In Los Angeles, we live with fire. There is even a season—fire season, which does not end until the rains come. This winter, the rains have not come. What has come is fire. And Angelenos have been caught off guard, myself included.

Tuesday mid-morning, a windstorm hit L.A. In the Palisades, a neighborhood in the Santa Monica Mountains that overlooks the Pacific Ocean, a blaze broke out. Over the past two days, it has burned more than 17,234 acres and destroyed at least 1,000 structures. The Palisades Fire will almost certainly end up being the most expensive in California history. It is currently not at all contained.

By Tuesday night, another fire had sparked—this time in the San Gabriel Mountains, near Altadena, where winds had been clocked at 100 miles an hour and sent embers flying miles deep into residential and commercial stretches of the city. By mid-morning yesterday, the Eaton Fire had consumed 1,000 structures and more than 10,600 acres. It, too, is zero percent contained. Together, the fires have taken at least five lives.

Last night, just before 6 p.m., another fire erupted in Runyon Canyon, in the Hollywood Hills. Like the Palisades and Eaton Fires, the Sunset Fire seems to have first broken out in the dry chaparral scrub whipped by the roaring winds. The hillside there is particularly dense with homes, and the neighborhood is jammed up against the even denser, urban L.A., where apartment buildings quickly give way to commercial blocks. One of this city’s many charms is its easy access to nature, but nature is also the cause of its current apocalypse.

Living through these fires, I’ve struggled to understand the scale of the event; to see the threat for what it is and respond appropriately. My family lives in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood 20 miles from the Palisades with a whole mountain range in between. On Tuesday, while driving on the freeway, I saw the colossal thunderhead of gray smoke of the Palisades Fire erupting from the Santa Monica Mountains and decided: This is fine. I finished my errand. I went on with my day.

When I got home, I turned on KTLA, which was broadcasting live from Palisades Drive, where dozens of cars, trapped in evacuation traffic, had been abandoned by their fleeing owners. A man ran up to the reporter, removed his face mask, and spoke into the microphone. Looking directly at the camera, he implored viewers to leave their keys in their car if they were going to flee, so that the fire crews could get to the fire unimpeded. The guy looked familiar. The reporter asked him to identify himself. It was Steve Guttenberg. Mahoney from Police Academy! Only in L.A.

The wind was making a constant low, terrible moan through the trees. Every few minutes, a violent gust would blast through and rattle the house. That afternoon, I went to pick up my kids, who had been kept inside their school all day. At home, I let them run around outside, but everyone’s eyes got itchy. There was so much dust in the air. Still, the only fire I knew of was all the way across town, so I went out again that evening to see a movie.  

At intermission, a friend returned from the restroom and told me that my wife had been trying to reach me. I turned my phone off airplane mode and called her; when she picked up, she told me a neighbor had just knocked on our door to tell her that a brush fire was burning nearby. It was close, she said. How close? I asked.

Across the street, she said. Like, can you see it? From our house? She said no. I’m coming home, I told her.

Driving back, I saw a huge, glowing gash in the San Gabriel Mountains—the Eaton Fire. I thought about what needed to happen when I got home: the go bags we should pack, the box of birth certificates and Social Security cards. A photo album or two. I’d park the car facing out, for a quicker exit. I’d move some potentially long-burning objects (trash cans) as far from the house as possible.

I knew what to do. I knew the procedure. I’d reported on fires before. Hell, the home I’d grown up in was nearly burned down by wildfires twice in 2017, and my aunt and uncle had lost their home in Santa Rosa that same year. I’d interviewed firefighters about days just like this one—when the Santa Anas howl and it hasn’t rained for eight months or longer, the chaparral is a tinderbox, and fires begin popping up everywhere.

And yet, I hadn’t thought that it could happen down the street. I hadn’t considered that it could happen to me and my family.

