The Washington Post analysis of a legal “blitzkrieg” in America reveals a chilling historical pattern. When Georgetown Law’s David Super warns about actors “playing a quantity game” to overwhelm our regulatory systems, he’s describing the same institutional warfare tactics that the Nazi regime used to paralyze German democracy in 1933.
‘So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,’ said David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School.
History teaches us that authoritarian takeovers rarely announce themselves. The Nazi strategy of Gleichschaltung wasn’t about openly destroying legal institutions – it was about making them functionally useless through coordinated abuse of their own processes. Today’s national security community must recognize these same patterns: When multiple actors simultaneously flood regulatory frameworks with contradictory challenges, they’re executing a tested blueprint for dismantling democratic oversight.
What makes this historical parallel urgent is the force multiplier of modern technology. Where the Nazi regime had to manually coordinate their legal warfare, today’s actors can deploy artificial intelligence to generate industrial-scale attacks on institutional capacity. The system doesn’t need to break visibly; it just needs to be overwhelmed until it can no longer fulfill its critical oversight function.
The Nazi strategy was most notably a sophisticated attack to abuse institutional capacity to stop massively scaled integrity breaches. Rather than simply ignoring the law, the regime weaponized legal process itself, unleashing waves of coordinated legal actions that paralyzed courts while maintaining a facade of legality. Beginning in 1933, they flooded courts with simultaneous challenges to opposition politicians while filing contradictory interpretations of the Enabling Act, effectively short-circuiting judicial review mechanisms.
The “Coordination” (Gleichschaltung) period:
- Flooded courts with simultaneous cases against opposition politicians and civil servants
- Filed multiple contradictory legal interpretations of the Enabling Act to paralyze judicial review
- Overwhelmed state governments with simultaneous legal challenges to their autonomy
- Issued hundreds of new regulations for Jewish businesses simultaneously to overwhelm their ability to comply or challenge
By 1935, this evolved into a full-scale assault on judicial independence and dismantling the court system. The regime didn’t just attack individual judges – they overwhelmed entire jurisdictional frameworks. They filed thousands of simultaneous property rights challenges while creating parallel “People’s Courts,” forcing the judiciary to waste precious resources on jurisdictional conflicts rather than substantive justice.
- Filed thousands of cases challenging Jewish property rights simultaneously
- Launched concurrent challenges to church autonomy across multiple jurisdictions
- Created parallel “People’s Courts” while maintaining regular courts, overwhelming the system with jurisdictional conflicts
- Bombarded judges with new legal “interpretations” requiring immediate implementation
The strategy reached its horrific apex during Kristallnacht 1938, when simultaneous incidents across multiple jurisdictions deliberately overwhelmed police response capabilities. This wasn’t chaos – it was carefully orchestrated legal warfare. The same pattern repeated in occupied territories, where overlapping military, civil, and SS jurisdictions created deliberate administrative paralysis:
- Issued massive numbers of new property regulations
- Filed simultaneous legal actions across multiple jurisdictions against Jewish businesses
- Created overlapping and contradictory regulations about Jewish movement/assembly rights
- Used the overwhelming number of simultaneous incidents during Kristallnacht itself to prevent effective police response
1941-1944: In occupied territories:
- Created multiple overlapping legal jurisdictions (military, civil, SS)
- Issued contradictory regulations from different authorities
- Overwhelmed local courts with mass denaturalization proceedings
- Filed simultaneous challenges to property rights across multiple territories
The coordinated assault on birthright citizenship exemplifies this Nazi-style legal warfare in action. Like the 1933 Gleichschaltung attacks on German Jewish citizenship, Trump’s executive order combines contradictory legal interpretations with technological amplification of administrative chaos.
It’s just one shining example of the anti-American blitz of racist lawsuits by Trump weaponizing the executive branch to overwhelm courts with attacks on the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause – a fundamental constitutional right established specifically to prevent racist denial of citizenship after the Civil War.
A federal judge has already blocked the order nationwide, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
That is, of course, correct…
Neither the Trump administration nor these attorneys general have a sound legal argument to the contrary. Instead, they cite a coterie of nonexperts who’ve attempted to subvert birthright citizenship through bogus history and cynical wordplay. They claim, falsely, that the guarantee encompasses only those whose parents hold full “allegiance” to the United States. Much of the states’ brief simply rehashes these losing arguments, substituting xenophobic rhetoric for persuasive analysis.
The pattern of institutional warfare becomes even clearer as a second judge confronts this coordinated assault on constitutional protections:
“The denial of the precious right to citizenship will cause irreparable harm,” Judge Boardman said in handing down her order. “It has been said the right to U.S. citizenship is a right no less precious than life or liberty. If the court does not enjoin enforcement of the executive order, children subject to the order will be denied the rights and benefits of U.S. citizenship and their parents will face instability.”
Following the Nazi blueprint precisely, Trump is seeking vulnerable points in the judicial system while deploying AI-powered legal warfare to overwhelm institutional defenses:
In her ruling, Judge Boardman said Trump’s executive order “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment.”
“The U.S. Supreme court has resoundingly rejected the president’s interpretation of the citizenship clause,” Boardman said. “In fact, no court has endorsed the president’s interpretation, and this court will not be the first.”
Trump is using technology for a targeted abuse of the legal system that mirrors the Nazi regime’s systematic dismantling of German democracy – a pattern that should set off immediate alarms for any historian, let alone national security expert or defender of constitutional rights.
