The fourth episode of Endgame with Fintan O’Toole welcomes the Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, whose most recent essay for the Review, “Surely Not?,” considers how an actual “Manchurian candidate” in the White House would never dare to be as radical and widely destructive as Donald Trump has in fact been. Acknowledging the risks and limitations of comparing Trump (and Trumpism) to Hitler (and Nazi ideology), O’Toole and Browning explore the parallels and differences between these two leaders. Trump’s embrace of war as a fascist-style tactic, which has helped him seize control of a more traditional establishment, may be his most consequential point of similarity to Hitler, and democracy in the US is in a race against time.

Christopher Browning’s nine books include Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (2004). He has as written some two dozen pieces for the Review since 2012, including on István Deák’s Europe on Trial and Götz Aly’s Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust. He is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.