Adolf Eichmanns everywhere
MAGA is a vessel of evil led by a depraved and corrupt criminal named Donald Trump.
It is an abomination, and it long ago unmasked itself.
Lest there be anybody who has just awoken from a long coma, the weapons-grade racism displayed by Donald Trump should make perfectly clear the evil at hand.
Trump has inspired a legion of frauds, racists and untreated psychiatric patients into believing their true calling in life is ruling over all of us. These people aren’t just wacky, they are dangerous.
My friend Tara Palmeri interviewed such a person this week. James Fishback is running for governor of Florida. I urge you to watch it.
I found it generally frightening because I know exactly what I am looking at.
Let me share a story to help understand it.
Avner Less was a German Jew.
His family was murdered in the extermination camps.
His destiny required his survival.
He became a policeman and rose through the ranks.
Eichmann was the organizer of the Wansee Conference, chaired by Reinhardt Heydrich in January 1942.
It was the meeting during which the industrial scale murder of Europe’s Jews was planned.
They spoke in euphemisms.
They talked about shipments “east.” They talked about “special treatment.”
They talked about settling the Jewish question, and called it the “final solution.”
The meeting was filled with lawyers. Everything was legal. The Nazis were obsessed with legality. Everything was buttoned up, especially the meticulous record keeping.
The surviving set of minutes is the record of the greatest crime in the history of humanity — planned in a leafy Berlin suburb over a sumptuous lunch in just 90 minutes.
That is all the time it took.
Ninety minutes.
It is important to remember that in Nazi Germany the torment of Jews was legal, while protecting a Jewish baby was criminal.
It is also important to remember that justice delayed is not justice denied. Adolf Eichmann, living under the identity of Ricardo Klement in Buenos Aires, was captured by the Mossad in 1961, and brought to Jerusalem to stand trial.
Less was the only man who spoke to Eichmann. The Israeli chief inspector and the SS Obersturmbannführer talked face-to-face for 275 hours.
The interrogation is a masterpiece. Studying it could be the work of a lifetime.
Less talked about the interrogations in 1981, 20 years after Eichmann’s execution when he was asked a question.
Less was asked if the experience had changed his perspective on anything.
It is an interesting question to ask the man who sat across the table from the principal organizer of the Holocaust for the equivalent of 11.5 days.
He did not answer the question by talking about revenge, or the satisfaction of seeing the Nazi criminal swinging from the end of an Israeli rope.
In fact, he didn’t attend the event itself.
He talked about democracy instead.
Less observed that there are Adolf Eichmanns everywhere.
They are all around us, he said.
He said that they are “latent in a democracy,” but that in a “dictatorship of the left or right, they become deadly in an instant.”
It is an astonishing statement. Democracy.
It is democracy that is the protection against mass murder and the depravity of the most savage animal on the planet: the human being.
Democracies, in all of their forms, are the only system of government and societal organization that places the dignity of the human being above the jackboot of the state.
American democracy remains a fragile experiment that has entered a period of contestation and crisis, following the greatest triumph of the American civil rights movement and the election of a two-term black president of the United States.
It is important to remember the American flag when thinking about America’s progress towards being a full democracy in which all people are equal under the law.
It wasn’t until there were 50 stars on the flag that Jim Crow was ended. The last two stars were added in 1959 – really not that long ago.
John Lewis belongs to the ages now and has taken his place with the other founders of the American Republic.
Then, he was just a gutsy young man who had not yet taken the first unarmed step towards state violence and hatred.
He would be beaten and bludgeoned by people who stood for the proposition that he was “less than.”
The unprovoked state violence inflicted on Lewis and the unarmed marchers was unprovoked and committed by men who claimed superiority over them on the basis of their skin color
This is the meaning of the Confederate flag.
It is a symbol of subjugation and oppression, a marker of racial primacy. It is the literal battle flag of a slave autocracy that waged war against the United States and killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.
Today, it replaces the banned swastika as an able substitute for Nazi marches and extremist parades.
It is no accident that the flag has found a home around Donald Trump and his cause.
It is no accident that 161 years after General Grant accepted the unconditional surrender of the cruel slave master and traitor Robert E. Lee that the first breaching of the US Capitol by the Confederate flag was made by a Trump foot soldier in the “red hat” brigade of pissed off Americans who want power and think violence is acceptable.
What is it that we are all witnessing in this extreme and radical moment?
It seems important to occasionally step back from the swirl of vituperation and “breaking news” chyrons to assess what is really happening.
What is the fight over?
Who believes what exactly?
Before continuing, transparency requires that my orientation be disclosed. Exhaustion is my overwhelming emotion when it comes to the current state of American politics, and particularly the Kabuki theater around pretending any of this is normal, or within the boundaries of the past 250 years of American history.