[Read: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this’]

I arrived home just after 9 p.m. First neighbors with hoses, then the fire department, had doused the blaze nearby. I worked through my checklist, packed the kids a bag of clothes, then my wife and I packed small bags of our own. A thought nagged at me: All day, I’d been looking at fire—why hadn’t I seen the immediacy of the threat? I pulled out a book called Thinking in an Emergency, by Elaine Scarry, which I find extremely calming in intense moments because it presents an extended argument for the benefits of thought and practice during emergency situations. “CPR is knowable; one can learn it if one chooses,” Scarry writes. “But one cannot know who will one day be the recipient of that embodied knowledge … It is available to every person whose path crosses one’s own.”

What we do during emergencies, when the habits of the everyday (getting out of your car, keys in hand) come face-to-face with the extraordinary (a fire by the side of the road), requires extraordinary thinking. And we would be wise to insert these acts of thinking into our everyday habits. We perform a version of this constantly: We call it “deliberation.” Mostly, we spend very little time between deliberation and action. But emergency-style deliberation is difficult, because true emergencies are rare. It is hard for us to conceive of them happening until they are.

The drivers who locked their car doors and left with their keys were not thinking within the framework of the fire as a threat. A fire doesn’t steal one’s car; it burns it down. I had been no different in my thinking that day. Maybe I was worse: I had the knowledge of what to do in a fire, but I hadn’t even considered the realistic possibility that the fire presented a threat to my family.

I spent most of Tuesday night awake. The wind remained terrible. The smell of smoke began to fill the house. I rolled up towels and stuck them at the foot of the doors. Yesterday morning, just after 7 a.m., our phones buzzed with an alert: an evacuation warning for our corner of the neighborhood and much of nearby Pasadena. We hustled our kids through breakfast, packed up, and got out. Our going was optional, but at least 100,000 other Angelenos are under mandatory evacuation, a number that is surely growing higher as all of these fires continue to burn.

We left with the little we’d packed in our go bags, which was clarifying. I felt a weight lift. This was everything that truly mattered. Rereading Scarry had reminded me: I did not learn to perform CPR until I was about to be a father, until the possibility of having to perform it seemed a bit more real. I still, thankfully, have never had to. But will I retrain myself? Should I be practicing? We motored on through traffic. After a while, the smoke began to clear, just enough to see patches of sky. I will schedule that CPR retraining, I thought. That’s something I should do. When we can get home and catch our breath.

A politically powerful opponent of birthright citizenship railed that the United States cannot “give up the right” to “expel” dangerous “trespassers” who “invade [our] borders,” “wander in gangs,” and “infest society.”

Was this Donald Trump speaking in 2024? No, the quote is from an 1866 speech on the Senate floor by Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania, a leading opponent of adding a provision to the U.S. Constitution granting citizenship based solely on birth on U.S. soil. Who were the “invaders” that Senator Cowan so feared? “I mean the Gypsies,” Cowan explained, despite offering no evidence that Roma migration posed a risk to the United States.

Senator Cowan lost the fight. In 1868, the nation ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, the first sentence of which guarantees birthright citizenship. The amendment invalidated the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that no Black person could ever be a U.S. citizen. Equally important, the Constitution now guaranteed citizenship to the children of immigrants born on U.S. soil, “no matter from what quarter of the globe he or his ancestors may have come,” as one senator later put it in a speech to his constituents.

[Martha S. Jones: Birthright citizenship was won by freed slaves]

More than 150 years later, Trump has vowed to end birthright citizenship on “day one” of his new administration for children without at least one parent who is a citizen or green-card holder. He made that announcement in a three-minute video prominently posted on his campaign website, which he repeated in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press last month.

In 2025, the end of birthright citizenship is more than just an applause line at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It has a genuine, if slim, chance of making its way into law. If it does, it will upend the lives of millions, and create a caste system in which a new set of people—native-born non-Americans—can never work or live in the open.

This prospect ought to be taken seriously. How would President Trump implement such a plan? Is it constitutional? And would the U.S. Supreme Court back him up?

