DAILY NEXUS / SARAH CAULDER

The most memorable moment of my study abroad experience wasn’t a trip to Ibiza or a long weekend of island-hopping in Greece. It was a relatively normal day — as normal a day can be when you’re studying abroad in Paris, France — and my professor commented on the United States general election that was happening in the coming days. My professor, a Frenchwoman and creator of social justice documentaries, said quite plainly, “Hitler was democratically elected.” 

The words sent a chill through my bones. As someone who has worked in democratic politics throughout my collegiate career, the days before Nov. 5, 2024 were ones of both trepidation and hope. I felt the standard pre-election anxieties, but I was still riding the highs of “Brat Summer” and the Kamala Harris Democratic Party switch-up. My professor’s words remained with me on election night, and have stuck with me throughout the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s term. Every executive order, every cabinet confirmation hearing, every government agency shuttered. 

I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. for the first time in March of 2025. The permanent exhibit was both horrifying and enlightening. When walking through the first part of the exhibit where the dark walls were engraved with details of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, I was reminded of the actions of Trump. 

It’s no secret that Trump likes to dabble in authoritarianism. In his first term, Trump frequently dipped his toes into the fascist pool, from his illicit dealings with authoritarian leaders to his persistent rejection of traditional media outlets. Prior debate surrounding Trump’s fascist ideologies has proved somewhat inconclusive, with experts disagreeing on whether or not Trump can confidently be called a “fascist.” But in the first 100 days alone, Trump’s second term has taken these tendencies a step further, pushing American democracy to the edge of extinction. So even if Trump doesn’t stick to the exact definition of “fascist,” he certainly looks like one. 

Getting a handle on fasces

“Fascism” is a term largely associated with the regimes of Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, two authoritarian leaders from the Second World War. Hitler and Mussolini popularized the term through their use of violence, censorship and racism to secure political power. In an interview with NPR, Roger Griffin, an Oxford Brookes University professor and political theorist defined fascism as: “an authoritarian, ‘revolutionary form of extreme nationalism’ that often incorporates racism, xenophobia, male chauvinism and the culture of violence.” 

Trump has had a history with all of these terms, from his 2017 Muslim ban to his public embrace of authoritarian leaders like Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. But where Trump has always excelled the most at authoritarianism is in his divisive, dehumanizing rhetoric. 

Trump’s use of the word “alien” has been a hallmark of his political career, the term being used to describe noncitizens and immigrants to this country. The use of the word “alien” is not limited to Donald Trump, but his first administration repopularized and even encouraged the use of the word in place of friendlier alternatives. The word is overtly dehumanizing, not only refusing human status to immigrants, but labeling them something else entirely. 

Furthermore, the word “alien” has a fascist history. According to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, throughout Nazi Germany, racial specialists examined eye and hair color in addition to facial dimensions to determine if people were racially deemed “Aryan” or “alien.” These racial policies, among others, sought to dehumanize Jewish people and other marginalized groups, drawing a clear line between the perceived “superior” and “inferior” races. 

But Trump’s reuse of Nazi rhetoric doesn’t end here. In November of 2023, Trump told a New Hampshire crowd, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” 

Trump’s obvious misunderstanding of fascism aside, his use of the word “vermin” is extremely troubling, as it is a term that became central to Nazi racial ideology. Nazis viewed the Jewish people as “parasitic vermin” in German society, and the reductive, dehumanizing term began the foundation on which genocide was created. The use of words like “vermin” and “alien” not only works to beat down political enemies and the marginalized, but they also uplift those who are “pure.” 

Hitler was obsessed with the “purity” of Aryan blood and was opposed to any member of society who could taint it. This included Jewish people, but also political dissidents, LGBTQIA+ individuals, Black people and others. This idea of “purity” is prevalent in Trump’s rhetoric towards immigrants as he told a far-right website The National Pulse that immigration was “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Trump’s anti-immigrant policies also resemble those of the Third Reich, as Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan has publicly encouraged Americans to inform on their neighbors’ immigration status. Ignoring the fact that the average American has no legitimate way of knowing the immigration status of those around them, snitching on neighbors was a common practice in Nazi Germany. According to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Gestapo, the secret Nazi police force, gathered much of its information from private citizens: waiters tattling on their patrons, bosses selling out their employees and children giving up their parents.   

Trump’s borrowed Nazi rhetoric is not insignificant. Dehumanizing the opposition is a central figure of authoritarian regimes and is often seen as the first step towards political violence. However, it’s apparent from Trump’s first 100 days that the president has taken more than just one step toward fascist rule. 

Trump versus education

Trump returned to the White House with a fervor on Jan. 20, 2025. Following an inauguration ceremony inside the Capitol Rotunda, Trump signed a whopping 26 executive orders. These executive orders did everything from withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization to establishing protections for TikTok. Trump’s executive orders have been unrelenting, with the president hitting 100 orders in just 64 days. 

