Right-wingers, who support many of the same policies of Adolf Hitler, often attack liberals as Nazis.
This was especially true when President Barack Obama held office.
But in 2016 a genuine authority on Fascism came forward to assess the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination.
“If Donald Trump become[s] the next president of the United States it would be a complete disaster. I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.”
So said Eva Schloss, the stepsister of Holocaust victim Anne Frank. As a survivor of Auschwitz, Schloss knows something about Nazis.
Eva Schloss
Then 86, Schloss met Anne in Amsterdam as a fellow refugee. Both their families had taken refuge there after fleeing Nazi Germany.
Anne Frank spent four years hiding in an attic and keeping a diary. But in 1944 she was discovered by the Nazis and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
She was 15 when she died there of typhus in March, 1945. After the war, Eva Schloss’ mother, Fritzi, married Otto Frank, Anne’s father.
Anne Frank
Eva was detained at the same time as Anne and sent to Auschwitz. She survived when the camp was liberated on January 27,1945.
In a January 27, 2016 essay for Newsweek, Schloss warned of dire consequences if Donald Trump became President:
“During his U.S. presidential campaign he has suggested the ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,’ as well as pledging to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico to keep illegal immigrants out.”
She was 11 when her family immigrated to Belgium after Hitler forcibly annexed Austria in 1938.
“We were treated as if we had come from the moon. I felt as if I wasn’t wanted and that I was different to everybody. It is even harder for today’s Syrian refugees who have a very different culture….
“I am very upset that today again so many countries are closing their borders,” said Schloss, who lives in London. “Fewer people would have died in the Holocaust if the world had accepted more Jewish refugees.”
And on February 18, 2016, Pope Francis also waded into the 2016 Presidential race with his own assessment of Trump.
During a six-day trip to Mexico, a reporter asked the Pontiff: What did he think of Trump’s campaign pledge to build a wall along the entire length of the U.S.-Mexican border and expel millions of illegal aliens now living in the United States?
“A person who only thinks about building walls, wherever they are, and not in building bridges, is not Christian,” replied the Pope. “This is not the gospel.”
Pope Francis
Francis said he would “give the benefit of the doubt” to Trump because he had not heard Trump’s border plans independently.
But he added: “I say only that this man is not a Christian if he has said things like that.”
Trump, a Presbyterian, responded minutes later: “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.”
Trump has repeatedly accused President Barack Obama—a self-described Christian—as a secret Muslim.
Donald Trump
On February 21, 2016, for example, he tweeted: “I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of [Supreme Court] Justice [Antonin] Scalia if it were held in a mosque.”
Obama had paid tribute to Scalia at the Supreme Court on the day prior to the funeral. He declined to attend the service because his heavy security detail might disrupt the ceremony.
“I am proud to be a Christian,” added Trump, “and as president I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened.”
Nor did he stop there: “If and when the Vatican is attacked by the ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria], which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.
“ISIS would have been eradicated, unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.”
Trump thus implied that the Pope’s future security depended on the United States generally—and on Trump in particular.
And he ignored the fact that, since September, 2014, the United States Air Force had been bombing ISIS convoys in Iraq and Syria.
On Easter Sunday, 2019—more than two years into Trump’s Presidency—ISIS bombed a series of churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, killing at least 321 people.
Trump has long been critical of the Pope’s stand on immigration.
As the Pope undertook his trip to Mexico, Trump told Fox Business Network that he didn’t think Francis understood “the danger of the open border we have with Mexico.
“I think Mexico got him to do it because they want to keep the border just the way it is,” he said. “They’re making a fortune, and we’re losing.”
A Vatican spokesman replied: “The pope always talks about migration problems all around the world, of the duties we have to solve these problems in a humane manner, of hosting those who come from other countries in search of a life of dignity and peace.”
For millions of Jews and Christians, the election of 2016 has turned into a referendum: Am I serving the Lord—or Satan?
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THE HIGH COST OF HATRED
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on March 19, 2026 at 12:10 amIt’s one of the most moving scenes in the 1974 classic, “The Godfather: Part 11”: Nine-year-old Vito Corleone and a cargo ship crammed with Italian refugees arrive at Ellis Island. They’re sitting or squatting on the deck when, suddenly, the Statue of Liberty looms over them.
And, just as suddenly, they rise as one and look up with expectant faces at the symbol of the new country in which they will soon live.
Statue of Liberty
Today, 125 years after Vito’s cinematic arrival in New York Harbor, the United States is seen as a far less welcoming place for would-be immigrants.
A far better description of its policies toward immigration can be found in the 1989 spectacular, “Saving Private Ryan.”
It’s 1944, shortly after the D-Day landings to liberate France from Nazi rule. As a squad of American soldiers prepare to assault a building held by Germans, a loudspeaker from the enemy side blares: “The Statue of Liberty is kaput.”
In 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported that more than 2.5 million illegal aliens left the United States, including about 1.9 million self-deportations and over 622,000 formal deportations.
Most of the deported came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba and Venezuela.
Since taking office as President on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump has made deporting illegal aliens—and even holders of green cards—the top priority of his administration.
Donald Trump
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reported hiring over 12,000 new officers and agents. This surge, largely occurring in late 2025, more than doubled the agency’s operational workforce from approximately 10,000 to over 22,000 personnel.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed on July 4, 2025, tripled ICE’s annual budget and provided $75 billion for massive increases in detention capacity and hiring new agents.
ICE’s aggressive arrests of migrants and even American citizens—capped by the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Minnesota—have sparked national protests.
They also led to Democratic Senators’ demanding major reforms in how ICE operates. Among these:
Trump—through his former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem—has absolutely refused.
As a result, Democratic Senators refused to fund DHS. A House-passed bill to do so failed in the Senate.
Since February 14, DHS has faced a partial government shutdown, forcing roughly 90% of DHS’s 260,000 employees to work without pay. On March 13, about 50,000 TSA workers officially missed their first full paychecks
The consequences of this include:
Ironically, ICE itself has not been affected by the shutoff of funds to DHS. Its funding comes separately from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Those agencies which are affected include:
All of these agencies perform tasks vital to the security of American citizens. But for Trump, the single most important of these agencies is the Secret Service.
Being forced to worry about meeting your most essential needs can easily decrease a bodyguard’s attentiveness to potential dangers.
Secret Service agent
This is not the first time that Trump has forced his bodyguards to work for free.
Secret Service agents had to work without pay through two major government shutdowns—for 35 days in 2018-19 and 43 days in 2025. Many of them had to stand in line at food banks to feed their families.
And there’s a less-personal danger facing Trump: More than 300 TSA agents have quit during the ongoing partial government shutdown as of March, 2026. Many more have called out sick, causing long lines at airports
If a terrorism incident occurs at an airport or aboard a plane—highly likely now since Trump attacked Iran on February 28—he will face the blame for it.
And with Republicans desperate to retain seats in Congress in the upcoming midterm elections, this could prove politically fatal.
During World War 11, Adolf Hitler prioritized the transportation of Jews and other prisoners to extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, often diverting munitions-carrying trains from the war effort to feeding victims into the Holocaust.
In the name of his racist effort to “cleanse” the United States of nonwhites, Donald Trump is putting his regime—and the lives of Americans—at deadly risk.
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