Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy functions less as a defense blueprint and more as an authoritarian mission statement that aligns structurally with Nazi-era and Putin-era doctrines, recasts Christian-nationalist culture war as national security, and hands strategic and ideological advantages to the Kremlin while eroding the U.S. constitutional order from within.
The key actors are the Trump White House, a Project 2025–aligned policy network, and likely Stephen Miller as principal architect of the NSS’s migration-, culture-, and “civilizational” framing, with the Kremlin as a chief external beneficiary and validator.
The NSS reframes U.S. mission and interests around “God-given” rights, “traditional families,” demographic and “civilizational” panic, mass-migration shutdown, and leader-centric dealmaking, while downgrading human rights, equal protection, and alliance-based deterrence. The document narrows “core rights,” attacks DEI and “radical ideologies,” and treats multipolar spheres of influence and a quick settlement with Russia over Ukraine as strategic goals.
Policy through this lens undermines the Bill of Rights, weakens checks and balances, normalizes a friend–enemy conception of politics, and converges U.S. doctrine with the ideological frameworks of Nazi Germany and Putin’s Russia on key points: sacralized “tradition,” demographic fear, vilification of internal enemies, executive supremacy, and disdain for liberal pluralism. That convergence increases the risk of domestic repression, unreliable alliance commitments, and opportunistic aggression by adversaries who see a distracted, internally fragmented America.
The NSS arrives early in Trump’s new term, synchronized with Project 2025’s effort to purge and capture the bureaucracy and with explicit Kremlin praise that the new U.S. strategy “largely accords” with Russia’s worldview. The window before institutional path dependence hardens represents the critical period in which legal, political, and societal actors can still contest and blunt the strategy’s implementation.
Signal effects already include reassurance to far-right and Christian-nationalist movements at home and abroad; confusion and concern among European allies over U.S. reliability, especially on Ukraine and NATO expansion; and open celebration in Moscow that Washington now talks in terms of spheres of influence, civilizational struggle, and “ending the perception” of an expanding NATO. Domestically, the NSS provides intellectual cover for intensified attacks on migrants, DEI, LGBTQ and reproductive rights, independent media, and the civil service.
Absent significant pushback, the most probable trajectory over the next three years points toward a hybrid regime in which elections persist but operate on an increasingly tilted playing field, federal power is used to privilege one religious-national identity, and U.S. foreign policy drifts toward transactional great-power carve-ups that sacrifice smaller democracies for “stability.” A darker but plausible branch of the cone involves exploitation of crisis to justify emergency powers and deeper repression; a more hopeful branch depends on coordinated resistance by courts, Congress, states, allies, and civil society that treats the NSS not as routine policy but as a red flag of regime change in slow motion.
Kremlin approval finally rips away the last pretense that Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy is a sober, technocratic blueprint. Reuters reports that Moscow “welcomed” the document, said it “largely accorded with Russia’s own perceptions,” and praised its pledge to revive a Monroe-Doctrine style sphere of influence, curb NATO expansion, and prioritize a quick deal in Ukraine over continued resistance. A U.S. national security strategy that the Kremlin celebrates as ideologically aligned is not a strategy to defend a constitutional republic. It is a manifesto for dismantling the post-1945 order, empowering Christian-nationalist and far-right movements, and normalizing a worldview that looks suspiciously like Stephen Miller’s long-standing obsessions written at the state scale.
An analytic assessment has to separate three questions. What does the strategy actually do and say? How does that content serve Trump’s personal and political interests rather than U.S. constitutional ones? Who, in probabilistic terms, most likely shaped the document’s language and structure? Evidence across multiple sources points to a strategy that merges Millerite nativism and executive-power maximalism with a geopolitical posture that hands major wins to Moscow while dressing them up as “flexible realism.”
National Security Strategies typically emerge from an interagency process and read like cautious bureaucratic compromise. Trump’s 2025 version reads like a campaign speech fused with a Christian-nationalist pamphlet. The text opens with breathless claims that no administration in history has matched Trump’s nine-month “turnaround,” credits him personally with ending multiple wars and carrying out cinematic operations like “Operation Midnight Hammer,” and anoints him “The President of Peace,” without offering a single concrete source, data point, or contingency. Analysts at Foreign Policy and War on the Rocks immediately noted that the document “goes full ‘America First’” and fuses immigration and domestic culture wars with foreign policy in a way no previous NSS has done. That fusion tracks precisely with Trump’s political needs and with Miller’s record of turning every policy domain into a vehicle for demographic and cultural warfare.
