America: Making the Reich great again

My friend Helen is one of the smartest and funniest people I know. I’m really grateful that because of you I can commission and pay for writing from other writers in Aotearoa x

Over to you babe:

"History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes." – Mark Twain (probably). Also: sometimes it crashes into the timeline wearing an orange spray tan, blasting 'Born Free' by Kid Rock (because apparently that’s who was still willing to sing at Trump’s last Inauguration Ball) and doing dance moves that look like he’s double-fisting two dicks at a Monster Truck rally. You know, democracy's final form.

I was compelled to write this after my Instagram feed was suddenly flooded with AI-generated images of Trump as the Pope and as Rambo, somewhere between end-times kitsch and algorithmic fascism.

Before we go any further, let me be clear: I am a geek. I once read The Fall of Berlin for fun, and I’m the kind of person who accidentally ends up in 2AM Wikipedia rabbit holes about 1930s political history. So, if parts of this feel a little intense, know that it comes from someone who has been yelling random, unwanted history facts about propaganda and the Third Reich to unsuspecting friends and group chats for years.

It always starts with a flag, a slogan, and a promise to protect. Maybe a meme. Maybe a joke. Maybe a plan to buy Greenland. Before you know it, there’s a crowd chanting, a press pass being revoked, and a leader claiming that really, the people over there want to be part of us, because culture, or borders, or "economic logic."

If that sounds familiar to you, it should. Trump’s 2025 rhetoric about Canada and Greenland isn’t bold. It’s not even original, he’s simply copy-and-pasting from Goebbels’ propaganda diary and pretending it’s an original idea. It’s the historical equivalent of copying your best friend’s answers in a sixth form history test (hi, Chantal!).

Trump repeatedly floats the idea that Canada should become the 51st state, suggesting that existing borders are merely “artificial lines” standing in the way of common sense and national security. In 2025, he declares, "The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State." To many, it just sounds like hyperbole, another made-up, catchy sound bite. But in 1938, Adolf Hitler used nearly identical logic when he announced that he made the Anschluss happen and Austria was absorbed into Nazi Germany.

The justification? Cultural unity. Shared language. Economic logic. Sound familiar?

Trump’s attempt to buy Greenland isn’t just about real estate envy. “I think we're going to have it, and I think the people want to be with us.” That’s almost a word-for-word echo of Hitler's 1938 address on the Sudetenland: “My patience is now at an end.”

Hitler claimed Germans were being mistreated there and that he was coming to save them. Trump claims Canadians and Greenlanders would be better off under U.S. rule. Both push the narrative that the people "over there" are simply waiting to be rescued or claimed - by a more powerful neighbour.

What’s truly chilling is how familiar this dance is, and no, I don’t just mean Trump’s infamous double-fisting-dick dance moves. I mean the rhythm of authoritarianism: repeat slogans, rewrite history, and perform masculinity like it's theatre on a collapsing stage.

Hitler became adept at using populist themes, often pinning blame on scapegoats for his followers’ economic misery, he chose Jews, communists, intellectuals. Sound familiar? Trump does the same: demonising immigrants, journalists, LGBTQ+ communities, and anyone who threatens his narrative.

It's the oldest play in the book: tell people their pain is someone else’s fault, then promise to punish them for it.

Hitler used propaganda posters and national radio to sell the dream of unity under one Reich. Trump has Truth Social, Fox News, and MAGA meme pages with more engagement than a Kardashian wedding and divorce saga. More reach than the Paddy Gower on Weed documentary could ever dream of.

The kicker? For Trump, Newshub-style media collapses aren’t a tragedy—they’re a dream scenario.

A world where media outlets he doesn’t control are dismantled, discredited, or defunded is precisely the kind of echo chamber authoritarianism thrives in.

Hitler did the same thing after seizing power in 1933: he banned opposition newspapers, took control of radio broadcasts, and used the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda to turn all media into a vehicle for Nazi messaging. The press wasn’t just repressed - it was transformed into an extension of the regime.

One of Hitler’s favourite slogans? “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.” One people. One empire. One leader. Trump’s is equally grandiose, just printed on more baseball caps made in China: "Make America Great Again."

