Trump's Revisionist Orders

Twisting WWII History as Fascist Feel-good Therapy

I’m in the English countryside this week on assignment, which I’ll tell you about later. I am writing these words a few miles from Winston Churchill’s country estate and the Biggin Air base, from which British pilots flew small prop planes trying to defend London from the German bombing that killed tens of thousands of civilians in World War II.

Exactly eighty years ago, on May 8, 1945, the Germans unconditionally surrendered, closing a horrendous chapter in human history. This week, towns across the English countryside are draped in Union Jack bunting – part of a three-day national celebration of the end of war, known here and in the US as Victory in Europe Day, or VE Day.

This is my first trip to Europe since the 2024 election. It’s weird to be over here for a lot of reasons (a woman in line at a shop heard my accent and walked over to ask, “What’s wrong with your man?”).

But then “our man” committed yet another petty act of renaming, this one designed to insult Brits and continental Europeans. In the kingly style to which Americans have so quickly and passively grown accustomed, the MAGAs are renaming Victory in Europe Day to remove mention of Europe. From here on out – at least as long as the regime is in town – May 8 will be called the clumsier but oh so America First “Victory Day for World War Two.”

Why do this after 80 years? Besides the pandering jingoism and the progressive-trolling glee of it, which is always at least 50 percent of the reason for any order from the White House, we are doing this because according to Trump’s understanding of history, gleaned from right wing memes and maybe John Wayne movies, the Americans did more than any other country to defeat Hitler.

There is no doubt that America did a lot to save Europe. Half a million Americans died in the Second World War. But almost the same number of British soldiers died in the same war, a much larger percentage of a tiny population. And those awful numbers pale in comparison to 24 million dead Russian soldiers and civilians during the war with Hitler.

For the last ten years, the extremely online fascist fanboys and their big dogs in bigger media have been inserting lies about the Nazis and Hitler into the American low-attention mainstream. Last year, Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan both hosted World War II revisionist Darryl Cooper, who argues that Churchill, not Hitler, caused the Second World War.

Last year, after his platforming of Cooper drew outrage, Carlson himself went on Piers Morgan’s blovia-thon and whined: “So people want to tell me Churchill’s an incredible guy. Really? Well, why didn’t he save Western civilization?”

For the new Roman-saluting right, the definition of saving Western civilization is apparently not eradicating a fascist regime that practiced industrial-scale ethnic genocide and kicked off a war that killed 70 to 85 million people around the world. In their view, the end of the pre-World War II order and the defeat of a viciously white supremacist regime led directly to the current migration crises. To them, the blending of humans in the modern world, upended by climate change and by George W Bush’s insane Iraq war, and with a deeply interconnected global economy and advanced transportation, is the actual end of “western civilization.”

Americans did a lot for Europe, that’s true. But we didn’t enter the war until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, more than a year after Germany launched the horrific, indiscriminate bombing campaign on civilian London, called the Blitz, that killed 43,000 civilians and injured another 71,000, and reduced infrastructure and housing to rubble.

However, as Jacob Heilbrunn wrote in America Last, his recent book about the American right’s long love affair with dictators, American conservative whitewashing of Nazism existed at the beginning of Hitler’s rise. The original America First movement opposed entry into the European war even as London was being destroyed by German bombs.

In the decades after the war, the American right turned to communism – and its supposed fellow travelers among progressive Americans – as the true enemy. A Heilbrunn notes, American anti-communism was always imbued with antisemitism, the very same sickness that inspired the Nazis and turned all of Europe into a genocidal hellhole.

Trump’s MAGA Republican party is the same old movement dressed up with new money and new media, with Foxbot fems draped in conspicuous crosses and preening fascist academics making the “I like beer” DC MAGA policy crowd feel smart in their racism.

Looking back at America in 2025 from across the pond, one can only sigh. The American right’s repulsive appeasement of ethnic hatred, racism, and misogyny, the fake Christianity equating Jesus' teachings with white supremacy. Nothing about it is new. Donald Trump’s father was arrested at a Klan rally. His grandparents were German citizens who, some have argued, passed on their era’s religion of pure white blood. According to his late ex-wife and the mother of three of his five spawn, he kept Mein Kampf by the bed. He literally used Hitlerian words in his 2024 campaign, calling immigrants vermin who “poison the blood” of Americans.

Musk’s and Bannon’s Hitler salutes would land them in jail in Germany and Austria, charged in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and fined in Sweden and Switzerland. In America, they are welcomed as honored guests at Dear Leader’s viewing stand over his birthday military parade.

Yes, that’s right: Trump’s regime is planning to celebrate his birthday next month with a military parade. The “daylong festival” on the National Mall will, according to an army spokesman, feature 6,600 soldiers, 150 vehicles, and 50 aircraft. He ditched a similar plan in the first term when it came with a price tag of $90 million.

Cue the Hitler/Kim Jong Un comparisons. I’ll skip those and stick with Trump’s personal relationship to the U.S. military. A diagnosis of “bone spurs” saved him from the draft that sent so many of his generation to Vietnam. In his first campaign for president, he trashed Sen. John McCain, a decorated American naval aviator who spent months in a jungle prison. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump famously said. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

In 2018, as President, he refused to tour the Aisne-Marne cemetery in France, containing the remains of 1,800 American marines dead in WWII. It was a rainy day, and the weather would muss his coif, but also, he wasn’t sure the dead deserved his time or attention. “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” he said, according to Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic. Trump has also called the war dead “suckers” for getting killed and suggested to aides that he wasn't sure the Americans had fought on the right side.

A few miles down the road from here, there’s a tiny pub with a framed chalkboard containing the signatures of dozens of the RAF flyboys who took off from the nearby airbase, dispatched to shoot down Luftwaffe bombers heading toward the great city. Many of them never returned.

A quote from Churchill is engraved into a plaque beneath it: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Framed chalkboard signatures of the 1940s RAF flyboys, at the White Hart in the village of Brasted, UK.

This week, those words are on my mind. In the fight against the apparently ineradicable human urge toward fascism, there is a duty for each of us to fight with determination and courage.