Gold, Greed and Cowardice
Trump's corporate and billionaire supporters are emboldening him as he pursues his path of destruction. History proves the future does not bode well for them.
In August of 1947, General Telford Taylor, a chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, stood before a collection of corporate executives who had facilitated the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime and shared blame for the destruction of Europe and tens of millions of lives. The two dozen defendants included leaders of Fried. Krupp AG, a major arms manufacturer, as well as IG Farben, the largest corporation in Europe, which produced everything from Bayer aspirin to the poison Zyklon B used in Nazi gas chambers.
A year earlier, the international military tribunal had convicted 19 of 22 high-profile Nazi leaders and hanged 10 of them. Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, swallowed a deadly cyanide capsule just hours before he too faced the executioner’s noose.
Taylor’s sober words from 1947 still echo now. “The grave charges in this case have not been laid before the tribunal casually or unreflectingly,” he began. “The indictment accuses these men of major responsibility for visiting upon mankind the most searing and catastrophic war in modern history. It accuses them of wholesale enslavement, plunder and murder.”
Taylor, a lawyer and native of Schenectady, New York, went on:
The face of this continent is hideously scarred and its voice is a bitter snarl; everywhere man’s work lies in ruins and the standard of human existence is purgatorial…God gave us this earth to be cultivated as a garden, not to be turned into a stinking pit of rubble and refuse…The crimes with which these men are charged were not committed in rage or under the stress of sudden temptation; they were not the slips or lapses of otherwise well-ordered men.
One does not build a stupendous war machine in a fit of passion, nor an Auschwitz factory during a passing spasm of brutality. What these men did was done with the utmost deliberation and would, I venture to surmise, be repeated should the opportunity to recur. There will be no mistaking the ruthless purposefulness with which the defendants embarked upon their course of conduct.
Diarmuid Jeffreys, author of the 2010 book, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, described the accused as exuding “an air of affronted authority.” These were men of power and wealth, certain of their own significance. They prioritized their business interests, and did not falter in supporting the extreme cruelty, antisemitism and mass murder of the Nazi agenda.
Gen. Taylor had more to say, what author Jeffreys describes as “the heart of their case, summing up the motives, intentions, and culpability of the accused and the necessity of bringing them to justice.”
In this arrogant and supremely criminal adventure, the defendants were eager and leading participants. They joined in stamping out the flame of liberty, and in subjecting the German people to the monstrous, grinding tyranny of the Third Reich, whose purpose it was to brutalize the nation and fill the people with hate. They marshaled their imperial resources and focused their formidable talents to forge the weapons and other implements of conquest that spread the German terror. They were the warp and woof of the dark mantle of death that settled over Europe.
This dark and terrible story offers a lesson for our own perilous moment—in a nation that too often treats moneymaking as the highest value and an easy justification for terrible deeds. The truth of corporate support for the Nazis, Jeffreys writes, has “much to tell us about the fallibility and failings of humankind and the way a nation gave up its soul. More directly, though, it contains a clear warning about the risks inherent in any close relationship between business and state and what can go wrong when political objectives and the pursuit of profit become dangerously entwined.”
This history has been on my mind as we witness a growing number of corporations and wealthy Americans deciding to serve the interests of a corrupt and criminal White House occupant. To support a man dedicated to exploiting his power and position to enrich himself, enrich his cronies and seek retribution against his perceived enemies. To support a man bent on consolidating dictatorial power by spreading hatred, fear and violence and building a police state. To support a man who trashes the Constitution, rejects the American democratic project—and will do anything to stay out of jail.
I’m not about to make a leap from the mass horrors of Nazi Germany to the demolition of the East Wing of our White House. Nor would I suggest that the expanding military occupation of Democratic-led cities and a brutal federalized police state necessarily leads to atrocities on the scale witnessed during WWII and the Holocaust.
But we must remember that a weak and broken man like Donald Trump cannot succeed without the support of rich and powerful enablers. From the feckless and compliant Republican Congress to the billionaires and corporate executives, money is just as essential to his success as obedience. And rather than facing a chorus of “no” from these people, many have chosen to say “yes” to him by handing over tens of millions of dollars.
This has been an ongoing reality since his inauguration on Jan. 20, which was funded by the corporate elite who proudly stood behind him in the rotunda of our nation’s Capitol. But it came into fresh focus again yesterday when the White House released the names of 37 corporations and rich donors whose dollars are being used to strip away the history and memories of our White House to make way for Trump’s enormous Mar-a-Lago-style ballroom which will dwarf the People’s House.
