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Buried deep in the Hannah Arendt book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a reference to Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck. Arendt calls Reck’s diary “one of the most important documents of the Hitler period”, and I have been devouring it.
Reck, a conservative who wrote books on German history to draw parallels to the Nazis – right under their noses – never deviated in his diary from his hatred of Hitler and his loyalists.
On 11 August 1936, Reck wrote:
“For more than 42-months, I have thought hate, have lain down with hate in my heart, have dreamed hate and awakened with hate. I suffocate in the knowledge that I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious apes, and I rack my brains over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years ago could have sunk into this stupor.”
He was forced to bury the pages of his diary on his land near Munich, and I read each entry as a gift, allowing me to draw my own parallels to America’s current troubles.
On 9 November 1937, Reck writes that high-ranking Nazis gave themselves fake backstories and pedigrees. Of Nazi military leader Hermann Göring, he writes:
“We spoke of the origins of this dainty fellow, the son of a Rosenheim waitress, who had not succeeded in gaining admission to a Bavarian cadet corps… now, of course, along with a fantastic coat of arms, Herr Göring has had a pedigree drawn up which traces his descent to some Westphalian general of the early Middle Ages. Obviously mentally deranged, he now takes himself to be the King of Prussia…”
In a long since forgotten story from a decade ago, Trump was accused of plagiarising a family crest. He branded his US properties with a stolen coat of arms. In a New York Times report from 2017, Trump’s heraldic arms was revealed to be “a near identical copy of one registered in 1939 by Joseph Edward Davies. The copy, printed on everything from golf carts to socks, made a single small change: where the original said ‘Integritas’, now it says ‘Trump’.”
Replacing “integrity” with “Trump” could not be a more perfect metaphor for a regime built on “Big C” corruption.
I return to Reck’s diary for more on Nazi loyalists:
“But this is how they all are… all of them act the ‘classa dirigente’, have fantastic coats of arms drawn up, compose even more fantastic pedigrees… worst of all are the females… loaded down with the stolen jewels of noble families… made up to resemble something midway between a movie star and a cocotte.”
American Parallels
Just this week, Trump’s new former press secretary Katie Zacharia, who has a history of pyramid schemes and TV punditry, turned out to not be a lawyer although she calls herself one. Being seasoned at lying on camera is a job requirement for Trump’s White House staff, which includes numerous TV personalities, including Trump’s ambassador to Greece, Fox personality Kimberly Guilfoyle. This week, Guilfoyle resigned her post after multiple pay-to-play reports about seeking money in exchange for administration access.
And Ric Grenell, who once led a stalking brigade against me on Twitter, also made headlines this week. Trump’s former personal lawyer Alina Habba just accused Grenell, Trump’s ex-intelligence director and former executive director of the Kennedy Center, of “failing to deposit millions of dollars donated by her Turkish billionaire husband to the Kennedy Center.”
Each of these players in Trump’s orbit also has something vital in common: they spread the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Two weeks before the midterm elections in the US, the White House reality TV show is throwing everything against the wall to offer distractions from the very serious fact that 2020 election deniers populate Trump’s administration, in extremely high-level places and are deeply embedded in formal and informal positions of power.
In August, I attempted to write a comprehensive report in my Hot Type column warning about all the ways Trump was planning to steal the upcoming midterm elections:
“Since the beginning of Trump’s second term in January 2025, he’s threatened state elections officials; continued to spread the Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen from him and relentlessly touted imaginary ‘massive voter fraud’. In January, his FBI led a raid on a Georgia election office. He’s claimed Chinese interference in the election without offering evidence, he has threatened to use ICE agents and the US military to intimidate voters and seize ballots, and he has openly floated the idea of declaring a national emergency to subvert the outcome of the elections or to even prevent them entirely.
The chaos Trump is stirring up, which also includes complaints about ‘rogue judges’ out to sabotage elections, are designed to stir up violence by loyalists, as well as exhaustion and doubt from the general public over the reality of election outcomes.
Lest we forget: he already attempted one coup.”
But as I wrote that column, I realized a proper evaluation of the threats would exceed the Mueller Report in length, because Trump’s war on the US elections also includes a massive number of Big Lie foot soldiers, who are actively working to destabilize and discredit election results, past and future.
Election Deniers Assemble
In new research from States United Action, there are a reported “200 election deniers in 43 states on the midterm ballots”.
“The election denial movement is showing up across every facet of our democracy—from the ballot box to the White House,” said Kelly Rader, research director at States United Action, a non-profit based in Washington DC.
Beyond the ballot, there are so many deniers within the federal government, it’s hard to even know where to begin.