The first question is easy, because Trump has told us exactly how he intends to proceed. In the video, the president-elect commits to issuing an executive order on January 20, 2025, that would deny citizenship not only to the children of undocumented immigrants but also to those born to parents who both are legally in the United States on a temporary visa for study or work. (Trump’s order as proposed would apply only to children born after it is issued.)

The consequences would be immediate. Trump says he will order government officials to deny these children passports and Social Security numbers. They will be prohibited from enrolling in federal programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and likely state benefits as well.

As adults, if all goes according to Trump’s plan, they will be barred from voting, holding elected office, and serving on juries. States could deny them a driver’s license and block them from attending state universities. They would be prohibited from working in the United States, and any U.S. citizen who employs them could be fined or even jailed under federal immigration laws. Many would be rendered stateless. Perhaps worst of all, they would live in perpetual fear of being deported from the only country in which they have ever lived.

[Read: Trump’s murky plan to end birthright citizenship]

Ending birthright citizenship for these children would affect everyone in America. Everyone would now have to provide proof of their parents’ citizenship or immigration status on the date of their birth to qualify for the rights and benefits of citizenship. The new law would necessitate an expanded government bureaucracy to scrutinize hospital records, birth certificates, naturalization oaths, and green-card applications.

Lawsuits are sure to follow, which leads to the second question: Will Trump have the constitutional authority to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants?

Per the text of the Constitution, the answer is a hard no. Some constitutional provisions are fuzzy, but the citizenship clause is not one of them. It states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Even the deeply racist Supreme Court back in 1898 couldn’t find any wiggle room in that language. Just two years before, in 1896, the Court had somehow read the Constitution’s equal-protection clause to permit “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, ushering in the Jim Crow era. But when the U.S. government argued in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the children of Chinese immigrants were not birthright citizens, the justices balked. The language granting citizenship to “all persons born” in the United States was “universal,” the Court explained, restricted “only by place and jurisdiction.” More recently, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that point, stating as an aside in a 1982 opinion addressing the rights of undocumented children to attend school: “No plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

Despite the clear text and long-standing judicial precedent, Trump claims that undocumented immigrants and their children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and so fall within the exception to universal birthright citizenship.

That is nonsense. Undocumented immigrants must follow all federal and state laws. When they violate criminal laws, they are jailed. If they park illegally, they are ticketed. They are required to pay their taxes and renew their driver’s license, just like everyone else. Trump certainly agrees that undocumented parents of native-born children can be deported for violating immigration laws at any time. So in what way are these immigrants and their children not subject to U.S. jurisdiction?

The citizenship clause’s exception for those not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States applies only to children born to members of American Indian tribes and the children of diplomats, as Congress explained when drafting that language in 1866. In contrast with undocumented immigrants, both groups owe allegiance to a separate sovereign, and both are immune from certain state and federal laws. (Native Americans were granted birthright citizenship by federal statute in 1924.)

As nonsensical as they are in an American context, Trump’s ideas didn’t come out of nowhere. In 1985, the law professor Peter Schuck and the political scientist Rogers Smith wrote an influential book, Citizenship Without Consent, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause did not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants. These scholars asserted that “immigration to the United States was entirely unregulated” before the 1870s, and so there was no such thing as an “illegal immigrant” and likewise no intent to grant birthright citizenship to their children. Many scholars and commentators, including some members of Congress, have repeated that same claim. In 2015, the law professor Lino Graglia testified before the House Judiciary Committee that “there were no illegal aliens in 1868 because there were no restrictions on immigration.” Then-Representative Raúl Labrador repeated the same point at that hearing, asserting as fact that there was “no illegal immigration when the Fourteenth Amendment came into being.” In an op-ed in June 2023, a former Department of Homeland Security policy adviser declared, “There were no immigrant parents living unlawfully in the United States” in the 19th century.

