General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is quoted as calling the last days of the Trump presidency, after the lost election of 2020, as well as the months before the election, when the ex-president openly considered invoking The Insurrection Act to have the military round up his enemies, a “Reichstag moment”. He also referred to the Trump dead-enders who were advising the increasingly desperate Trump as Nazis and was determined not to let them win.

Of course, to appreciate what a Reichstag Moment is you need to know a snippet of history. If you are on the right you will also be very skeptical toward the comments of the disloyal Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as reported, and framed, in an influential newspaper owned by a supremely greedy billionaire Satanist pedophile cannibal who pays no tax. This account of General Mark Milley’s reaction to Trump inner circle authoritarianism really got my attention. Nobody has been sued over the account in the book, reprinted in the article, including some Milley quotes that could have been uttered by me, so there’s that too.

The Reichstag is the German Parliament building. After Hitler came to power, with a 37% share of the electorate, he was part of a coalition government, initially hemmed in by an eighty-six year-old general (the chancellor) and other determined (but overmatched) traditionally conservative functionaries. Within a few weeks the Reichstag went up in flames. Hitler was not surprised when he arrived on the scene (Nazis almost certainly set the supremely useful fire) but angrily vowed quick restoration of law and order and a fight to the death against the perpetrators of this shameless communist provocation [1]. The members of the Reichstag quickly granted Hitler emergency powers, as authorized in the Weimar Constitution for times of national emergency, which in this case was to last the entire twelve increasingly murderous years of the Thousand Year Reich.

When someone who knows a bit of history mentions the “Reichstag” it is usually in the context of a terrifying atrocity done to enable a radical political change. Once they burn your seat of government you’re allowed to go to a very different rule book for fighting these motherfuckers, as the former president might say. Which, frankly, he did say, when using his monumental lie about a stolen election to incite the MAGA riot:

The Washington Post article, entitled “Joint Chiefs chairman feared potential ‘Reichstag moment’ aimed at keeping Trump in power” begins:

In the waning weeks of Donald Trump’s term, the country’s top military leader repeatedly worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, comparing his rhetoric to Adolf Hitler’s during the rise of Nazi Germany and asking confidants whether a coup was forthcoming, according to a new book by two Washington Post reporters.

As Trump ceaselessly pushed false claims about the 2020 presidential election, Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, grew more and more nervous, telling aides he feared that the president and his acolytes might attempt to use the military to stay in office, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year.”

Milley described “a stomach-churning” feeling as he listened to Trump’s untrue complaints of election fraud, drawing a comparison to the 1933 attack on Germany’s parliament building that Hitler used as a pretext to establish a Nazi dictatorship.

“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides, according to the book. “The gospel of the Führer.”

A spokesman for Milley declined to comment.

source

The article continues:

. . . as military and law enforcement leaders planned for President Biden’s inauguration, Milley said he was determined to avoid a repeat of the siege on the Capitol.

“Everyone in this room, whether you’re a cop, whether you’re a soldier, we’re going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power,” he told them. “We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

Nazis did get in, some very fine Nazis (now being persecuted by radical leftists in power illegitimately), and the ring of steel Milley talked about did not stop tens of thousands of them from gathering to cheer the audacious lies of America’s Greatest Liar and then, the most audacious of them from storming and ransacking the Capitol to halt the peaceful transfer of power in what many call an insurrection (the GOP calls it patriotism), but, as Milley predicted, our institutions held, even if barely.

As Democracy Now! summarized the same revelations today:

Top U.S. General Mark Milley feared then-President Trump could attempt a coup to remain in power, and compared Trump’s rhetoric in the final weeks of his presidency to that of Nazi Germany. The revelations come in a new book by Washington Post reporters, which says Milley described Trump as a “classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose.” Milley also reportedly called Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud his very own “Reichstag moment.”

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Is it hyperbole to call people Nazis merely for being willing to use violence to overthrow a fair election out of undying loyalty to a bullying, constantly lying leader?

You be the judge, here’s my recently composed synopsis of Nazism in action:

They calculatingly used the rage of a suffering populace to fuel a right wing revolution in Germany and install an anti-democratic one-party government. Nazis were pioneers in the now popular technique of the Big Lie — an audacious and incendiary lie (Biden, the Clintons and Tom Hanks all fuck children and drink their blood, BLM and antifa stole your president from you!!!) to keep the rage and fear levels high. They employed street violence (brown shirt squads, kicking ass and taking names!) which they defended as necessary to save the nation from radical leftists who wanted to destroy Germany. They called for the execution of all critics of Nazism (and soon got around to doing it). They had the backing of many of Germany’s top industrialists, who feared socialist reforms in poverty-stricken post-WWI Germany more than they did street violence in the name of the free market, militarization and, soon, vastly increased profit from Nazi government slave labor programs and the like. They instituted loyalty pledges and purged all non-Nazis from public positions, judiciary, civil service, professorships, medicine, law. They went along, step by step, first “euthanizing” people in mental hospitals, then conducting nationwide pogroms against a hated minority, then taking the citizenship away from classes of citizens, then detaining them, confiscating their property, deporting now stateless “resident aliens”, etc. It was years until they had everyone ready for what they became famous for during the last three years of the war, high tech mechanized mass murder of at least ten million hated subhumans (six million Jews, five million others were killed in death camps). The Nazi one-party police state advanced step by step, with the support of millions of purposefully deluded Germans and the willing connivance of a fully Nazi judiciary.

As for very fine people on both sides, on both sides, it’s impossible for me to see any very fine people on the Nazi side, or the Klan side, or the Trumpist side, for that matter. Most likely because I am a judgmental hater, as so many of my ilk seem to be.

[1]

A dim witted Dutch communist was quickly tried and executed as the sole perpetrator. This van der Lubbe, who in spite of his modest intelligence was apparently a gifted athlete who sprinted, breaking all speed records, to the various spots in the large building that were simultaneously set ablaze to turn the Reichstag into a dramatic bonfire.