As fires burn in L.A., has Trump found his Reichstag fire moment?
Trump’s decision to call in the National Guard to quell unrest recalls the ways in which Hitler asserted and consolidated power
A police helicopter shines light on a dumpster fire after another night of unrest during a protest against immigration raids on June 8, 2025 in Los Angeles. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky June 9, 2025
As we follow the rapid succession of events in Los Angeles, where clashes between locals and police over the arrests of undocumented foreigners led to the arrival of the National Guard, we might want to tweak the (retired) slogan of the Washington Post: Democracy does not die in darkness; instead, it often dies in flames.
Flames, of course, were the proximate cause to the power grab by the Nazis a little more than 90 years ago in Weimar Germany. On the evening of Feb. 27, 1933, a fire began inside the Reichstag, the home of the German parliament. Several hours later, firefighters managed to control the conflagration, but not before it had destroyed the gilded cupola, turned the debating chamber into a smoldering ruin, and riveted the attention of the government.
That government, scarcely a month old, was led by the newly installed chancellor, Adolf Hitler. In the company of his fellow Nazi luminaries — Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and Wilhelm Frick — Hitler had rushed to the building while the fire was still flickering. Turning to a reporter, Hitler observed, “You are now witnessing the beginning of a great new epoch in Germany history.” That night Goebbels elaborated on his leader’s remark in his meticulously kept journal: “It is through fire and terror that one sows confusion in order in the general panic to grasp power for themselves.”
Goebbels was describing what had quickly become the Nazi claim — the country’s Communist Party had poured the kerosene and lit the match at the Reichstag. The police arrested a young Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, who they found in the building. But the arrests did not stop there; Göering deputized the dreaded Sturmabteilung, or stormtroopers, as auxiliary policemen. They poured across the city, picking up and packing off Communist party members to makeshift prisons that doubled as torture centers.
The following day, Hitler convened his cabinet. Though its majority was non-Nazi, the cabinet agreed to an emergency declaration, seconded by President Hindenburg, that fed the Weimar constitution into the wood-chipper. The rights to freely assemble, freely speak, and freely publish were turned into sawdust, as was the independence of the nation’s federated states. This was the first of two fundamental documents which turned Weimar Germany into Nazi Germany. The second document, the Enabling Act, bestowed legislative powers on Hitler and his government, which neutered the parliament and completed the Nazi takeover of the state.
For the crime of arson, Van der Lubbe was found guilty and executed, even though arson had not been a capital crime punishable by death until the Nazis, retroactively, made it so. As for the Communists who were arrested, the courts, which were still independent, found them innocent of the charges. Though the men were released, Hitler, livid that law had foiled him, promptly created a parallel court system designed to deliver the decisions he demanded. What had been a country ruled by law was now a country ruled by a single man; the Weimar Republic had fully morphed into the Third Reich.
The cause and consequences of the Reichstag fire are still hotly debated by historians. As the historian Richard Evans notes, there are two camps of interpretation. One camp is “intentionalist,” insisting that the Nazis, and ultimately Hitler, were those who lit the fire; the other camp is “functionalist,” casting the Nazis as opportunists who transformed this unexpected but welcome event as their justification to seize power. Though the debate will probably never be settled, it is also irrelevant: whether deliberate or accidental, the fire led to the unprecedented horrors that consumed the world over the next dozen years.
If all this sounds familiar, it should and should not. While history does not repeat itself, as Mark Twain might (or might not) have said, it tends to rhyme. Two days ago, this old chestnut was given new life by President Donald Trump’s decision to order the National Guard to deploy in Los Angeles to counter the demonstrations against masked ICE agents who are bundling undocumented foreigners off the streets and into unmarked vans. Against the objections of Gavin Newsom, the governor of this federated state, Trump cited an obscure provision in the U.S. Code of Armed Services that permits such a move if “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States.”
This executive order, of course, is as pitiful as is the ego of the executive who signed it. If the approximately 9000 officers in the Los Angeles Police Department, not to mention the 75,000 state and local police officers across California, cannot control a few hundred demonstrators, then the (retired) call to defund the police takes on a new and unexpected urgency. Just as the corruption of the Trump presidency is transparent, so too are the reasons for this executive order. Trump is attempting to alchemize a not completely unexpected event, one spurred by the insidious activities of Immigration and Immigration Enforcement, into a casus belli — a reason to go to war against our nation’s constitution.
As the conservative Atlantic columnist David Frum warns, Trump might well be using this incident as a test run for the upcoming midterm elections. “If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections,” Frum writes, “he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control.” If Trump succeeds in this effort, he will have done so by hammering together the “intentionalist” and “functionalist” interpretations: he poured the kerosene lit by a handful of protesters, so he could present himself as the fireman who alone can extinguish the fire.