Between 2015 and today, Donald Trump has become the singular leader of an autocratic movement that is the greatest threat to the endurance of the American Republic since secession and the Confederacy.
During this time, Donald Trump was narrowly elected president of the United States twice, was twice impeached, and incited and led an insurrection.
He built a cult of personality on top of a weak and corrupt political party that traded decency for power.
Obedience was the price.
Trump’s overt embrace of revenge as a political philosophy saw the wholesale capitulation of every principle, position and value by the political party that embraced him.
The Republican Party, founded in 1854 to stand against the evils of human slavery, succumbed to a Queens hustler running on a platform of narcissism, malice and animus.
It has been reduced to an organized conspiracy for the purposes of advancing the self-interests of its donors to maintain the power of the politicians who stand for nothing but themselves.
None of them saw Trump coming, but he saw every last one of them from miles and miles away.
It is important to fully understand the vice-like grip Trump holds over the institution he captured and controls.
Even as he becomes less popular and loses support, his grip on the party will tighten.
There is no escape for men like Tim Scott and Pastor Mark Burns. They have lashed themselves to an evil cause they cannot disentangle from either in this world or the next. They have made their choice, and it is final.
There is physics involved around shrinking political parties.
First, it is important to recognize that a shrinking party can still win, and under the rules of the American system, hold power consistently.
Second, a shrinking political party becomes more extreme the smaller it gets.
Like a collapsing star, as a party shrinks, it doesn’t just become smaller, it gets denser, hotter and more fanatical until it implodes into a black hole of nihilism, madness and nothingness.
That is the state of MAGA in 2026.
With each point drop in the polls, the voices of the fanatics like Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, JD Vance and Stephen Miller will get louder and crazier.
There are two political parties that have endured as central pillars of the world’s oldest Republic. Each of them has played a vital role in the advancement of human dignity and freedom.
One of them has abandoned democracy and liberty.
One of them has turned against free elections.
One of them has turned against equality for all people under the law.
One of them has declared a right to rule over the majority.
One of them has embraced violence.
One of them has embraced thuggery.
One of them has made Donald Trump their leader.
One of them has become a threat to the Constitution and the endurance of the American experiment.
The Republican Party is controlled by thousands, not millions.
Those thousands have succumbed to the temptations of power in a way that no previous collection of American political activists ever has.
Their partisanship gave way to a fervor that, combined with algorithms, Fox News and demagogues galore, gave birth to a toxic cloud of animus that has led to their making war on the country that gave them a birth right of freedom.
They are committed to rewriting the definition of freedom to make it narrower and smaller again. They have put America on a collision course for disaster and political violence.
Control and subjugation are the meaning of policies that demand pregnant 10-year-olds carry their child rapist’s baby to term, while male politicians decide what birth control women can have.
They intend to use technology to track, monitor and control women.
Many of them are prepared to accept the use of violence to achieve political aims and believe in the establishment of a national morality written by fanatics and charlatans like Franklin Graham and Pastor Paula.
They want to build a thieving theocracy that is beyond the control of the people.
The people in this dystopian philosophy are simply pawns of the state.
When democracy collapses, violence follows because people kill other people for political power.
It took thousands of years for humanity to evolve to a point where the rule of law took the place of state savagery.
The American experiment is one of the most noble undertakings in all of human history, and it stands at the edge of an abyss because of Donald Trump, his family and a couple of thousand opportunistic cowards.
There is nothing that is carved in stone ahead – for good or bad. The American people will have a decision to make.
Reconciliation and renewal seem a better path than tyranny and violence.
Before he died, Avner Less reconciled himself to his place of birth.
He reconciled with the German people, and became one of them again.
When he died, Avner Less held two passports.
He was a German-Israeli Jew, who interrogated Adolph Eichmann face to face for 275 hours.
The lesson he learned from the experience is one the American people have no right to forget.
Our children deserve to live in an America that is freer and more prosperous than what came before. They deserve that no matter how despicable and cowardly the couple of thousand people are who have an iron grip on the Republican Party.
They must be defeated. They may label themselves as members of a great institution that once stood for democracy, but that is long gone. Avner Less would know exactly what he was looking at.
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” — Hannah Arendt
Adolf Eichman never pulled a trigger but his willingness to be a functionary of a criminal regime made his lack of empathy and in
ability to use morality as a factor in his capacity to think critically a dangerous personal trait. This turned his organizational skills into a weapon of mass destruction. Making his pen just as deadly as the weapons used by those who don’t mind getting their hands dirty.
Listening to Fishback is like taking yet another deep dive into the depths of narcissistic sociopathy. When will we learn that people like him should never be given public power?