how far Trump will go to achieve his objectives at home and abroad, including putting the country on a path toward war. Historic comparisons are both useful and imprecise. Yet there are enough echoes of Germany in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became the country’s newly appointed chancellor. Then and now were periods seen by some as a brutal darkening and others as a great national revival. (My most recent book is set in Holland during the war.)

As with Hitler’s earliest days in power, we are seeing an increase in race-based hate crimes. Back then, the targets were communists, socialists and Jews. Today the targets are Muslims. Trump’s advisers are pointing to a much-criticized World War II-era Supreme Court ruling, Korematsu v. United States, which held that wartimeinto a deportation treadmill. Trump and the GOP have threatened to ramp up that process, including the prospect of blocking all federal aid to any municipality or state that acts as a sanctuary state. There’s also been talk about seizing the international wire transfers of money migrants send to their families in Mexico and Central America. What’s clear is that this is uncharted territory, domestically speaking.

What happens with the Muslim registry, segments of police forces resurrecting racial profiling, crackdowns against protesters and dissent, are all open questions. But the president-elect and his top advisers, like most of the anti-communist crusaders of the 1950s McCarthy era, have shown little tolerance for dissent and a willingness to go after their critics. In California, people at anti-Trump protests talk about opening