The cult of personality is no historical footnote - it’s the main event. After the failed ear-assassination-that-wasn’t, his team tripled down on the mythologising. Images of him waving stoically, hand over heart, ear bandaged needlessly…

This version of Trump is somewhere between confused cosplay and ego-driven fan fiction, shot entirely on a green screen of delusion. But Hitler played this card too. After the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, the Nazi propaganda machine spun his arrest and prison time into martyrdom.

Then came the paintings. Hitler, the warrior; Hitler, the saviour; Hitler, the man communing with mountaintops and destiny. It's always the same script: turn the man into myth, and let the myth do the marching.

Trump’s mugshot isn’t a legal record; it’s now merch. Hitler carefully staged press photos, rehearsed gestures, and choreographed statuesque marches. And then there were the images - all meticulously composed to sell a fantasy.

Half of them look like they were dreamed up by a Mills & Boon cover artist with a fetish for militarised masculinity, windswept, brooding, and just one open-collar shirt away from invading Poland.

The visuals were theatre: constructed masculinity, nationalist cosplay, fascist vibes filtered through a Leni Riefenstahl lens (she directed Triumph of the Will, basically the cinematic blueprint for making fascism look like a Coachella headline act).

Trump has AI-generated photos of himself as a Rambo-style warrior, bald eagle at his shoulder, and muscles from someone else's torso.

While much of the world now teaches the Holocaust as the central horror of WWII, it wasn’t the reason the war began. Before the camps, before the full machinery of genocide was unleashed, many Germans were already sounding the alarm about Hitler - journalists, academics, clergy, even some within his own party.

They saw what was coming.

But he silenced them, one by one.

First through ridicule, then censorship, then force. Controlling the media wasn’t just a side project, it was a key strategy.

When the only voice left is the loudest one, truth doesn’t stand a chance.

Hitler didn’t start with death camps; he started with intimidating his dissidents into silence and then land grabs. Austria. Czechoslovakia. Poland. Border by border, handshake by handshake, he redrew Europe like it was his to edit. He promised order and prosperity. And he got applause for it.

The mass genocide comes later.

The silence comes first.

Today, when Trump talks about deportation forces, military purges, and seizing other countries, many still shrug. Just like they did in 1935. And 1936. And 1937.

Annexation is never about kindness. It's about resources. When Germany annexed Austria, it gained gold reserves, skilled labour, idle factories, and hydroelectric power. It was sold to the public as destiny. Trump’s obsession with Greenland and Canada follows the same logic: rare earth minerals, Arctic oil, water, timber. Nationalism is the mask. Extraction is the motive.

People comfort themselves by saying it couldn’t happen here. That this is just Trump being Trump.

But history doesn’t repeat itself because no one remembers - it repeats because people only remember the ending, not the beginning.

They forget that Hitler was mocked, underestimated, and dismissed - until he wasn’t.

They forget that many Germans also sounded alarm bells, and they didn’t listen.

They forget that the first losses under fascism are never your own. Until they are.

So when Trump hugs the flag like a lover and floats annexing allies, don’t laugh. And don’t look away.

Because if history tells us anything, it’s that authoritarianism doesn’t need everyone to agree, it just needs most people to look the other way until the tanks are already rolling.

And if you're reading this from Aotearoa and wondering why you should care, here's why: because Hitler didn’t stay within his borders.

He escalated until the world was on fire.

And the last time that happened, over 11,900 New Zealanders didn’t come home from WWII.

Just a few weeks ago, we stood in silence on ANZAC Day, honouring those who served and those who fell. We said, 'Lest We Forget.'

So, let’s not. Because I don’t want to see our children used as cannon fodder for the glory of someone else’s empire, because no one took it seriously.

Helen Gilby is a writer, solo mum, and wildly inconsistent law student. She’s better at arguing in essays than exams, and far more fluent in grief, class warfare, and bureaucratic nonsense than in torts. Her writing appears in The Spinoff and Rere Takitahi: Flying Solo, where she trades footnotes for feelings.

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