These critics have their facts wrong. In a recent law-review article, the legal scholars Gabriel Chin and Paul Finkelman explained that for decades, Africans were illegally brought to the United States as slaves even after Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, making them the “illegal aliens” of their day. The nation was well aware of that problem. Government efforts to shut down the slave trade and deport illegally imported enslaved people were widely reported throughout the years leading up to the Civil War. Yet no one credible, then or now, would argue that the children of those slaves were to be excluded from the citizenship clause—a constitutional provision intended to overrule Dred Scott v. Sandford by giving U.S. citizenship to the 4.5 million Black people then living in the United States.

[Read: Birthright citizenship wasn’t born in America]

Even so, these ideas have gained traction in the right-wing legal community—a group that will be empowered in Trump’s next term. The Fifth Circuit judge James C. Ho, who is regularly floated as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court, recently said in an interview that children of “invading aliens” are not citizens, because “birthright citizenship obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion”—a reversal of his previous position on this issue. (This is the judicial equivalent of shouting, “Pick me! Pick me!”) Never mind that undocumented immigrants—a majority of whom entered the United States legally and then overstayed their visa—don’t qualify as invaders under any definition of the word. And never mind that there is no support for that idea in either the Constitution’s text or its history. In 1866, Senator Cowan opposed granting citizenship to the children of the “flood” of Chinese immigrants into California, as well as to Gypsy “invaders” of his own state. His colleagues pointed out that the only invasion of Pennsylvania was by Confederate soldiers a few years before. Birthright citizenship, they explained, would ensure that the United States would never revert back to the slave society that the Confederates invaded Pennsylvania to preserve.

In truth, all of these baseless arguments are window dressing for the real goal. The Fourteenth Amendment’s overarching purpose was to end a caste system in which some people had more rights under the law than others. To be sure, that ideal has always been a work in progress. But many opponents of birthright citizenship don’t even hold out that ideal as a goal; they would rather bring caste back, and enshrine it in our laws.

If birthright citizenship were to end tomorrow for children without at least one parent who was a citizen or lawful permanent resident, it would bar from citizenship hundreds of thousands of people each year. These people wouldn’t be eligible to participate in our democracy, and they would be forced to live and work in the shadows, as would their children and their children’s children. The end of birthright citizenship would create a caste of millions of un-Americans, locked in perpetuity into an inferior, exploitable status. Ironically, if Trump were to succeed in ending birthright citizenship, he would preside over the most dramatic increase of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history.

That brings us to the third question: Would five members of the Supreme Court uphold Trump’s proposed executive order?

No sitting justice has addressed this question directly. At his confirmation hearing in 2006, Justice Samuel Alito was asked whether he thought the children of undocumented immigrants qualified for birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. He refused to answer on the grounds that a future case might come before him, but he also observed: “It may turn out to be a very simple question. It may turn out to be a complicated question. Without studying the question, I don’t know.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett declined to respond to the same question for the same reason. (These two justices also dodged questions about whether they would overturn Roe v. Wade on those grounds.)  

The Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, an expert on the Supreme Court, believes that, at most, “two” or “maybe … even three justices” on the current Court would vote to end birthright citizenship. But all it takes is five, and the Court’s composition may well change. Trump appointed three justices during his first term in office, and he could appoint a few more before the end of his second. It is they who will have the last word.

Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered.

Hans Frank served as Hitler’s private attorney and chief legal strategist in the early years of the Nazi movement. While later awaiting execution at Nuremberg for his complicity in Nazi atrocities, Frank commented on his client’s uncanny capacity for sensing “the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law” and then ruthlessly exploiting that weakness. Following his failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, Hitler had renounced trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic by violent means but not his commitment to destroying the country’s democratic system, a determination he reiterated in a Legalitätseid—“legality oath”—before the Constitutional Court in September 1930. Invoking Article 1 of the Weimar constitution, which stated that the government was an expression of the will of the people, Hitler informed the court that once he had achieved power through legal means, he intended to mold the government as he saw fit. It was an astonishingly brazen statement.

