Trump’s Reichstag fire presidency is immolating
The media personality in the White House has been exposed as a crisis actor.
The day after an alleged gunman tried to barge into the White House Correspondents Dinner, Todd Blanche — the nation’s chief law enforcement official — appeared on national television to denounce that act of political violence.
But during the very same news conference, Blanche also signaled the president may vacate the convictions of terrorists found guilty of scheming to attack the government of the United States on behalf of Donald Trump on January 6, 2021.
“They were convicted, but President Trump, as is his right and duty under our Constitution, commuted or pardoned those individuals,” Blanche said.
This perverse contradiction epitomizes the era of Late Trumpism, in which the rewriting of history and systemic abuses of power are ramping up while Trump’s political power is collapsing.
Wishing for a Reichstag fire
Months after becoming Germany’s Chancellor in January 1933, Adolf Hitler took advantage of the burning down of the Reichstag, the seat of Germany’s democratically elected house of parliament (likely by lone arsonist), to warn of a purportedly imminent communist coup. He successfully used the fire to push for passage of the Enabling Act, a law that formalized his dictatorship and ended democracy in Germany for the remainder of his rule.
Since his return to power a year ago, Donald Trump and his cronies have assiduously searched for their own Reichstag fire — something, anything, to substantiate their claim that a vaguely defined conspiracy (comprised among others of No Kings protesters, trans people, and elected Democrats) is scheming to undermine the president, thus justifying his oft-expressive desire for absolute power.
Trump entered office with some reason to be encouraged that an act of terrorist violence could be leveraged to cement his long-desired dictatorial status. After all, the near-miss Butler assassination attempt in July 2024 galvanized his supporters, many of whom bought into claims that he was saved by divine intervention.
The September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk, a podcaster who built his profitable empire by piggybacking on Trump’s support among culture “warriors,” echoed yet another foundational myth of the Hitler State: The 1930 murder of Horst Wessel, a young stalwart member of the SA, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, who became the subject of the Nazi’s favorite song and the movement’s chief martyr.
For a while, it seemed MAGA might succeed in following the footsteps of other fascist movements by portraying the their regime as a dictatorship under siege, thus justifying ever more aggressive efforts to rule by force. But while many pundits seemed impressed by the purported success of Trump’s efforts to nullify democracy, most Americans remained unconvinced by his claims of victimhood.
In fact, contrary to his claim to popular appeal, Trump’s approval numbers began steadily ebbing shortly after he took office, a process he accelerated by embarking on his nihilistic tariff war, a move that (predictably) increased inflation and steadily weakened the economy. Then, after Trump sought to distract the country from his violent and incompetent governance at home through a series of increasingly reckless military adventures abroad, the bottom began falling out of his remaining support.
The Wolf’s Lair, at Mar-a-Lago
It is against that backdrop that Trump embarked on his own little version of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa (the failed invasion of the Soviet Union) by starting a war on Iran.
Characteristically, however, in contrast to Hitler — who managed his titanic war from a fortress near the front that came to be called the Wolf’s Lair — Trump declared his war while on vacation in his gated retirement community in Florida. In the two months since, he’s done very little beyond send social media posts to manage the conduct of his “military excursion.”
Like Hitler’s invasion of the USSR, Trump’s Operation Epic Fury at first seemed to be successful. But just as Hitler’s dreams of glory collapsed with the siege of his forces at Stalingrad by Stalin’s mighty US-backed army, Trump’s dreams of conquest met its match when Iran used a few speedboats and some mines to lay siege to the Strait of Hormuz.
As the scale of the debacle and Trump’s lack of an exit strategy has become clear, he’s expressed his growing frustration with ever more unhinged “Truth” posts. It was probably inevitable that his increasingly bonkers middle of the night rantings would lead him to do what he’s plainly wanted to do for years: declare himself not only emperor, but the Messiah. On the night of April 12, 2026, Trump posted a picture of himself as Jesus, apparently healing a sick man with rays emanating from his hands.
Trump has repeatedly played into messianic portrayals of himself with little blowback, including by appealing to members of the QAnon cult, which declared him to be a savior who was saving the world from the “globalists” (aka, Jews). And evangelical leaders had repeatedly assembled before him in what plainly amounted to worshipful arrays. But if he thought crossing the social media Rubicon by declaring himself to be the second coming of the Christian savior would be no big deal, he was quickly proven wrong.
The first political blows came from America’s Catholic community. American Catholics have long been a redoubt of conservatism (and even right-wing extremism) in a Church whose leadership in Rome has been moving markedly to the left. Trump, therefore, must have been blindsided when the church’s American bishops roundly denounced The Donald for dissing the Pope in the wake of Trump’s Messiah moment. More dismaying for Trump were the criticisms that almost immediately began emanating from Republican Catholic politicians.