Stephen Miller stands out as the most plausible architect not because of conspiracy thinking, but because of role, record, and fingerprints. Miller currently serves as White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, a portfolio that places him at the crossroads of immigration, internal security, and long-range strategy. Journalistic and scholarly work over the last decade has consistently described him as the architect of Trump’s hardline immigration and “demographic engineering” agenda, the driving force behind family separation and the Muslim ban, and the de facto chief speechwriter whose words Trump routinely delivers as his own.
Language and priorities in the NSS match Miller’s ideological signature almost to the word. The strategy declares that “the era of mass migration is over,” casts migration as a near-global source of crime, social decay, and security risk, and insists that “border security is the primary element of national security.” The European section warns that the continent faces “civilizational erasure,” claims that current trends will leave Europe “unrecognizable in 20 years or less,” and suggests that future “majority non-European” NATO members may no longer be reliable allies. Time and Reuters both note that European leaders view this language as echoing far-right “Great Replacement” rhetoric rather than any mainstream strategic analysis.
Miller’s documented worldview revolves around exactly those ideas. Investigations by outlets and researchers across the spectrum have shown that his political formation included immersion in white-nationalist and anti-immigrant circles, and that his policy focus has always centered on ending “mass migration,” tightening citizenship, and using state power to reshape America’s demographic future. His emails and public remarks promote nativist websites, hint at “replacement” narratives, and frame migration as an existential civilizational threat rather than an economic, legal, and humanitarian challenge. When a new NSS suddenly orients the entire U.S. security posture around ending mass migration, elevates border enforcement above all other instruments, and imports “civilizational erasure” language that analysts immediately link to the far right, the attribution problem starts to look less like a mystery and more like a stylistic fingerprint.
Christian nationalism forms the ideological glue that binds that nativism to the document’s broader strategic posture. The strategy defines America’s purpose as defending “God-given natural rights,” calls for “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” and explicitly ties security to “strong, traditional families” raising “healthy children.” Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, produced by Heritage and allied Christian-nationalist organizations, uses nearly identical language to demand that the next conservative president “restore our Republic to its original moorings” by privileging “traditional families,” eliminating LGBTQ-inclusive terms from federal law, and criminalizing vast swaths of sexual expression. The NSS echoes the Mandate almost verbatim when it narrows “core rights” to free speech, religious freedom, and electoral choice while treating deradicalization efforts or democracy-protection programs as sinister abuses of “fearsome powers.”
Miller’s own record anchors that merger of religion, culture war, and state power. His policy agenda consistently aims to erase protections for immigrants, Muslims, and LGBTQ people and to codify a hierarchy of belonging that favors conservative Christians and white Americans. Analysts and watchdog organizations have repeatedly described him as a central promoter of Christian-nationalist priorities inside an ostensibly secular administration, even though he comes from a Jewish background, because he treats that movement’s goals as the best vehicle for his anti-pluralist project.Home+1 A national security framework that elevates “spiritual health” and “traditional families” into complex security criteria fits far more with Miller’s ideological trajectory than with any mainstream Republican or realist tradition.
Executive-power maximalism represents the second unmistakable Miller hallmark. In a widely discussed October CNN interview, Miller asserted that Trump has “plenary authority” under Title 10 and Article II to deploy federalized National Guard troops, language that constitutional scholars quickly flagged as flirting with a theory of near-absolute presidential power that courts have rejected for decades. His career has repeatedly featured attempts to test or smash constraints on the president, from travel bans drafted to skirt judicial review to efforts to override state governments on immigration enforcement.
The NSS fits perfectly with that theory of the presidency. The document frames Trump as the singular agent of national salvation, celebrates his “unconventional diplomacy” and personal “dealmaking,” and treats institutions that might constrain him—courts, international organizations, independent regulators, even allied governments—as obstacles erected by “elites” and “transnationalists” to thwart the people’s will. The Kremlin-friendly complaint about the U.S. “deep state” that appears in Peskov’s praise of the strategy perfectly mirrors Trump’s and Miller’s rhetoric about entrenched enemies inside the bureaucracy. Once you view the NSS as an instrument to justify further purges and concentration of power in the Oval Office, Miller’s involvement stops looking speculative and starts looking structurally necessary.