“So, through constitutional means?” the presiding judge asked.

“Jawohl!” Hitler replied.

By January 1933, the fallibilities of the Weimar Republic—whose 181-article constitution framed the structures and processes for its 18 federated states—were as obvious as they were abundant. Having spent a decade in opposition politics, Hitler knew firsthand how easily an ambitious political agenda could be scuttled. He had been co-opting or crushing right-wing competitors and paralyzing legislative processes for years, and for the previous eight months, he had played obstructionist politics, helping to bring down three chancellors and twice forcing the president to dissolve the Reichstag and call for new elections.

When he became chancellor himself, Hitler wanted to prevent others from doing unto him what he had done unto them. Though the vote share of his National Socialist party had been rising—in the election of September 1930, following the 1929 market crash, they had increased their representation in the Reichstag almost ninefold, from 12 delegates to 107, and in the July 1932 elections, they had more than doubled their mandate to 230 seats—they were still far from a majority. Their seats amounted to only 37 percent of the legislative body, and the larger right-wing coalition that the Nazi Party was a part of controlled barely 51 percent of the Reichstag, but Hitler believed that he should exercise absolute power: “37 percent represents 75 percent of 51 percent,” he argued to one American reporter, by which he meant that possessing the relative majority of a simple majority was enough to grant him absolute authority. But he knew that in a multiparty political system, with shifting coalitions, his political calculus was not so simple. He believed that an Ermächtigungsgesetz (“empowering law”) was crucial to his political survival. But passing such a law—which would dismantle the separation of powers, grant Hitler’s executive branch the authority to make laws without parliamentary approval, and allow Hitler to rule by decree, bypassing democratic institutions and the constitution—required the support of a two-thirds majority in the fractious Reichstag.

The process proved to be even more challenging than anticipated. Hitler found his dictatorial intentions getting thwarted within his first six hours as chancellor. At 11:30 that Monday morning, he swore an oath to uphold the constitution, then went across the street to the Hotel Kaiserhof for lunch, then returned to the Reich Chancellery for a group photo of the “Hitler Cabinet,” which was followed by his first formal meeting with his nine ministers at precisely 5 o’clock.

Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists. At this point he turned to his main agenda item: the empowering law that, he argued, would give him the time (four years, according to the stipulations laid out in the draft of the law) and the authority necessary to make good on his campaign promises to revive the economy, reduce unemployment, increase military spending, withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners he claimed were “poisoning” the blood of the nation, and exact revenge on political opponents. “Heads will roll in the sand,” Hitler had vowed at one rally.

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

But given that Social Democrats and Communists collectively commanded 221 seats, or roughly 38 percent, of the 584-seat Reichstag, the two-thirds vote Hitler needed was a mathematical impossibility. “Now if one were to ban the Communist Party and annul their votes,” Hitler proposed, “it would be possible to reach a Reichstag majority.”

The problem, Hitler continued, was that this would almost certainly precipitate a national strike by the 6 million German Communists, which could, in turn, lead to a collapse of the country’s economy. Alternatively, Reichstag percentages could be rebalanced by holding new elections. “What represents a greater danger to the economy?” Hitler asked. “The uncertainties and concerns associated with new elections or a general strike?” Calling for new elections, he concluded, was the safer path.

Economic Minister Alfred Hugenberg disagreed. Ultimately, Hugenberg argued, if one wanted to achieve a two-thirds Reichstag majority, there was no way of getting around banning the Communist Party. Of course, Hugenberg had his own self-interested reasons for opposing new Reichstag elections: In the previous election, Hugenberg had siphoned 14 seats from Hitler’s National Socialists to his own party, the German Nationalists, making Hugenberg an indispensable partner in Hitler’s current coalition government. New elections threatened to lose his party seats and diminish his power.

