Hitler: Donald Trump’s Historical Antecedent

Like Trump, Hitler had boundless trust in his own instincts. As with Hitler, managing Trump’s mood is the top priority of his war cabinet.

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Copyright ©2026 Independent History and Research • www.RevisionistHistory.org

I am as weary as many of you are of the cheap polemical trick wherein someone losing a debate resorts to the tired, shopworn tactic of accusing their opponent of being “just like Hitler.” In most cases the comparison is a flimsy one put forth by a historical illiterate. Yet, weak debaters often take the bait and spend the rest of the time remaining in the exchange strenuously trying to show they’re not an avatar of the Fourth Reich.

When do we ever hear of someone accused of being “another Lenin”? The Communist tyrant Vladimir Lenin was responsible for the mass murder of at least five million mostly Christian Russians in the early days of the Bolshevik dictatorship (1918-1922). This fact is seldom taught anywhere in the West with anything like the intensity with which Hitler’s iniquity is conveyed.

In the college I attended, which was affiliated with the Episcopal Church, one of my history professors, a popular pedagogue who was a graduate of the London School of Economics, proudly displayed a poster-sized photograph of Lenin in his office. This was not considered controversial.

In Seattle, Washington a statue of Lenin stands on a prominent corner in the commercial heart of the Fremont district. When queried by critics, Seattle grandees explain the presence of the monument to a mass murderer as being due to the fact that Fremont “embraces quirky public art.”

Trump/Hitler Parallels

The Trump/Hitler parallels I am bringing to your attention are from the dark corners of revisionist history, neglected by the vast majority, especially by those who have either a grudging admiration for the Nazi dictator or are his outright defenders.

Background: Hitler’s first defeat occurred in the summer of 1941. This revisionist verity demonstrates the suicidal nature of his invasion of Russia, which had no chance of ultimate success.

As early as the autumn of 1941, less than four months after the June invasion, Nazi Germany’s Quarter Master General Eduard Wagner informed the führer that the war was lost. Supplies of every vital material necessary to sustain the war effort were too catastrophically low to sustain a military victory over the resource-rich Soviet Union.

This was at a time when Hitler in his Reichstag Speech of October 3, 1941 declared to the German people that the collapse of the Soviet Union was near at hand, “In the East, the enemy has already been broken and will not recover from the blows he has received. The Soviet regime has lost its main military forces; what remains can no longer alter the outcome. The campaign has shown that this opponent was far weaker than we had assumed, and I can therefore say today that the struggle in the East has already been decided.”

In the early days of Trump’s Iran war he made similar cocky, pre-mature claims about the defeat of the Islamic Republic. In early March Trump stated: “We already won the war in many ways…” On March 28 he claimed that Iran’s forces and government were effectively “neutralized.”

In his indispensable history, Retreat from Moscow: A New History of Germany’s Winter Campaign, 1941-1942, David Stahel writes:

For those not familiar with my former studies of German operations in the east, the fighting at Moscow will not be portrayed in this book as Hitler’s “first defeat,” nor even the turning point of the war, because I argue that both already took place in the summer of 1941. Such a proposition may strike some as counterintuitive given that, at the most basic level, the story of Germany’s summer campaign is typically characterized by fast-moving panzer groups, calamitous cauldron battles, and staggering sums of Red Army losses. Perhaps even more conclusive is the fact that, at the end of it all, Hitler’s armies stood deep inside the Soviet Union, ultimately threatening Leningrad, Moscow, and Sevastopol. The logic here appears simple: Germany’s first defeat, whenever that might have been, certainly could not have come before the first winter of the war.

The problem with this logic is that it separates German operations from their strategic context. Battles do not exist in a vacuum, and they should not be seen as ends in themselves. The sheer accumulation of battlefield “victories” in 1941 clearly did not suffice to knock the Soviet Union out of the war, and it was this failure that ultimately proved so ruinous to Germany’s prospects. Heavily restricted access to raw materials, critical production bottlenecks, and bitter policy debates governing the allocation of resources to the armed forces were fundamental to the outcome of a large-scale industrialized war.

Indeed, it was Germany’s grim long-term economic prospects that first directed Hitler’s attention toward an eastern campaign, but embarking on it came with huge risks. Either Hitler would secure his long-prophesied Lebensraum (living space) in the east and ensure limitless access to almost any resource Germany might require in its war against Great Britain, or the Wehrmacht’s air and sea war in the west would be disastrously undercut by a parallel, high-intensity land war in the east. Thus, it was absolutely essential for Germany to end any prospective war against the Soviet Union as quickly and as decisively as possible—there was simply no economic or military contingency for anything else.

Under these circumstances, some authors have attempted to argue Germany’s dominance by pointing to the far greater problems in the Red Army during the summer campaign. Yet the contexts for the two forces were entirely different; the Wehrmacht had to win outright at all costs, while the Red Army had only to survive as a force in being.

Allow me to mirror the preceding statement about Russia in 1941, in Iran in 2026: thus, it was absolutely essential for the U.S. to end any war against Iran as quickly and as decisively as possible. The American military had to win outright at all costs, while the Iranian missile and drone forces, as well as its Revolutionary Guard Corps, had only to survive as a force in being.

Like Trump’s war in Iran, Hitler’s war in the East was launched on the basis of his gut instinct and over-confidence in those instincts, which were further propelled after Germany’s stunning victories in France, Belgium and the Netherlands in 1940.

Trump’s successful attack on Venezuela gave him a blind faith in his intuition. In the forthcoming book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, authors Haberman and Swan reveal how the deliberations inside the administration that led to the decision to go to war on Iran were based on the president’s instincts.

Returning to the 1940s and the Eastern front, Stahel notes, “As the chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel-General Franz Halder, acknowledged in his diary on November 23: “An army, like that of June 1941, will henceforth no longer be available to us.”

Accordingly, the summer and fall of 1941 saw the Wehrmacht achieve stunning successes, but from a strategic point of view it failed to do the one thing that really mattered—defeat the Soviet Union before its (Germany’s) vital panzer groups were blunted. Once Operation Barbarossa (the code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union) passed from being a blitzkrieg to a slogging war of matériel, which was already the case by the end of the summer, large-scale economic deficiencies spelled eventual doom for the Nazi state.

As Albert Speer observed, “The manner in which Hitler and his entourage governed and commanded was bound to stifle gradually every free opinion. Nobody in his surroundings had the courage to put forward his opinions, let alone stand up for them.”