But one of these issues in particular stands out for its open opposition to constitutional principles — the conservative stance against education. Educational institutions have been at the center of conservative culture wars throughout Trump’s political career, from Trump and his supporters calling for bans on LGBTQIA+ books in elementary schools, to attacking a doctoral recipient for her “woke” thesis on the politics of smell. 

Trump’s style of anti-intellectualism harkens back to Nazi Germany, as Nazi forces facilitated the burning of thousands of books in the spring of 1933. They most heavily targeted books by Jewish authors, including the works of Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, but they also burned thousands of books by non-Jewish intellectuals. They burned the work of Communist theorists, literature on homosexuality and women’s rights as well as the writings of Helen Keller. 

Trump’s rejection of education has manifested in his attempts to take down the Department of Education entirely, which he set out to do in a March 20 executive order. This is not a new agenda item for the president, as he targeted the department throughout his first term as well. But Trump has proved to possess the renewed vigor of a Napoleonic “hero” returned from exile, and has set out to destroy federal control over American education for good. 

Dismantling a federal institution like the Department of Education requires an act of Congress, and although both the House and Senate are currently under Republican control, the slim margins make it difficult for Trump to secure the numbers to pass such an act. Not to mention, courts across the country have already begun to express dissent with the Trump Administration’s plans for the federal agency. However, Trump has impacted education through other means, including his actions against academia. 

In the spring of 2024, we saw college campuses again become a conduit for political protest, with students forming encampments on university greens across the nation to engage in pro-Palestine activism. Columbia University was at the forefront of these actions, with their “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” making national headlines as students occupied a university building and camped out on the university’s lawn for two weeks. 

The Trump administration’s recent response to these protests was a threat to pull over $400 million dollars of federal aid from Columbia’s coffers — a condition that could only be discussed if Columbia complied with demands from the federal government. The demands call for the expulsion or long-term suspension of protest participants, a campus-wide mask ban and an evaluation of the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department, among other things.

Trump’s retaliation didn’t end here, as the president began to target student organizers on Columbia’s campus publicly, the first of which was Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student and Palestinian activist. Khalil, a green card-holding permanent resident of this country, was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on March 8, 2025. Authorities have offered little in response to questions of why Khalil was detained. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared on X that the administration would be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” 

Trump’s attacks on Khalil have triggered an onslaught of visa terminations across the country. One equally troubling case has been that of Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk who was detained outside of her Massachusetts apartment on March 25, 2025. Öztürk, a Turkish citizen on a student visa, was also targeted for her pro-Palestine activism. 

Surveillance footage of this moment is striking, as six plain-clothed officers descend on Öztürk in seconds, leaving her no choice but to comply. Watching the footage should leave no doubt that Öztürk’s detainment is not a politically justified power move. It is a kidnapping, it is an abduction. It is an egregious display of power from the executive branch and an ominous message for the coming years. 

Targeting political dissidents in this way was a key tool in Nazi rule. The Nazis took action against anyone who disagreed with them: Communists, social democrats, trade unionists, liberals and more were arrested for their political views and activities. Members of the religious clergy faced imprisonment if they spoke out against the regime, and religious minorities were persecuted for their refusal to swear allegiance to the state.

Trump’s actions against American universities, their activists and education in general signal a troubling shift in Trump’s attitudes towards fascism. No longer are Trump’s dalliances with the fascist world a furtive secret, a clandestine tryst — it is undeniable public knowledge. Trump’s actions represent the new American order, a state where people are punished for exercising freedom of speech, where political enemies are deported, where our civil liberties are dissolving before our eyes. 

21st-century Holocaust

My dad accompanied me on my trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Every bit as politically oriented as I am, my dad asked me if I thought a 21st-century Holocaust was feasible. I wanted to say no, that humanity had evolved past mass death and torture, past persecution and hatred. But I couldn’t shake the feeling the exhibit had given me. I felt that we had not only taken a journey through the past, but were also allowed a glimpse into the future. 

I wish I could provide a helpful guide of solutions for dissent, a 10-step guide to protecting democracy and your citizenship. But the Trump presidency has thrown all concepts of legal protest and protection out the window. Watching Trump’s administration go after institutions of higher education, including the University of California system, has proved that no one is safe. Every revolutionary act comes with a new level of risk, the knowledge that to protest means endangering your livelihood. With this new American order also comes a new level of freedom — if nothing is protected, then anything goes. We can’t do anything but remain vigilant, loud and empowered. 

When Keller’s writings were burned by Nazis in the spring of 1933, she did not despair. Instead, she reacted to the burnings with a swift grace, with defiant authority: “Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.” 

Lucy Dixon can’t help but have faith in democracy.

A version of this article appeared on p. 9 of the May 1, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.