Ernst Christ, of the Christ branch of the family, a first cousin once removed of Donald Trump, the son of his great-uncle Johannes Christ, born in Kallstadt, was a Nazi. Unteroffizier Christ, a corporal, served in the 1st Company of the Panzerjager-Abteilung 670, an anti-tank unit that saw action on the western front in Belgium and France before being transferred to participate in the invasion of Russia.
In July 1942, Christ’s company occupied the town of Polodovitoye, about 100 kilometers south of Stalingrad. The Nazi soldiers rounded up about 100 Jewish families who had fled there from throughout the region. According to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust research center in Jerusalem, “Jews were loaded onto trucks, supposedly to be taken home. In fact, the victims were taken outside the village toward a ravine located 50 meters south of the village. There the victims were shot or probably severely wounded and then doused with some highly flammable liquid and then set on fire.” A month later, on 13 August, Unteroffizier Christ was killed in battle.
Three days before, on 10 August, the Wehrmacht reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. On that day, Private Eduard Freund, born in Kallstadt, was killed. He was the first cousin once removed of Donald Trump, the son of Donald’s great-aunt Elisabetha Trump and Karl Phillip Freund. Private Freund served in a security unit, the fourth company of the Sicherungs-Battalion 790, whose task of guarding supply lines and police work quickly turned, like that of all such units, into the operation of wholesale brutal terror. He was one of those soldiers from “all walks of life” described in historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, who found themselves occupiers in eastern Europe to execute the regime’s policies, often under the control of the SS, where “mass murder and routine had become one”, murdering partisans and civilians alike, and systematically killing Jews. The policy was justified in a phrase – Jude gleich Bolschewik gleich Partisan, or “Jew equals Bolshevik equals Partisan”.
If “blood” is the biological marker of indelible personal, racial and ethnic character, by his own reasoning Trump’s organic linkage to Nazis must inexorably explain his unapologetic Hitlerian politics. On Fox News, in March, Howard Kurtz, the host of its show Media Buzz, interviewed Trump. “Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’?” he asked. “The press, as you know, immediately reacts to that by saying, ‘Well, that’s the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used.’” To which Trump replied, “Because our country is being poisoned.”
But another Trump relative stands as a repudiation of Trump’s theory. John G Trump, Fred’s younger brother, did not go into real estate. Instead, he earned a master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in electrical engineering. He became a co-inventor of high-voltage electrostatic generators, which during the second world war he applied to advancements in radar. He served as the secretary of the microwave committee created by the federal government’s new National Defense Research Committee. After the war, he was appointed director of MIT’s High-Voltage Research Laboratory, whose work he used in cancer research and on environmental pollution.
His obituary in Physics Today in 1985 by a colleague paid tribute to his personal virtues as well as his scientific contributions: “Trump’s remarkable personality mix contributed to all of this achievement and success. He was remarkably even-tempered, with kindness and consideration to all, never threatening or arrogant in manner, even when under high stress. He was outwardly and in appearance the mildest of men, with a convincing persuasiveness, carefully marshaling all his facts.” Furthermore, wrote his eulogist, “He cared very little for money and the trappings of money.”
In other words, John Trump was nothing at all like his bullying, ignorant and greedy nephew, who bears the middle name “John”, the only apparent correspondence between them. The resemblance, regardless of genetics, is nil. Yet Trump cites him as proof of his intelligence, a case positive of “blood”. “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr John Trump. A genius,” Trump said in an interview with CNN in 2015. “It’s in my blood. I’m smart. Great marks. Like really smart.” From time to time, he brings up his uncle as his forebear of his own “genius”. “Good genes, very good genes. OK, very smart.”
Through his distorted lens, Trump’s uncle, who was the opposite of a narcissist, serves as a rationale for his narcissism. He is held up as an example of Trump’s “blood” mania, though the scientist in the family had no use for the sort of malevolent superstition the Nazis propagated and his nephew mimics.
