Viral Twitter Thread: Donald Trump ‘Dangerous Democrats’ Tweet Is Prelude To ‘Reichstag Fire’ And Dictatorship
Donald Trump posted an alarming message to his Twitter account on Saturday, describing Democrats as “dangerous” as well as “extreme,” Inquisitr recently reported. Trump’s rhetoric, suggesting in effect that the Democratic Party is illegitimate and actually a threat to the United States, immediately sparked fears among Twitter users that Trump was planning to seize control of the government and declare himself a dictator.
“You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob,” Trump wrote on his Twitter account Saturday. “Democrats have become too EXTREME and TOO DANGEROUS to govern. Republicans believe in the rule of law – not the rule of the mob. VOTE REPUBLICAN!”
But according to a lengthy Twitter thread posted by Twitter user “Cyndia Blue,” Trumps’s Twitter post puts the United States “one ‘Reichstag fire’ away from true dictatorship.”
The “Reichstag Fire,” as Inqusitr recounted, was a 1933 incident in Berlin, Germany, in which the German parliament building, the “Reichstag” was burned by an unknown arsonist just one month after Adolf Hitler was named German chancellor. The Nazi Party, of which Hitler was leader, had won 230 parliament seats in German national elections the previous year.
Hitler quickly announced that Communists were behind the fire, and he within days issued what later came to be called “The Reichstag Fire Decree,” according to a history by The Holocaust Encyclopedia, terminating most rights — such as free speech, free assembly, and press freedom — that Germans had previously taken for granted. Hitler soon followed that decree with a new law abolishing the parliament and declaring himself der fuehrer, or dictator.
Twitter user Cyndia Blue, who as of Sunday evening had received nearly 1,400 rewteets for the initial post in her thread, saw parallels between Germany in 1933 and the United States today.
“If you’re ‘too dangerous to govern,’ what does that mean? It means you fall outside the bounds of acceptable & legal, and something must be done to contain & control you for the safety of society. He’s putting this language out there intentionally,” she wrote in a subsequent Twitter post in the thread. “The window to preventing a descent into fascism is closing. Stefan Zweig, who fled Austria to escape Hitler, wrote about how Germans waited too long. They kept thinking they could wait out Hitler & the Nazi party — it was a democracy, after all, & he wouldn’t be in power forever, right?”
As Cyndia Blue wrote in her thread, “they were wrong. Their window to stop him slammed shut in a moment with the Reichstag fire.”
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to worry Trump might be capable of something horrific to protect himself and consolidate his own power. I think you'd be naive to imagine that something like this is not possible in America.
— ?Cyndia BLUE "Unstable Genius" (@malinablue) October 7, 2018
She also noted that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin — who as the Atlantic magazine wrote has to be the world leader Trump most admires — may have launched his rise to power in a similar fashion.
As the American Interest recounts, Putin’s rise to the Russian presidency in 2000 was propelled by anti-terrorist fervor after a series of residential apartment buildings in Moscow were bombed in 1999, killing about 300 people. Putin was prime minister and acting president of Russia at that time.
“The mystery of who bombed the Russian apartment houses in 1999 has not been solved to this day,” wrote David Satter in The American Interest. “And to the extent that there is evidence as to the perpetrators, it points not to Chechen terrorists but to the Kremlin leadership.”