Alignment with Russian strategic narratives moves from troubling to damning once you fold in the Reuters report. The Kremlin explicitly welcomed the decision to stop calling Russia a “direct threat,” lauded the pledge to end “the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance,” and declared that the adjustments “correspond in many ways to our vision.” Trump’s strategy elevates an “expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine” and the restoration of “strategic stability with Russia” to “core” U.S. interests, rather than centering Ukraine’s right to self-defense or the integrity of the rules-based order. Russian officials quite rationally interpret that shift as Washington moving toward Moscow’s preferred end state: a frozen conflict that locks in territorial gains, fractures Western unity, and normalizes a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
National security strategies framed by mainstream American traditions—liberal internationalist or hawkish realist—do not aim to make adversaries happy. They define threats, uphold alliances, and use deterrence and diplomacy to protect a pluralistic constitutional order. Trump’s NSS, instead, hands Moscow two enormous victories: rhetorical acceptance of great-power spheres of influence via a revived Monroe Doctrine and effective deprioritization of NATO cohesion in favor of bilateral leader-to-leader deals. Kremlin praise confirms what the text already shows.
A cognitive-bias-free assessment has to consider alternative explanations. Some might argue that the document reflects a coherent “realist” pivot toward burden-sharing and de-escalation with nuclear peers, written primarily by Pentagon and State Department professionals. Public reporting and the document’s own content undermine that theory. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speeches at the Reagan Defense Forum track the NSS line almost exactly, but he couches policies in the same culture-war language and great-power-sphere logic that Trump and Miller use, not in classic realist terms. Independent analysts at Foreign Policy, Time, ABC, and CFR all emphasize that the novelty of the 2025 NSS lies in its civilizational and demographic framing, its obsession with migration, and its open endorsement of “patriotic” far-right parties in Europe. Career officials rarely write that way; Miller and his ideological allies almost always do.
Another alternative posits that Trump personally dictated the document. Trump undoubtedly set the tone, and some phrases bear his verbal tics. Yet Trump’s history shows that he rarely writes or structures lengthy policy texts; he relies on trusted aides, particularly Miller, to translate his instincts into coherent, if toxic, prose. Major investigative profiles and insider accounts describe Miller as the one who “knows where he wants the president to go,” crafts the speeches and orders, and then uses his bureaucratic reach to ensure that agencies implement them. The NSS reads more like an extended Miller speech than like Trump’s improvisational rally style.
A fair analyst must also acknowledge uncertainty. No public document yet lists the drafting team, and no whistleblower has produced an email proving that Miller hit “save” on the final PDF. Credible inference still carries weight in intelligence and policy work. Role, ideology, language, and pattern of behavior all converge on the conclusion that Miller and his network almost certainly played a decisive role in shaping the strategy’s migration-centric, Christian-civilizational, executive-maximalist, Russia-accommodating core. In probabilistic terms, the likelihood that Miller is a marginal figure here looks low; the possibility that he is one of the primary authors or shapers looks high.
Constitutional stakes emerge starkly once you strip away the propaganda gloss. A national security strategy that defines safety in terms of religiously inflected “spiritual health,” traditional family structures, ethnic-civilizational homogeneity, and unbounded presidential authority collides head-on with the First Amendment’s ban on establishment of religion, Article VI’s prohibition on religious tests, and the separation of powers that vests lawmaking in Congress and limits the commander-in-chief. A strategy that demonizes migrants and “non-European” populations, marginalizes DEI and civil-rights enforcement, and treats human-rights defenders as subversives undermines the Equal Protection Clause and the broader post-war human-rights regime that U.S. leadership helped build. A strategy that wins praise in Moscow for aligning with Russian “perceptions” of the world while alarming democratic allies in Europe and elsewhere betrays the basic orientation of American foreign policy since 1945, which sought to contain rather than empower authoritarian revisionists.
An NSS anchored in constitutional fidelity would begin with the supremacy of the Constitution, the universality of individual rights, and the duty to defend pluralist democracy at home and abroad, even when that defense complicates short-term transactional deals. Trump’s 2025 strategy instead elevates the president above institutions, elevates one religious-cultural identity above others, elevates demographic engineering over human rights, and elevates agreement with Moscow over solidarity with assaulted democracies. Evidence strongly suggests that Stephen Miller’s hand guided the pen that produced that outcome. Even if Trump signed the document and basks in its flattery, Miller appears to have supplied the architecture, the vocabulary, and the malice.
An analyst does not need to indulge in hyperbole to reach a scathing conclusion. A national security strategy that delights the Kremlin, echoes white-nationalist and Christian-nationalist tropes, and serves as a vessel for one unelected adviser’s long-standing crusade against migration and pluralism does not protect the United States. It endangers the constitutional order, corrodes alliances, and invites adversaries to exploit self-inflicted moral and strategic weakness.