But I suppose we start with the FBI Director Kash Patel, who tweeted on Friday “From Russia, with Love.” Patel is criminally investigating “irregularities” in the 2020 presidential election, seizing voting records at the Fulton County election center in Georgia and the subpoenaing of records in Maricopa County in Arizona.
It appears these moves could be a set up to overturn the 2020 election results, which would then make Trump a three-term president retroactively, and pave the way for him in 2028. Just a thought.
Patel, who avoided directly answering questions about the Big Lie in his Senate confirmation hearing last year, also spread disinformation about a Chinese plot to throw the election to Joe Biden.
And then, of course, there’s the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who organized more than 100 House Republicans to sign a brief filed in support of a lawsuit from Texas’ Republican Attorney General, Ken Paxton, asking the Supreme Court to invalidate Joe Biden’s wins in the four states that won him the Electoral College — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Both of Trump’s Attorney Generals, former AG Pam Bondi and current AG Todd Blanche, played aggressive roles in promoting the Big Lie, as did current Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin.
Among some of the lesser known deniers in positions of power are Heather Honey, who spread lies during the ballyhooed Maricopa County audit. Despite no election experience, Honey is now the deputy assistant for Election Integrity at the Department of Homeland Security.
Honey is closely allied with Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who worked for Trump and was part of a cell of lawyers behind the fake elector scheme in Georgia, an attempt to pressure Georgia officials to overturn the 2020 results. Mitchell now runs a non-profit spending millions to fill election litigation coffers, including reports of a $72,000 payment to a consultant firm owned by Honey, who has collaborated with Mitchell on election fraud investigations.
Former Colorado elections clerk and convicted felon, Tina Peters, who was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2024 for tampering with voting machines, just had a meeting with Trump to discuss “election integrity”. Trump ran a pressure campaign to get Peters’ sentence commuted this summer.
Election denier Kurt Olsen is now working on a “special project” at the White House tied to 2020 investigations, according to The Wall Street Journal. In addition to Olsen, Clay Parikh is a “special government employee”, brought in to investigate fraud claims in the 2020 election, and appears in the FBI affidavit that propelled the search of Fulton County’s elections office. He regularly acts as a witness in cases involving election “fraud” and voting machines, including Kari Lake’s failed attempt to reverse her defeat in the 2022 Arizona governor’s race.
Lake’s campaign lawyer who led attempts to reverse her defeat, Harmeet Dhillon, is now leading the Justice Department’s push to get unredacted voter roll lists from every state, including suing states to force them to hand over the data.
Big Lie superspreaders also include Eric Neff, the acting chief of the voting section of the US Justice Department, which has a cell of deniers working to gain access to registration lists and actively investigating swing states that went to Biden in 2020.
In addition to the White House and the DOJ, you will also find election deniers in the Defense Department. Among them, Patrick Weaver, Pete Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff; Marci McCarthy, director of external engagement for the Defense Department’s chief information officer. McCarthy is another associate of Cleta Mitchell.
There are so many 2020 election deniers embedded within the US government - JD Vance, Stephen Miller, anyone? - it appears to be a resume requirement. But I think I will end on a special mention: Jeanine Pirro, the current US attorney in Washington and former Fox News host. Pirro used her Fox show to bullhorn voting system lies after Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, and Fox ultimately paid out nearly a billion dollars for those lies and many others. In her current role, Pirro wields the kind of administrative power that Trump lacked in 2020.
I am writing this second report, so Americans brace for impact. In the time I’ve gathered evidence about the deniers within, white powder has been sent to election offices, conjuring reminders of the dozens of 2024 bomb threats on election day, and a headline just landed on my desk about a computer “glitch” in Texas affecting 600,000 voters.
I am sure another staffer/election denier of Trump’s White House has done something awful to redirect our focus to their ongoing shitshow and away from the Very Real Threats facing America at this moment.
And so I return to Friedrich Reck’s diary, where buried in vignettes from history, I find a witness to unbearable madness:
September 1938
“Homeward-bound from Berlin… I saw endless trains loaded with artillery and munitions rolling towards the border. Germany, by which I mean this latest generation, carefully nurtured in the precepts of highway robbery, is indeed in a most unusual state of mind today. It regards the will of this so-called Führer as a kind of cosmic law, and all opponents, even those outside the Reich’s borders, as criminals… And what if the others were finally to take courage in hand and say ‘No’ to this Führer grown drunk on the success of his political burglaries? It could be that the shock of learning that he is not, as he has gradually come to believe, the centre of the world, would be enough. That moment when, for the first time, he does not get his way, he might well simply disappear from the stage.”
In 2026, let us will it so.
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 102 countries.