Jason Stanley on Gleichschaltung

“You have a media environment in which Trump is very cleverly not at all like a charlatan — behaving exactly like any fascist would, claiming the other side is the democratic threat and being extremely open about his intentions. He’s going to replace everyone in the government-by-loyalists. He’s going to target the universities, the schools. This process is called gleichschaltung in the literature on Nazi Germany, where every organization, every government institution turns loyalist-like and is transformed. Their employees are replaced by people loyal to the leader and loyal to the party. And Trump has already announced he’s going to do this. So he’s already announced a full fascist plan.”

“The significance of Project 2025 is that it calls for what in the Nazi parlance is called Gleichschaltung, the systematic replacement of civil servants by loyalists — by party loyalists — and the systematic replacement of teachers in schools and universities and, in general, institutions throughout society by party loyalists. In the case of education, it’s completely implausible that Trump is ideologically distant from the goals of Project 2025. Trump has repeatedly said he’s going to target critical race theory, which, let’s face it, is simply Black history. The Project — he’s targeted — he said he’s going to replace education with patriotic education — namely, representing the United States as an exceptional grand nation whose exceptionality is due to its white Christian heterosexual men, who have defined the nation.”