We analyze the core mission/vision/goals of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), Nazi strategic doctrine, and Putin’s Russia, and provide an analytic verdict on how closely Trump’s NSS aligns with openly authoritarian projects.
| Theme | 2025 U.S. NSS (Trump) | Nazi Germany mission / goals | Putin’s Russia mission / goals | Analytic assessment |
| Foundational purpose of the state | Frames the United States as an “independent, sovereign republic” whose government secures “God-given natural rights,” restores “spiritual and cultural health,” and ushers in a “new golden age” through strong “traditional families.” | Frames the Reich as the instrument of the Volksgemeinschaft (racial national community) and Aryan supremacy; demands restoration of “unity of mind and will” and elevation of Christianity and the family as the “basis of our morality” and “nucleus” of nation and state. | Frames Russia as a “distinct civilization-state” that must protect “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values,” cultural sovereignty, and historical truth against “Westernization” and “alien values.” | NSS abandons a neutral, constitutional conception of the state and steps straight into civilizational and theological territory. Nazi and Russian doctrines turn the state into a guardian of a specific, sacralized culture and “traditional values.” Trump’s NSS does the same with Christian-nationalist framing. The move shifts security from defending rights to policing souls and culture. |
| Leader cult and personalization of destiny | Exalts Trump as unique savior: credits him with ending multiple wars, annihilating Iran’s nuclear capacity, fixing NATO, and making America “the greatest and most successful nation in human history,” all in nine months, with no evidence or caveats. | Elevates Hitler as Führer, embodiment of the Volk’s will. Proclamations describe a “national uprising” and promise that only his leadership can restore unity and greatness; Enabling Act speech clears the way to abolish separation of powers in his hands. | Elevates Putin as guarantor of stability and rebirth of “great power” status. Foreign-policy and security concepts hinge on his vision of a “multipolar world” and Russia’s civilizational mission; official rhetoric markets him as the indispensable defender of sovereignty. | NSS reads like campaign propaganda, not a national strategy. Nazi and Russian doctrines explicitly fuse national fate with one man. Trump’s NSS adopts the same structure: the leader’s will defines interests and “dealmaking” substitutes for institutions. That pattern aligns with authoritarian personalism, not with Madisonian checks and balances. |
| Concept of the nation / people | Defines the core “we” as citizens whose rights and security depend on controlled borders, “traditional families,” and cultural cohesion. Treats uncontrolled migration and “cultural subversion” as existential threats to the American “way of life.” | Defines the German Volk in racial terms; Nazi platform restricts citizenship to those “of German blood,” explicitly excluding Jews, and aims to build an ethnically pure national community. | Defines the “Russian world” (Russkiy mir) as a transnational civilizational community bound by language, Orthodox Christianity, and shared history; assigns the state a duty to defend that community, including abroad. | NSS stops short of race law but borrows the same friend-community vs. hostile outsiders architecture. Nazi doctrine grounds it in Aryan blood; Russian doctrine grounds it in “Russian civilization”; NSS grounds it in a Christian-coded “American” identity threatened by migrants and cosmopolitan elites. That convergence lays conceptual track for graded citizenship in practice, whatever the formal law says. |
| Migration, demography, and “replacement” anxiety | Declares “the era of mass migration must end,” claims mass migration worldwide has increased crime, weakened cohesion, and “undermined national security,” and insists “border security is the primary element of national security.” Warns that Europe faces “civilizational erasure,” will become “unrecognizable,” and that soon some NATO states will be “majority non-European.” | Frames demographic struggle as central: Nazi ideology demands Lebensraum for the growing Aryan population and warns that Jews and “inferior races” will destroy German blood and culture. Policy uses expulsions, sterilization, and genocide to engineer demography. | Frames Russia as defending itself against “demographic decline,” “Russophobia,” and Western promotion of “alien” lifestyles that threaten birthrates and family. Security strategy casts Western culture as a demographic and moral attack on Russia’s survival. | NSS wraps classic “Great Replacement” fear in respectable prose. Nazi doctrine states outright that non-Aryans must disappear; Putin’s doctrine hints that Western liberalism and migration erode the Russian people. Trump’s strategy copies the same panic about demographic change, especially in Europe, and elevates it to a central U.S. interest. That move has no constitutional basis but tracks perfectly with far-right ethno-nationalist narratives. |
