Endgame with Fintan O’Toole

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 written some two dozen articles 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.

Endgame with Fintan O'Toole is a New York Review podcast. Our theme music is "Political World" by Bob Dylan, courtesy of Universal Music Publishing Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Our show art is designed by Jason Logan. And our producer is Erica Getto.

New episodes drop every Tuesday across podcast platforms and at YouTube.com/@nybooks. For more, head to nybooks.com.

What is Endgame with Fintan O’Toole?

Join Fintan O’Toole, Advising Editor at The New York Review, as he and his guests discuss the great unraveling of the American order—and imagine what comes next.

Each week they’ll explore some of the major contradictions that have shaped the United States since its founding 250 years ago, looking closely at subjects that range from Civil War history to contemporary fiction, from Thomas Jefferson to Bernie Sanders, from Gilded Age monopolies to tech oligarchs. What can Shakespeare and Nazi Germany tell us about the current presidency? Making unexpected connections and always drawing out the human drama within complicated ideas, Fintan and his guests—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Ben Lerner, Colin Grant, Jean Strouse, and Dan Chiasson—take the best of New York Review essays and turn them into a conversation.

Endgame with Fintan O’Toole is a New York Review podcast.

Show Art: Jason Logan