I recently rewatched the historical series “Band of Brothers.” One of the scenes I can’t get out of my head is toward the end in which local inhabitants around a discovered Nazi concentration camp are forced to serve as a burial detail for the hundreds of bodies of murdered Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and others who had fallen into disfavor by the regime.
The citizens insisted they did not know about the existence of the camp nor about the activities occurring there. For a whole host of reasons from the constant train traffic delivering cattle cars of people to the camp to the inevitable stench of burning bodies from the crematoria, this denial was wildly implausible. The reason this scene sticks in my mind is that I cannot escape the similarities I see in that scene to the history unfolding in our current time in our own country.
As the Trump Administration takes a wrecking ball to the federal government and the norms of the rule of a law, civil service non-partisanship, professional apolitical military, and the overall Constitutional order, I wonder when the MAGA base of Trump’s Republican Party will realize that he, Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Robert Kennedy Jr., and the rest of the cast of misfit toys known as the Trump Cabinet are not acting in the best interests of the country or of the MAGA base. They are acting in the grossly arrogant belief that only their vision of America as detailed in Project 2025 can produce a safe and prosperous United States. The anti-immigrant, white Christian Nationalist world that that document proposes is antithetical to every fiber of what made this country the envy of the world.
I have many German friends from my decades of work in the international arena. If the topic of the Holocaust comes up, they will quickly, and mostly rightly, point out that the views of the Nazi’s in the 1930s do not reflect the Germany of today while also expressing a sincere embarrassment, bordering on shame, that it will always be a footnote to their country’s identity.
As millions of Americans, the majority of which are residents of Trump’s red state coalition, face the loss of access to health care, defunding of critical nutritional programs for their children and resources for their rural hospitals, and mounting financial and services obligations forced on their state and local governments with little financial backstop, I am left to wonder when the blinders will come off. When will they see they have been duped by a conman who genuinely is tossing them onto the trash heap of American political fraud while he accumulates more and more power for his own enrichment?
Sadly, these economic and social disruptions are actually child’s play compared to the societal and legal damage being done by the rounding up of people on the streets by armed and masked federal agents. Let’s be clear, the Biden administration woefully mismanaged the southern border. There is a real national interest in regaining control of the border and addressing the impact of the Biden malfeasance on America’s cities and resources. But there is a legal way to do it.
In January 2024, there was a legislative path forward that Trump torpedoed through his Congressional minions so he would have an immigration crisis on which to run his campaign. Now that he is back in office, he is a one-trick pony: the mass deportation of undocumented people. He has flailed on the economy, utterly failed at making any progress on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, become an internet meme on the issue of tariffs, and is in the process of gutting the world’s premier science and medical research and university ecosystem. Through all this, the MAGA base cheers because the consequences of his actions are falling on the “them.”
At some point, maybe during next year’s midterm election season, or during the campaign for president in 2028 when most of Trump’s handouts to the working class are scheduled to end, or over the next 10 years when the cost of America’s growing debt and budget deficits will cripple the federal government’s ability to function, maybe the MAGA proud will look themselves in the mirror and see just a tinge of embarrassment, bordering on shame, for what they fell for and enabled to happen.
Brad Gutierrez, Ph.D., is a retired U.S. Air Force combat pilot, professor of political science, military diplomat, and senior public policy civil servant.
