In September, 1938, as Adolf Hitler threatened to go to war against France and England over Czechoslovakia, most Germans feared he would. They knew that Germany was not ready for war, despite all of their Fuhrer’s boasts about how invincible the Third Reich was.

A group of high-ranking German army officers was prepared to overthrow Hitler—provided that England and France held firm and handed him a major diplomatic reverse.

But then England and France—though more powerful than Germany—surrendered to Hitler’s demands for the “Sudetenland”—the northern, southwest and western regions of Czechoslovakia, inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans.

Hitler’s popularity among Germans soared. 

The plotters in the German high command, realizing that public opinion stood overwhelmingly against them, abandoned their plans for a coup. They decided to wait for a more favorable time.

It never came.

Adolf Hitler and his generals

Less than one year after the infamous “Munich conference,” World War II erupted. 

Most Germans blindly followed their Fuhrer right to the end—believing his lies (or at least wanting to believe them), serving in his legions, defending his rampant criminality.

Germans paid the price for their loyalty to a murderous dictator—not just on the battlefield, but through countless rapes, murders and the wholesale destruction of their cities. And from 1945 to 1989, Germans living in the eastern part of their country paid the price as slaves to the Soviet Union. 

Americans have learned nothing from this warning from history about subservience to a madman.

In 2016, almost 63 million Americans elected Donald Trump—a racist, serial adulterer and longtime fraudster—as President. 

Upon taking office in January, 2017, Trump began undermining one public or private institution after another. Among his outrages:

• Repeatedly and viciously attacked the nation’s free press for daring to report his growing list of crimes and disasters, calling it “the enemy of the American people.”
• Publicly sided with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin against American Intelligence agencies (FBI, CIA, National Security Agency) which unanimously agreed that Russia had subverted  the 2016 Presidential election,
• Fired FBI Director James Comey for investigating that subversion. 
• Gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey  Kislyak highly classified CIA Intelligence about an Islamic State plot to turn laptops into concealable bombs.  
• Allowed predatory corporations to subvert Federal regulatory protections for consumers and the environment.
• Shut down the Federal Government for more than a month on December 22, 2018, because Democrats refused to fund his “border wall” between the United States and Mexico. An estimated 380,000 government employees were furloughed and another 420,000 were ordered to work without pay.
• Threatened members of Congress with treason charges for daring to challenge him.
• Since being acquitted of impeachable offenses by the Senate, fired the Inspectors General (IG) of five cabinet departments in six weeks. 

Donald Trump   

Through all those outrages, House and Senate Republican majorities remained silent or vigorously supported him.

Democrats seemed unable to cope with Trump’s legislative agenda and his personal attacks on Twitter and in press conferences.

Even when the press unearthed his latest corruptions, the public didn’t care.

And now, with the 2020 Presidential election fast approaching, Trump has unleashed his latest outrage—while Americans who could stand against it do nothing: Trump now is laying the groundwork to discredit the outcome if he loses.

And it’s increasingly looking as if he will.

His tactics: Make it difficult to vote, guarantee voting is slow and complicated and raise questions about the outcome.

He wants to claim that if former Vice President Joe Biden wins, he was elected through a fraudulent mail-in vote.

Republicans have not protested any of this. Nor would they likely protest if Trump illegally occupied the White House in the face of massive vote fraud—on his part.

(His Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, won the popular vote in 2016—but lost in the Electoral College. But that didn’t prevent Trump from claiming that he would have won the popular vote except for massive fraud—which never happened.)

Whatever happens, Trump will claim he won.

In 2012, after President Barack Obama defeated his endorsed candidate, Mitt Romney, Trump tweeted:

• Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! 
• The world is laughing at us. We can’t let this happen.  We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. 
• Our nation is totally divided!
• The loser one! [Trump’s spelling]
• He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!

And even if he’s forced to leave office, he will undercut the ability of his successor to govern. 

During World War II, scores of  high-ranking German army officers risked their lives to plot the overthrow—and even assassination—of Adolf Hitler. Their efforts culminated in the ill-fated July 20, 1944 bomb plot that left Hitler badly injured but still in total command of Germany. 

It would take only Vice President Mike Pence and eight Cabinet officers to courageously invoke the 25th Amendment and find Donald Trump “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,”

Yet even that small a number of honorable men cannot be found within the Trump administration.