| Religion and “traditional values” | Grounds U.S. strategy in “God-given” rights, calls for “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” and links security to “strong, traditional families” and rejection of “radical ideologies” and DEI. | Vows to place Christianity “under firm protection” as the basis of morality and the family as “nucleus” of nation and state; Nazi propaganda presents struggle as a quasi-holy war for racial and spiritual purity. | National security and foreign-policy concepts elevate “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” and “cultural and spiritual sovereignty” as core interests; documents claim Western culture threatens Russia’s “moral health.” | NSS imports the language and logic of confessional states into an ostensibly secular constitutional order. Nazi and Russian regimes use “Christian” and “traditional” rhetoric to justify repression of dissenters and minorities. Trump’s strategy follows the same script, priming policy to treat non-conforming beliefs, identities, and scholarship as security risks rather than protected freedoms. |
| Internal enemies and “elites” | Condemns decades of “elites” who pursued “permanent American domination of the entire world,” imposed “globalism,” shackled the U.S. to “anti-American” institutions, and foisted DEI and “radical ideologies” on the country. Casts deradicalization and democracy-protection programs as abusive pretexts. | Rages against “November criminals,” Marxists, Jews, and Weimar politicians as traitorous “internal enemies” who caused defeat and humiliation; 1933 proclamations promise “merciless war” on those enemies and brand them saboteurs of national rebirth. | Denounces the “collective West,” “fifth column,” “foreign agents,” and “neo-Nazis” as internal and external enemies threatening Russia’s sovereignty and spiritual health; security strategy labels “alien ideals” existential threats to identity. | NSS uses near-identical cognitive framing: a virtuous “real people” versus corrupt elites and subversive ideologies. Nazi doctrine pins that hatred on specific racial and political groups; Russian doctrine pins it on liberals, Westernizers, and “agents.” Trump’s NSS focuses on “globalists,” DEI, migrants, and “radical” domestic critics. The structure sets up a permanent enemy-within narrative that undermines any pluralist democracy. |
| Rights, liberties, and hierarchy of freedoms | Trumpets “core rights” as free speech, religious freedom, and the right to choose government, and warns against abuse of state “fearsome powers” under the banner of deradicalization or democracy protection. Omits press freedom, due process, privacy, and equal protection. Surrounding Project 2025 program aims to gut LGBTQ, reproductive, and civil-rights protections. | Destroys Weimar civil liberties under emergency decrees and the Enabling Act; Nazi law reduces Jews and other groups to rightless subjects, then proceeds to mass expropriation and extermination. “Rights” exist purely as rewards for loyal Volksgenossen. | Russian strategy and laws restrict media, assembly, and political competition while defending “freedom of religion” and “traditional values.” “Foreign agents” and “extremism” statutes give the regime tools to crush independent NGOs, media, and opposition while claiming to protect sovereignty and morality. | NSS lays the conceptual groundwork for a two-tier rights regime. Nazi doctrine takes that logic to genocidal extremes; Russian doctrine uses it to build a managed democracy. Trump’s NSS narrows “core” rights to those that protect the ruling coalition and its religious base while treating other liberties as expendable luxuries or security threats. That inversion flatly contradicts the Bill of Rights’ design. |
| Executive power and checks and balances | Praises Trump’s unilateral “course correction,” presents his “unconventional diplomacy” and deals as central tools, and implicitly treats institutions that constrain him—courts, international organizations, independent agencies—as mistakes of “elites.” Project 2025 around it pushes Schedule F, purges, and politicization of the civil service. | Uses enabling legislation and emergency decrees to strip the Reichstag of authority and fuse executive and legislative power in Hitler’s hands. Führerprinzip demands unquestioning obedience from all state and party organs; separation of powers disappears. | Gradually centralizes power in the presidency, weakens parliament and courts, and uses security and foreign-agent laws to neutralize competing centers of power. Kremlin foreign-policy concept portrays a unified “state policy” under presidential leadership. | NSS offers ideological cover for an imperial presidency that answers to a personalized notion of “the people,” not to coequal branches. Nazi and Russian regimes have already walked that path. Trump’s strategy echoes their justifications—emergency, humiliation, elites, unity—while stopping just short of saying the quiet part out loud. The constitutional order appears as an obstacle to be gamed rather than a framework to be honored. |
