What does Trump’s Hitler impersonation at the United Nations on Tuesday have to do with Trump’s banning select news organizations from the White House? And what do either have to do with his increased efforts to round up thousands of unaccompanied children with pending asylum claims and prep them for deportation?

The answer: All of these indignities are symptoms of a US political system that has been captured by fanatics, its priorities now a near-mirroring of those of the fascist leaderships against whose foul vision hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their lives fighting during the Second World War.

At the UN this week, as part of the annual gathering of world leaders at the general assembly, Trump railed against supranational organizations such as the International Criminal Court; threatened to “annihilate” and cast into an unrelenting hell the Iranian state and the tens of millions of people who live there; boasted about seizing Venezuelan oil fields; peremptorily embraced the might-is-right notion that “to the victor belong the spoils”; intimated that he would extend his tender mercies to Cuba next; and pledged, despite growing public unease, to turbocharge the AI revolution so as to lock US dominance in place from here to kingdom come. The irony was lost on no one that the US president had chosen the United Nations—the founding mandate of which, in the aftermath of world war, was to create international cooperation to help defuse conflict—to unfurl his most odious, nationalist sentiments.

This was, quite simply, Hitler updated for the digital age. I challenge you to find one sentence in that monstrosity of a UN speech that the German Führer would have wanted to distance himself from.

Fascists talk a good talk when it comes to toughness, but another common denominator is their incredibly thin skin. If you can’t brook criticism, and you have an awful lot of power at your fingertips, why not go after media institutions and individual journalists who try to hold you to account?

In the early days of Nazi rule, the opposition press was systematically destroyed, with an anti–free press law decreeing that editors must “regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life.” Hundreds of publications were driven out of business, and it was made clear to collaborator companies by Max Amann—the bureaucrat in charge of Hitler’s efforts to corral the media—that their advertising money should only be spent buying space in party-approved journals and newspapers. Legally and financially, the free press was ground to dust.

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October 2026 Issue

This past week, in a middle-of-the-night social media tantrum, Trump decided to “ban” reporters for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House because of their at times unflattering portrayals of America’s wannabe king. In explaining this appalling move, Trump then declared that the free press is “something which I cherish,” but that his move was aimed at “instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!” He also informed the press corps, “Something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposefully negative stories.”

After years of training, I now speak enough Orwellian to be able to translate this. It means “Quiescent Free Press good; critical Free Press bad. First Amendment simply a waste of parchment.” Again, Hitler, or for that matter Stalin, couldn’t have said this any better—although I suspect it would have sounded vaguely more poetic in the original German or Russian.

Unsurprisingly, Todd Blanche’s quisling Justice Department then went to court to defend the indefensible, arguing that the president had absolute freedom to deny any media he wanted from the White House and to make a judgment call on national security grounds that the critical media were, in fact, a danger to the well-being of the state. That, I suspect, will be a bridge too far even for the Roberts Supreme Court.

While we’re on the subject of defending the indefensible, for the past two months the administration has been building a massive infrastructure, centered largely in Texas, to detain, and to fast-track for deportations, thousands of unaccompanied minors who crossed the southern border in recent years and who have pending asylum cases in US courts.

They have chosen Texas—immigrants’ rights advocates whom I have spoken with on this believe—because Abbott’s Lone Star state has so few regulations in place requiring minimum levels of services and legal protections for children in immigration detention.

At the urging of Stephen Miller, hundreds of children have been snatched from communities around the country in recent weeks and relocated to Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) sites in Texas, according to Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice. And the administration has solicited proposals for the building of a 3,000 bed facility in Texas that would have the capacity to receive 500 new children every 30 days.

Consider this the opposite of the Kindertransport efforts that rescued Jewish children from fascist territories in the run-up to the outbreak of World War II and provided them safe refuge in Great Britain. In 2026, the United States, by contrast, is in the business of rounding up vulnerable children, interning them, and then deporting them back into clear and present danger—and dozens of companies are, with alacrity, crafting business proposals to get in on the profits from this vile trade.

The proposed Texas mega-site for child detainees, along with others in the works, would, says Aber, be in clear violation of ORR’s own regulations, which state it can open “emergency influx facilities” only when upwards of 85 percent of the beds in its regular facilities are filled; currently, she says, only a quarter of these beds are being utilized. In other words, it is a solution in search of a problem, one that makes sense only in the context of the government’s determination to round up huge numbers of kids around the country in the near future, and then concentrate as many of these unaccompanied children as possible into Texas as a prelude to dumping them back over the border, where they will be peculiarly vulnerable to trafficking and murder. “Our suspicion is it’s about trying to have a big facility that is hard to access for legal services providers [who, as of March 2025, saw their federal funds to represent these children terminated] in order to funnel children out of the country as quickly as possible,” Aber states.

Urged on by Miller, the child-snatching teams are working overtime. Neha Desai, managing director of the National Center for Youth Law’s Children’s Human Rights & Dignity project says that “the pace at which they are proceeding now is unprecedented. Every day over the past few months has brought more chaos and destruction.”

That the fate of thousands of young children is being decided by a man of Stephen Miller’s fetid disposition ought to send shivers down all of our spines. Remember, Miller was instrumental in the decision, last year, to set up the secretive Office of Remigration within the State Department, aimed at coordinating efforts across government agencies to “remigrate” everyone from refugees and asylum seekers to children who have been trafficked and abused. It is a nakedly white supremacist project that even takes its name from European fascist movements’ rhetoric on the “remigration” of non-white, non-Christian immigrants.

More than a century ago, Miller’s family fled pogroms in the Russian empire and found a way to start afresh in the United States. Today, Miller is presiding over the shredding of America’s welcome mat for immigrants and is looking for ever-nastier ways to “remigrate” even desperate, unaccompanied children into situations that will likely prove lethal to many of them.

I don’t know if Trump or Miller have ever read Mein Kampf, but I do know that their hideous philosophy is shockingly similar to that detailed by Hitler nearly a century ago. And I know that a terrifyingly large number of people and institutions are collaborating with this project as it takes a wrecking ball to the American story. It is a moral stain that the country will be grappling with for generations. We had a choice in 2024; as a country, we chose the fascists. An opportunity is on the horizon to choose again. Let’s not mess this one up.