made the Hitler-Trump comparison on account of their shared hatred for the democratic norms and “the ‘enemies within’ who must be removed from the body politic.”

Just as Nazi-aligned students burned books at the Institute for Sexual Research over its advancement of gender and sexuality research, Trump purged federal web pages and research grants of LGBTQIA+ information.

Like how Hitler issued his Night and Fog decree to kidnap people for “endangering German security,” Trump repeatedly disappears pro-Palestine college students over their ideologies being “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

This is how far the Hitler-Trump parallels of national purification go. The President of the U.S. is treating “never again” horrors like they’re a to-do list. Instead of honoring America’s liberation of concentration camps, Trump resuscitates the dehumanizing rage that made the camps possible in the first place.

I argue Trump takes messaging and policy inspiration from the Third Reich playbook. While my institutional neutrality, free speech and immigration stances make my opposition to Trump’s Fourth Reich abundantly clear, I still believe it is worth understanding. After all, the economic discontent under the Biden administration played a not too dissimilar role in Trump’s 2024 win as post-NAFTA rage did in 2016. The need to understand this rage, one that is heavily anti-institutionalist and heavily influenced by economic strife, is of particular importance for the Stanford community.

Stanford possesses some of the nation’s best legal minds, sends its students to work with leading policymakers and enables Silicon Valley to become the holy grail of technology innovation that it is today. Boasting a $36.5 billion endowment and heavily decorated, Stanford is a top-resourced institution of influence, access and power. Those are the reasons that, alongside the University acquiescing to MAGA scrutiny so far, stress the community’s need to re-imagine its role in the Trump era. 

Stanford voted for and donated overwhelmingly to Democrats in the 2024 election. Having met Stanford students that include former interns for both Democratic leaders in Congress and a 2024 Democratic primary delegate, that data doesn’t surprise me. What does alarm me is the risk of the Stanford community, from the students poised to be the changemakers of tomorrow to the professors who are actively consulted by the biggest names of our society, falling into the same out-of-touch trap that its party is already in.

The Democratic Party’s congressional leaders have sidelined working-class voters and prioritized the donations of already well-off Silicon Valley oligarchs. And while 2016 Democratic loser Hillary Clinton repeatedly belittled Main Street grievances, former-Vice President Kamala Harris surrendered credibility on economic woes to Trump after she said she would do “not a thing different” from Biden. Is this pro-status quo, anti-worker party the vehicle for the Stanford community to gain political wins with? In this anti-institutionalist, populist rage moment, I hardly think so.

To the Stanford community: I know that we can emerge victorious against the MAGA rage we are up against. To do that, we must change our Democratic positioning. We should dedicate our donations and volunteer efforts to explicitly anti-billionaire candidates. We should listen to the working-class minorities who voted for Trump and a progressive House firebrand like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We should condemn the economic “leaders” whose only beliefs are sticking to the rules of the game they wrote to benefit themselves. To prove that our institutions, which we personify, are worth fighting for, we should follow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s lead.

FDR condemned the Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks of his day as an “industrial dictatorship” that needed to be whipped into shape by pro-worker New-Deal policies. He tied justice for the working-class to “the survival of democracy.” That is the Democratic spirit that the moment calls for, and so it represents the very “American frontier” that we must help construct.

I see Hitler’s post-Versailles Germany alive and well in Trump’s post-NAFTA America. We won’t fully rid ourselves of that rage and hatred by ousting anti-Main Street Democrats. However, doing so would be real progress against the economically-rooted rage giving that hatred much of its political sway. After all, the desire to “win” in life is one of the most understandable desires there is. Our social and political engagements must reflect that understanding. 

As the Stanford community, we are a uniquely Democratic community that must lead the way on abandoning institutional deference and embracing every day needs. History reminds us that that is what fighting the MAGA rage looks like: ushering in an inclusive Golden Age of America.