| Sovereignty, spheres of influence, and world order | Proclaims an “America First” vision, asserts a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine to lock up the Western Hemisphere and deny “non-Hemispheric competitors” access, and calls for ending “the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” Treats multipolar balance and burden-shifting as goals. | Pursues Lebensraum and continental hegemony; aims to overturn Versailles, rearm, expand German control over Central and Eastern Europe, and create a hierarchical order with Germany at the top. “Peace” language masks aggressive revisionism. | Pursues a “multipolar world” that rejects Western “hegemony,” claims a right to defend Russians and compatriots abroad by force, and treats Eurasia and the post-Soviet space as privileged spheres of influence. Foreign-policy concept explicitly embraces that logic. | NSS abandons the universalist post-1945 U.S. role and walks into a carve-up world in which big powers claim regions. Nazi Germany used that logic to justify partition and annexation; Putin’s Russia uses it to invade Ukraine and bully neighbors. Trump’s strategy does not yet call for conquest but signals acceptance of a Yalta-style map that strongmen like Putin crave. Kremlin praise for the NSS confirms that reading. |
| War, peace, and use of force | Markets Trump as “The President of Peace” who ends conflicts through personal deals while simultaneously demanding massive military buildup and nuclear “Golden Dome.” Downplays Ukrainian agency and centers a quick “cessation of hostilities” with Russia as a U.S. core interest. | Portrays wars of expansion as defensive and preemptive; Hitler’s proclamations frame invasions as necessary for security, unity, and God-blessed national resurgence, and promise annihilation of those who disturb unity. | Labels the invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation” to defend Russia and Russians from “neo-Nazis” and NATO encroachment; security and foreign-policy documents frame aggressive war as defensive action within Russia’s sphere. | NSS cloaks transactional de-escalation with Russia in peace rhetoric and almost completely ignores justice, accountability, or the rights of invaded states. Nazi and Russian doctrines already show how regimes weaponize “peace” and “security” language to legitimize expansion and carve-outs. Trump’s strategy leans toward the aggressor’s narrative and invites moral surrender in the name of “stability.” |
| Information, culture, and history as battlefields | Brands foreign propaganda, “cultural subversion,” DEI, and critical history as threats; pledges to use “soft power” that remains “unapologetic” about America’s past while resisting censorship of “core liberties” for allies. The 2025 Surrounding Project plan seeks to purge schools, media, and bureaucracy of “woke” content. | Uses total propaganda apparatus to rewrite history, glorify the Aryan past, and saturate culture with Nazi symbols and narratives; suppresses critical scholarship and dissenting art under threat of prison or worse. | Treats Western media, NGOs, and historians as information-war instruments; Russia’s NSS and foreign-policy concepts warn of “falsification of history” and Western cultural “expansion,” and call for firm defense of official narratives. | NSS moves U.S. doctrine toward the same’ war on truth’ posture. Nazi and Russian texts show how quickly “cultural defense” slides into censorship, persecution of academics, and criminalization of inconvenient facts. Trump’s strategy, backed by Project 2025, sketches a roadmap to capture education, public broadcasting, and the civil service under the banner of fighting “subversion.” |
| View of liberal democracy and pluralism | Denounces “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties” in Europe and cheers “patriotic European parties” that oppose migration, the EU, and liberal norms. Frames democracy largely as majoritarian rule validated by elections, not as a system of rights and checks. | Rejects liberal democracy as decadent; replaces multi-party competition with one-party rule and suppresses pluralism in favor of a unified “people’s community.” Elections and institutions become shells for Nazi control. | Treats Western liberal democracy as hypocritical “hegemony”; builds “managed democracy” with controlled opposition, stage-managed elections, and constrained media. Official doctrine casts Russia as alternative model based on sovereignty and traditional values. | NSS aligns the United States rhetorically with Europe’s illiberal right and with Moscow’s civilizational critique of liberal democracy. Nazi and Russian doctrines converge in contempt for pluralism and checks; Trump’s strategy sympathizes with that contempt and recodes it as defense of “freedom” against elites. That inversion marks a fundamental breach of the U.S. constitutional tradition, in which rights limit majority power, not the other way around. |
The table does not claim that Trump’s National Security Strategy equals Nazi doctrine or that the United States now plans genocide. Nazi Germany built an entirely racial state devoted to expansion and extermination; Putin’s Russia fights an ongoing imperial war. The assessment instead tracks how Trump’s NSS replicates many of the same ideological joints: leader worship, sacralized “tradition,” demographic panic, enemy-within mythology, spheres-of-influence geopolitics, and hostility to liberal pluralism, all wrapped in the language of sovereignty and God.
Authoritarian projects rarely announce their worst intentions up front. They rewrite the mission statement first. Trump’s 2025 NSS has now done that work in a style that Nazi and Russian strategists would recognize immediately, and that the Kremlin already applauds.
