Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Letter to the editor:

History has seen Trump’s ploy

We’ve seen him stumble, reading speeches on a teleprompter and we’ve heard that he won’t, or can’t, read daily CIA intelligence briefing reports. But there is one book that Donald Trump kept beside his bed and studied carefully, according to his first wife, Ivana. Adolf Hitler’s “My New Order” held Trump’s attention as he read this tome on using propaganda to control a nation.

After the Parliament building was destroyed by a suspicious fire, Hitler issued the 1933 “Reichstag Fire Decree,” giving him extraordinary powers that crushed Germany’s democracy under the jackboot of dictatorship. Is Trump attempting to replay that disaster with his phony “national emergency” declaration?

Declaring a national emergency gives the president many more dangerous powers than simply spending military base reconstruction funds to build a useless, symbolic wall. It enables censorship of our free press; it enables massive spying on American citizens with tools unimaginable in Hitler’s time; it could squelch special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

Democrats will oppose this fake “emergency,” but Senate Republicans also need to stand up for our democracy, now, before Trump actually uses this power, or it will be too late to stop catastrophe.