Donald Trump, who has cratered in opinion polls this spring as the pandemic and the economic collapse have battered the U.S., is attempting to turn this past week’s explosion of political protest amid a deadly pandemic into his Reichstag fire moment.
Back in 1933, when the German parliament burned (the Reichstag fire) — ostensibly at the hands of a Dutch communist, more likely at the hands of Hitler’s own agents provocateurs — Hitler seized on the event, and on the fears of chaos that it stoked up, to demand he be given unlimited emergency powers.