Secret Hitler is a board game produced by Max Temkin, who was behind Cards Against Humanity. It published last year after a successful 2015 Kickstarter that raised $1.4 million. While the name itself is chortle-inducing and the fun is in figuring out which one of your friends is the closet fascist, it makes a very real point about how such leaders come to power. This week, its creators sent a copy to each of the 100 members of the United States Senate.
The makers of Secret Hitler — Mike Boxleiter, Tommy Maranges and Temkin — explain that Hitler himself "required the cooperation of well meaning men who hoped to appease and control the Nazis." Regardless of his political aims, that fairly describes how Donald Trump backed into the Republican nomination against a weak establishment afraid of challenging him and alienating his riled-up base of voters, whom they also needed for their own political aims.
From there he scored an upset in the general election that defied what pollsters had been reporting, and in a lot of cases a "this isn't really going to happen," mentality in the nation's punditry.
That more than any policy, really, is what connects Trump to Hitler and why the game's makers want senators to, if not play their game, at least think good and hard about why they would cooperate with Trump or his policies. The Republican majority in Congress for sure prefers a GOP chief executive who won't veto their legislation. But they have struggled to get any kind of an agenda going, even on red-meat promises they threw their voters throughout the election. The White House doesn't appear to be setting any kind of real legislative agenda either.
Anyway, food for thought. If you want to know more about Secret Hitler, see this overview and video from the end of November.
