have us violently depart the EuTrump and conscience in the age of demagogues

His name is Isadore Greenbaum. He’s a Jew, a plumber’s helper from Brooklyn. He rushes onto the stage, beneath a portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. He tries to accost the Nazi who is denouncing the “Jewish-controlled press” and calling for a “white gentile-ruled” United States. Uniformed storm troopers beat him. Police officers drag him from the stage, pants ripped, arms raised in desperate entreaty.

The mob howls in delight. It’s Feb 20, 1939, more than 20,000 Nazi sympathisers are packed into Madison Square Garden as Greenbaum attempts to silence Fritz Kuhn, Bundesführer (so-called) of the German American Bund. Greenbaum has been enraged by Kuhn’s demand that the country be delivered from Jewish clutches and “returned to the American people who founded it.” The 26-year-old Jew is brought before a magistrate who, according to an account in The New York Times, tells him that “innocent people might have been killed.”

To which Greenbaum retorts, “Do you realise that plenty of Jewish people might be killed with their persecution up there?” “Plenty” is an inadequate word for six million, but that was 1939 and human beings tend not to imagine the unimaginable. The pale, dismayed face of the young Jewish boy, arms raised, being rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 is well known. Greenbaum’s expression of terrorised anguish in New York City presages it. All this is caught in Marshall Curry’s remarkable Oscar-nominated documentary short, “A Night at the Garden,” composed of footage from the time.

Attacks on the press; the take-back-ourcountry cry; hymns to the true American (or German): There’s not much new, as Curry notes, about fascism. The movie brings to mind a phrase of Hannah Arendt’s that has haunted me about how most people will comply under conditions of terror but some will not: “No more is required,” she wrote, “and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.” Think the “Tank Man” of Tiananmen Square. Think Anton Schmid, the sergeant in Hitler’s army who helped Jews in the Vilnius ghetto and was executed in 1942.

Think Ron Ridenhour, the helicopter gunner in Vietnam spurred by conscience to gather information that led to the official investigation into the My Lai Massacre. Think Isadore Greenbaum. It is of the essence of such gestures that they appear futile, yet have the power to redeem humanity. Our age, too, is one of demagogues. What are we to make of our “ivory-gold colossus” — James Lasdun’s phrase in his brilliant new novel of the #MeToo era, “Afternoon of a Faun”? This colossus “at once menacing and cosmically aggrieved” who for two hours perorates before the Conservative Political Action Conference (only would-be or actual dictators afflicted with narcissistic disorders talk for that long) and declares: “I’m in love, and you’re in love. We’re all in love together.”

Who, for President Donald Trump, are his people in love? They are “our people.” Now, “our people” are not synonymous with the American people. This president, unlike his predecessors, has never seen himself as the president of all Americans. No, they are the CPAC crowd, his fans. They are the “tough people,” the people who could make things “very bad” if necessary — police and military and bikers who, the president claimed in an interview with Breitbart News this month, support him.

He needs people in his thrall, like that Madison Square Garden crowd. As Lasdun wrote, “Nothing short of dominion over the entire universe could compensate for the wrongs done to him.” The wrongs, that is, of journalists, judges and Hollywood directors — anyone who thinks the president might just be a dangerous white nationalist charlatan. Why think that? Because Trump, from Day 1, has maligned brown people and Muslims; and, as president, he saw “very fine people on both sides” at the 2017 Charlottesville rally where white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us” and a woman who protested, Heather Heyer, was killed.

I am not suggesting Trump resembles Hitler. That should be obvious — but not so obvious that I will refrain from writing this column. The white nationalist mass murderer of Muslims in New Zealand was not out of his mind in seeing Trump as a symbol of “renewed white identity and common purpose.” Trump’s love affair is with revanchist white people who don’t like the demographic look of the 21st century. It’s not that Trump could be dangerous. He is dangerous. People die because the worst leaders know they enjoy the American president’s connivance.

The debate on whether Trump is harmless, whether we should laugh away his grotesquerie, is misplaced. I have no doubt that the worst is yet to come. In his own mind, whatever the Mueller report contains, Trump cannot lose. Greenbaum and his wife moved to Southern California. A fisherman at Newport Pier, Greenbaum died in 1997. There was, as Philip Bump observed in The Washington Post, “a brief mention of his passing in the local news.”