While specific dollar amounts were not noted, the list includes Altria Group, Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton, Caterpillar, Coinbase, Comcast, J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, Hard Rock International, Google, HP, Lockheed Martin, Meta, Micron, Microsoft, NextEra Energy, Palantir, Ripple, Reynolds American, T-Mobile, Tether America, Union Pacific Railroad, Adelson Family Foundation, Stefan E. Brodie, Betty Wold Johnson Foundation, Charles and Marissa Cascarilla, Edward and Shari Glazer, Harold Hamm, Benjamin Leon Jr., The Lutnick Family, The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation, Stephen A. Schwarzmann, Konstantin Sokolov, Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher, Paolo Tiramani and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
This list includes tech and AI giants, arms manufacturers, crypto financiers and wealthy individuals committed to funding Trump’s grotesque abuse of our history, traditions, values and democratic processes. While he has demolished the East Wing without explicit official approvals and with indifference to the will of the people, their money gives him cover and support. Their money tells him that he can continue to act as he sees fit.
“He is the builder in chief,” his lead propagandist Karoline Leavitt proudly said yesterday on Fox News. “In large part, he was reelected back to this People’s House because he is good at building things. He has done it his entire life, his entire career.”
Get it? Rather than lowering the price of eggs, making healthcare more affordable or making life more livable, Trump was reelected to build monuments to his ego.
Trump initially said this billionaires’ ballroom would cost $200 million; now he says it will cost $300 million, a sum he spouted without explaining how all that money is being raised or spent. (This along with lying that he wouldn’t “touch” the now gone East Wing.) Reportedly, the payments are being managed by the Trust for the National Mall, a non-profit that works with the National Park Service.
Make no mistake: Beneath the pseudo-legitimacy of these organizations is a coordinated campaign to channel corporate money and support for Donald Trump. For example: The BBC reported that, according to court documents, YouTube is paying $22 million as part of its legal settlement of Trump’s lawsuit over the platform’s suspension of his account in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
This is where we are: The Supreme Court won’t say no to Trump’s unfettered demolition. The Republicans in the House and Senate won’t question any of his lawlessness or abuse of power. Too many corporations and billionaires won’t say no when he demands more money. All this convinces Trump to keep going.
We’ve seen this story before. Consider the words in Leo Tolstoy’s last novel, Hadji Murat, published posthumously in 1912:
The constant, obvious flattery, contrary to all evidence, of the people around him [Tsar Nicholas I] had brought him to the point that he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer conformed his actions and words to reality, logic, or even simple common sense, but was fully convinced that all his orders, however senseless, unjust, and inconsistent with each other, became sensible, just, and consistent with each other only because he gave them.
Let me leave you with some images from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Winter Palace and home of Tsar Nicholas II and his family before they were executed. The gaudy rooms are laden with gold, so much gold and ostentatious displays of wealth that it’s not hard to see how everyday Russians struggling to survive decided they had had enough with their country’s extreme inequality.
Donald Trump has plenty of reasons to assume that his depraved reign will have no end. But there comes a point when people decide they have had enough and seek the removal of leaders who care only for themselves. No regime based on violence and cruelty can survive once the people decide they’ve had enough.
Several signs at the No Kings protests referenced this point by quoting Frederick Douglass: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will…The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
The billionaires and corporate giants may think they are securing their fortunes and fate. But history reminds us that capitulating to a tyrant to get what you want is ultimately a losing proposition.
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Spectacular column tonight, Steven. I recently read the whole of Robert Jackson's opening remarks at Nuremberg. (Jackson was given 'sabbatical' from his seat on the Supreme Court to lead the trials, at which General Taylor spoke a year later. ). Jackson said this:
"What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power."
--Justice Robert Jackson, opening remarks at Nurenburg, Germany, November 21, 1945.
I am ordering Jeffreys' book. Also worth reading as a window into our own time: Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she reflects on "the banality of evil." Not the upper tier with the enormous wealth, but the army of followers whose orders are to obey, and who do so mindlessly.
Thank You Steven ..No we can't say that what happened in Germany and Europe WW ll is the same as what is happeing in America. But what is happening to us is a screaming nightmare. His blowing up the boats makes him a murderer. His cruelty to migrants is unbearable. Tearing down the East Wing of the WH has finally pushed me over the edge. The goldleaf in the Oval Office looks like something you buy in the dollar store for party decorations.. The patio with the tables and umbrellas is strait out of Mar-a-Lago .Now the ballroom..Maybe he plans to rename the WH Mar-a-Lago ll . If he builds Arc de Trump across from the Lincoln memorial will that be fine with all of his supporters. If we don't do an economic boycott I don't see anything changing, The only thing they understand is money and loss of it. All of us seniors can stay home. No shopping online or in the stores no movies no theater no eating out. The rest of the working population that can stay home should .. We cannot count on SCOTUS or the Congress or the Senate ..My heart can't take much more of this. lost in america.