But the really unprecedented and most potentially damaging criticism came from members of Trump’s most stalwart base — white Evangelical leaders — most of whom had long been willing to look the other way as evidence of his sinful ways piled up. Suddenly Trump was no longer immune from taking blowback even from those who days earlier had been worshipfully laying hands upon him in the White House, including from none other than that paragon of WASP extremism and pseudo religiosity, Tucker Carlson, who theatrically renounced Trump.
This turnabout cannot be explained simply by a bad choice of an AI image, which Trump in any event had deleted the day after he posted it. No, something more significant is afoot: The base of the would-be Trump dictatorship is cracking.
Germania on the DC Mall
Trump is clearly losing his mind — his cognitive abilities have been deteriorating in front of cameras with ever greater rapidity at least since the last presidential campaign. But the media personality in the White House retains his instinctual understanding of what plays, and what bombs, on TV. So it must be all the more frustrating for him to witness the now-undeniable fact that his show has jumped the shark.
Trump’s failed war heralded more than a historic military disaster, but also the end of any remaining hope he could be a dictator. The rejection of his Jesus audition made that reality resoundingly clear. But Trump has never been one to accept defeat with anything but defiance. Here the transit of America’s would-be fascist strongman once again bears a fateful resemblance to the fate of Adolf Hitler.
As Hitler’s war progressed, Allied bombing turned German cities into heaps of rubble. But a delusional Hitler claimed the destruction of Berlin was a good thing, because it would make it easier for him to rebuild the city as a Nazi showplace he called “Germania.” One of the centerpieces of his plan was a grotesquely massive arch. Sound familiar?
In the wake of the debacle of Stalingrad, the Führer began to blame the German people for his failures, a claim that conveniently justified his nihilistic choice to fight a losing war to the last child and retiree. And in another currently resonant note, as the Russians advanced toward the underground bunker Hitler had built under the Reich Chancellery, Hitler ranted about how history would vindicate his genocidal legacy.
While America, and the world, is lucky that Trump — a far, far lazier man than the quite lazy Hitler — seems to be running out of steam well before he can hope to work horrors anything close to those achieved by the Nazi dictator, the two share a late-regime obsession with rewriting history and building monuments to justify their utterly failed rule.
Hence the increasingly frantic effort of a crew of cronies, now being led by Blanche, to validate Trump’s victimhood thesis. The scheme, which began as soon as Trump re-took office with the pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists, seems about to culminate in a series of indictments against those Trump claims engaged in a “grand conspiracy” to hold him responsible for his own crimes — first and foremost among them former FBI Director James Comey, who was just indicted (again), this time for photographing an arrangement of seashells and posting it on Instagram.
The obvious (and almost certainly futile) goal of this effort is to use the next two years to invert the well-documented history of the last decade so as to render Trump into a victim of those who have sought to preserve the institutions of democracy, rather than the individual who has assiduously worked to destroy them. His desire to rewrite history offers the only cogent explanation of the increasingly bizarre and obsessive efforts to remake in his image not only the White House, but also much of Washington DC.
An emperor scorned is the most dangerous kind
While Trump’s effort to cover over his failures with a massive dose of gold paint will fail, the doomed nature of his endeavor won’t stop him any more than the bombing raids on Berlin caused Hitler to realize Germania was not to be.
Trump’s press appearance shortly after Saturday’s assassination attempt was as bizarre as it was pathetic. Only a deranged person would do what he did: use the occasion of his own brush with death to make yet another convoluted argument for the immediate construction of a massive Holiday Inn conference center next to the White House.
Just as Hitler’s failures led him to resent the German people ever more strongly and destructively, we can expect Trump’s growing frustration to result in ever more nihilistic and destructive actions as his term moves toward its end.
Trump is a failed dictator — but he is still president, and he’s propped up by stooges like Blanche who are ready and willing to make good on his most rage-fueled and irrational desires. The next two years, therefore, may be among the most trying of the slow-motion disaster that has been the Trump Era.
That’s it for now
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The Reichstag framing is vivid but the behavioral story is simpler: he pays nothing for the Jesus posts and the country pays for the January 6 pardons.
That’s the asymmetry that matters.
Approval can collapse and the pardon pen still works, which means the next two years run on grievance rather than mandate. Watch what gets signed, not what gets posted.
Johan 🐌
What is most frustrating is the fact that even though we know he will inevitably fail, we now have to watch him destroy ever more of our institutions and norms. The Republicans in Congress could stop this destruction but continue to play along with it. The futility is heartbreaking.