“He was capable of acting only on the basis of false pretenses. That note of fantastical over excitement associated with his personality derived from this disturbed relationship to reality. We might say: only unreality made him real.” — Excerpt from Joachim C. Fest’s 1973 book “Hitler”
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Historians have noted that President Donald Trump’s rise to power parallels Adolf Hitler’s. Like Hitler, Trump is a once-disgraced dilettante outsider who returned to power after attempting to overturn a legitimate election. Trump also takes after Hitler in spewing hate-infused white supremacist rhetoric against immigrants, marginalized groups and political enemies.
Additionally, both men have been described as fantastic liars. Pants-on-fire liars.
By now, Americans are becoming desensitized to disturbing images of camouflage-clad, gun-toting National Guard members from red states patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., supposedly to deal with “out-of-control” street crime. But it is important to look at the lies that got us here and threaten to invade other cities, including Chicago, where Trump has also promised more U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
This month, in the early hours of Aug. 3, a white teen claimed to be attacked by a group of Black teenagers in Logan Circle, one of Washington’s gentrified neighborhoods. The alleged victim, 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, is a former staffer with the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency. Before joining the team that fired more than 260,000 federal workers, Coristine was fired at a previous internship for allegedly leaking data to a competitor. Coristine also happens to be the grandson of a KGB spy.
The person who was conveniently present to photograph the blood-soaked aftermath was a fellow former DOGE staffer, Marko Elez, a college graduate in his 20s. He, too, racked up a shady record in his less than a year working in the Trump administration: Elez resigned for spouting racist eugenicist comments. He has since been rehired and is also allegedly known to have leaked sensitive proprietary information.
Eight days after Elez’s image of Coristine surfaced, Trump suspended democracy and essentially declared war on the citizens of the District of Columbia, despite the fact that we are experiencing the lowest violent crime rate in 30 years. No investigation. No fact-finding. No hearings. All on the word of two ethically challenged white men who work for Trump.
The same administration that fired a data analyst for releasing jobs numbers Trump did not like has announced an investigation of Washington’s crime statistics. Not the crimes — the statistics.
As Washingtonians, these lies hit home. We are scholars tracking the city’s crime data and the severe income inequality driving these spikes. We watched in horror as thugs attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and viciously assaulted a police officer, who died the next day, while Trump cheered the mob on and later pardoned them as heroes.
We looked closer at the supposed crime photo Elez shared on Fox/Truth Social. Coristine appears bloody and is posed holding his shirt, head down. There is no ambulance or medical staff present. It looks like he is leaning against a police car, but again, look closer: the vehicle logo is for American Pest, an exterminator.
Consider Elez’s previous public rhetoric. “Normalize Indian hate,” he said in one social media post. “I was racist before it was cool,” he said in another. Elez’s photo could be viewed as a sly nod to both Hitler and Trump’s affinity for characterizing their enemies as “vermin.”
This is an old story. Ever since Black people have set foot in this country, mythologies of Black crime and pathology and mostly male Black “superpredators” have led to thousands of savage lynchings, racist criminal justice policies, police brutality, mass incarceration and the ruse for continuing slavery “as punishment for a crime.” Fear of Black crime is one of the oldest and most reliable political dog whistles from Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush.
A Mississippi white woman accused Black Chicago teen Emmett Till of sexually harassing her in 1955, leading to his lynching.
In 1994, Susan Smith and in 2009, Bonnie Sweeten invented stories about Black carjackers. Trump himself took out a full-page ad in the New York Times in 1989 demanding the execution of five Black teenage boys rounded up and accused of raping a white woman jogging in Central Park. The boys, now men known as the Exonerated Five, served seven to 13 years behind bars before another person confessed to the crime after DNA evidence cleared the Exonerated Five.
That is of no concern to our president. He has only double-downed. Now Trump is just as obsessed with scapegoating Brown immigrants, along with the Black community, to justify his militarization campaign.
We do not know the truth about what happened on that dark street in Washington. It hardly matters. The myth is doing what it always does in this country. It is up to every American to make this grave injustice stop.
Suzanne Goodney Lea is an associate professor of criminology at University of the District of Columbia. Natalie Hopkinson is an associate professor of media, democracy and society at the American University.