Trump designates his blood as superior and the blood of those he chooses to demonize as inferior. “Well, I think I was born with a drive for success,” Trump told CNN in 2010. “I’m a gene believer. Hey, when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse. And I really was – you know, I had a – a good gene pool from the standpoint of that.”
“I have an Ivy League education, smart guy, good genes. I have great genes and all that stuff, which I’m a believer in,” Trump informed a crowd in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 2016. He had recently called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.
“You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump told another nearly all-white rally during his 2020 campaign in a Minnesota town that had voted against accepting refugees. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” He compared and contrasted. “Every family in Minnesota needs to know about sleepy Joe Biden’s extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet.”
“Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” Trump bemoaned in a White House meeting in 2018. He pointed to Haiti – “take them out” – El Salvador and the entire continent of Africa. “We should have more people from Norway.”
This April, at a fundraiser with donors at Mar-a-Lago, Trump proudly recalled his “shithole countries” moment to elaborate on his categories of acceptable and unacceptable immigrants. “And when I said, you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries,’ I’m trying to be nice. Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”
Trump claims he has not read Mein Kampf. His first wife, Ivana Trump, said he “reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed”, Vanity Fair reported in 1990. Trump explained it was a gift from a Jewish friend. Then, he told Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
As Trump ginned up his third campaign, Hugh Hewitt, a rightwing radio talkshow host, tried to help cleanse Trump of taint from his “poison in the blood” incantations. “Now, Mr President,” said the deferential Hewitt, “your critics say that you are using Hitlerian language that was used to dehumanize Jews by saying that Jewish blood cannot be part of German blood. Do you have anything like that in mind when you say poisoning our blood?”
“No, and I never knew that Hitler said it, either, by the way,” Trump replied. “And I never read Mein Kampf. They said I read Mein Kampf. These are people that are disinformation, horrible people that we’re dealing with. I never read Mein Kampf.”
Asked again by Hewitt, Trump answered, “First of all, I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way.” Then, after showing he was familiar with Hitler’s “blood” obsession that he had just said he did not know about, he repeated his “poison” meme eight times.
“I know nothing” was the comic punchline of Sergeant Schultz, the buffoonish Nazi prisoner-of-war camp guard from the 1960s television series Hogan’s Heroes. “I know nothing” has been a useful if transparently false tactic of deflection for Trump, from David Duke – “I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” – to the Proud Boys.
After the violent neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017, ringing with chants of “Jews will not replace us,” attended by a number of Proud Boys, Trump infamously stated, there were “very fine people on both sides”.
When Chris Wallace, the moderator of the 2020 CNN presidential debate, asked Trump if he would denounce white supremacists, he replied, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” a message to the neo-fascist paramilitary group that would be the shock troops in the attack on the Capitol on January 6. After the debate, he told reporters, “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are.” Now, he has pledged to pardon those Proud Boys and others serving prison terms for their actions in the insurrection of January 6. He refers to them as “hostages”.
White supremacists, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis attach themselves to Trump, sometimes appearing as more than a fringe – including, recently, the self-proclaimed “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, whom Trump called “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Neo-Nazis just seem to pop up weirdly on Trump’s property. At Mar-a-Lago, on 22 November 2022, Trump had a night to remember: dinner with the antisemitic rapper Kanye West, AKA Ye, and Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi, who was a leader at the Charlottesville march and riot, present in the mob on January 6, and has built an antisemitic following he calls the “Groypers”. Afterward, when the press reported on the dinner, Trump issued a statement that Ye brought “a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about”.
Trump’s footsie with Nazis mingles narcissism with Nazism. But it is his belief in the far-right “replacement theory”, which is the central idea of his campaign, that provides the greatest illumination on what are more than overlapping coincidences. The historical lineage of poisonous ideas, rather than “poison in the blood”, explains Trump’s doctrine of a master race, whether Trump is aware or not of the origins of his venom.
