I know that many on the left are going through what might be termed Late Weimar Tremors, but for whatever it may be worth, yesterday’s spate of spite from the incoming president didn’t really put me in mind of Hitler.

Actually, it put me in mind of Stalin.

Consider, for instance, the executive order prepared for Trump by his transition team, on which The Wall Street Journal just reported. It would establish a “warrior board” of retired generals and admirals with the power to recommend the sacking of any current generals and admirals whom it deems soft on wokeness, or just meh on Trump. It would thereby bypass altogether the military’s promotion, demotion, and dismissal processes. The sacking of multiple top military leaders for presumed lack of personal loyalty to the president (and reluctance to send the Army against American citizens) is without precedent in American history.

It has ample precedent in Soviet history, however. As Stalin’s executions of most other Communist political leaders wound down in 1938, due largely to the shortage of remaining political leaders, he refocused his attention on the country’s Communist military leaders. In short order, he executed Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who had led the transformation of the Red Army into a sizable and well-led fighting force, as well as most other Soviet generals. By the time the purge was done, 35,000 officers had been discharged, many of them sent to the gulag and several thousand to their deaths. In consequence, the Soviet army was shellacked by the Finnish army when it invaded Finland in 1939, and was a largely leaderless sitting duck when Germany invaded the USSR in June of 1941.

...

Consider, now, the case of Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump nominated yesterday to be the director of national intelligence, the post in charge of the nation’s 18 spy agencies. We have no Venona Files on Gabbard, of course, but she has publicly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin and support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with whom she met in 2017 after he’d killed numerous fellow Syrians with poison gas. Whatever she may be, Gabbard is no mole; her affinities for blood-drenched anti-American dictators are completely out in the open.

Then we come to Matt Gaetz, whom Trump nominated yesterday to be his attorney general. While Gabbard has no history or familiarity with intelligence agencies, Gaetz, at least, is no stranger to the justice system, having been investigated by Trump’s and then Biden’s Justice Department for alleged sexual crimes. His legal acumen is clearly demonstrated by his decision to resign from Congress yesterday, thereby keeping the bipartisan House Ethics Committee from releasing its impending report on his alleged misconduct. (The committee’s investigative powers are limited to sitting House members only.) While there’s no direct Stalin-era precedent for this, I will note that Stalin’s secret police head, Lavrentiy Beria, was known to have raped large numbers of underage women and girls while retaining Stalin’s support, chiefly for imprisoning and executing a sufficiently high number of fellow Russians.