Interesting comparison of present day America with Germany in the 1930s.  Format is an interview with Isabel Virginia Hull, professor of history at Cornell University and one of the foremost scholars on modern Germany.  Full article here:

http://gothamist.com/2017/02/06/trump_bannon_german_history.php

Some quotes:

Steve Bannon, is the closest thing to a genuine fascist that I’ve seen ever in American government—and the removal in the National Security Council of the military leaders. That’s extraordinary and unprecedented.

Bannon is not a security expert. He’s not an expert in government at all. That’s one thing. The second thing is the fact that the Trump Administration didn’t engage in a transition. They were uninterested in both the documents prepared by the Obama administration and in meeting with the heads of the various divisions of government. The third thing is the purge of the senior-most officials in the State Department. The fourth thing is the order banning Muslims—and that’s what it is—the manner in which that happened, the process, which is to say a small group of advisers with no government experience keeping it secret and then launching it. That’s also unprecedented.

… these people want to remove the normal functioning of government and to replace the adepts at government—the people with experience and knowledge—with toadies who will do whatever they tell them to do.

…I have a very high bar to call somebody that and my bar is a pretty well-formed ideology, a really fanatical attachment to it, and a rigidity in not modifying it. I don’t think Trump fits that bill. I think Steve Bannon might fit that bill. And the question then is: Who’s running the government? Is it Steve Bannon or is it Donald Trump? And Donald Trump’s inability to keep his mind on anything for more than 15 seconds would suggest that he’s a character much more like Kaiser Wilhelm II than Adolf Hitler. These are the thoughts that a German historian has….