Trump’s embrace of the replacement theory may owe a good deal to its relentless promotion by its chief exponent, Tucker Carlson, who also serves as an intellectual mentor to JD Vance. On more than 400 shows when Carlson was on Fox News, according to the New York Times, “he has amplified the idea that a cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration”.
On his 2 September podcast, Carlson interviewed a self-proclaimed “non-racist fascist”, Darryl Cooper, whom he introduced as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. For two hours, he held forth on Winston Churchill as the “chief villain of the second world war” and the Holocaust as an accident forced on Hitler. Despite Carlson’s Nazi fascination, his principal influence has been as a recent popularizer of a doctrine developed more than a century ago.
Trump’s replacement theory is derivative of the nativism of eugenicists and “race scientists”, especially Madison Grant, whose 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, warned against “the old stock being crowded out” by “swarms of Polish Jews” and other aliens, who were pushing aside “the Nordic man”, and fostering “suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race”.
Grant served as an adviser to the congressional members who wrote the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration of those ethnic groups from eastern and southern Europe that he deemed inferior, closing out Italians and Jews. He also helped write laws in the south banning interracial marriage.
Hitler regarded Grant’s book in his speeches as scientific proof and wrote him an admiring letter telling him it was his “Bible”. “It was America, in spite of its enormous territory, that was the first country to teach us by its immigration law that a nation should not open its doors equally to all races,” Hitler told the New York Times in an interview on 20 December 1931, before he seized power. “Let China be for the Chinese, America for the Americans and Germany for the Germans.” In 1936 the Nazis promoted The Passing of the Great Race as essential reading for Germans.
“The irony is that by putting Madison Grant’s theories into practice, the Nazis discredited those theories forever,” wrote the historian Jonathan Spiro in his biography of Madison Grant, Defending the Master Race.
That is, until Trump.
When Trump says immigration, he means race. When he says crime, he means race. When he says communism, socialism, or Democrat, he means race. When he says America is declining, he means race. When he says “American First”, he means race. When he says blood, he means race. When he says poison, he means race.
When he says race, he means Black people. When he says race, he means Hispanics. When he says race, he means Muslims. And when he says race, he means other white people, too, some less white, less pure, less clean, less acceptable depending on their ancestral origin, than others. When he says race, he means the replacement theory.
Trump has Hitler on the brain in unknowable ways until he lets his admiration seep out. “Well, but Hitler did some good things,” Trump remarked to his White House chief of staff, General John Kelly. “Well, what?” asked Kelly. “Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy,” Trump replied. Kelly was outraged. He told him, “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.” Kelly reflected, “It’s pretty hard to believe he missed the Holocaust, though, and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theater,” Kelly told Jim Sciutto, the CNN correspondent. “But I think it’s more, again, the tough guy thing” – Trump’s insatiable need to playact.
On 17 September, Trump launched a new theme with an old echo. He made a prophecy about who should be blamed if he is defeated in the election. “I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss,” he said. Then, he repeated, “If I don’t win this election – and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because if 40%, I mean, 60% of the people are voting for the enemy …” He complained that as “the most popular person in Israel” he was not “treated right” by American Jews.
Trump’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, his converted Jewish daughter Ivanka, his Jewish grandchildren, his Jewish adviser Stephen Miller, who is poised to be the implementer of the replacement theory and deportation of millions, including legal immigrants, and his Jewish supporters and donors are exempt from his condemnation of “the Jewish people”. Trump’s family ties don’t give him pause from his obsession. His “blood” makes them kosher. In the case of an inconvenient contradiction his narcissism prevails.
Trump’s blame game is his version of the Dolchstosslegende – the stab in the back legend – that Germany did not lose the first world war in battle but was betrayed on the home front by Jews and leftists. Hitler traced his political awakening to his understanding of the Dolchstoss.
Now, after all Trump has done for the Jews, after all he has done for Israel, “the Jewish people” are ungrateful. Too many of them support “the enemy”. Trump is warming up his myth of a scapegoat.
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Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
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