When Hitler wondered whether the army could be used to crush any public unrest, Defense Minister Werner von Blomberg dismissed the idea out of hand, observing “that a soldier was trained to see an external enemy as his only potential opponent.” As a career officer, Blomberg could not imagine German soldiers being ordered to shoot German citizens on German streets in defense of Hitler’s (or any other German) government.

Hitler had campaigned on the promise of draining the “parliamentarian swamp”—den parlamentarischen Sumpf—only to find himself now foundering in a quagmire of partisan politics and banging up against constitutional guardrails. He responded as he invariably did when confronted with dissenting opinions or inconvenient truths: He ignored them and doubled down.

The next day, Hitler announced new Reichstag elections, to be held in early March, and issued a memorandum to his party leaders. “After a thirteen-year struggle the National Socialist movement has succeeded in breaking through into the government, but the struggle to win the German nation is only beginning,” Hitler proclaimed, and then added venomously: “The National Socialist party knows that the new government is not a National Socialist government, even though it is conscious that it bears the name of its leader, Adolf Hitler.” He was declaring war on his own government.

We have come to perceive Hitler’s appointment as chancellor as part of an inexorable rise to power, an impression resting on generations of postwar scholarship, much of which has necessarily marginalized or disregarded alternatives to the standard narrative of the Nazi seizure of power (Machtergreifung) with its political and social persecutions, its assertion of totalitarian rule (Gleichschaltung) and subsequent aggressions that led to the Second World War and the nightmare of the Holocaust. In researching and writing this piece, I intentionally ignored these ultimate outcomes and instead traced events as they unfolded in real time with their attendant uncertainties and misguided assessments. A case in point: The January 31, 1933, New York Times story on Hitler’s appointment as chancellor was headlined “Hitler Puts Aside Aim to Be Dictator.”

In the late 1980s, as a graduate student at Harvard, where I served as a teaching fellow in a course on Weimar and Nazi Germany, I used to cite a postwar observation, made by Hans Frank in Nuremberg, that underscored the tenuous nature of Hitler’s political career. “The Führer was a man who was possible in Germany only at that very moment,” the Nazi legal strategist recalled. “He came at exactly this terrible transitory period when the monarchy had gone and the republic was not yet secure.” Had Hitler’s predecessor in the chancellery, Kurt von Schleicher, remained in office another six months, or had German President Paul von Hindenburg exercised his constitutional powers more judiciously, or had a faction of moderate conservative Reichstag delegates cast their votes differently, then history may well have taken a very different turn. My most recent book, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, ends at the moment the story this essay tells begins. Both Hitler’s ascendancy to chancellor and his smashing of the constitutional guardrails once he got there, I have come to realize, are stories of political contingency rather than historical inevitability.

Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of the country’s first democratic republic came almost as much as a surprise to Hitler as it did to the rest of the country. After a vertiginous three-year political ascent, Hitler had taken a shellacking in the November 1932 elections, shedding 2 million votes and 34 Reichstag seats, almost half of them to Hugenberg’s German Nationalists. By December 1932, Hitler’s movement was bankrupt financially, politically, ideologically. Hitler told several close associates that he was contemplating suicide.

But a series of backroom deals that included the shock weekend dismissal of Chancellor Schleicher in late January 1933 hurtled Hitler into the chancellery. Schleicher would later remember Hitler telling him that “it was astonishing in his life that he was always rescued just when he himself had given up all hope.”

[Thomas Weber: Hitler would have been astonished]

The eleventh-hour appointment came at a steep political price. Hitler had left several of his most loyal lieutenants as political roadkill on this unexpected fast lane to power. Worse, he found himself with a cabinet handpicked by a political enemy, former Chancellor Franz von Papen, whose government Hitler had helped topple and who now served as Hitler’s vice chancellor. Worst of all, Hitler was hostage to Hugenberg, who commanded 51 Reichstag votes along with the power to make or break Hitler’s chancellorship. He nearly broke it.

As President Hindenburg waited to receive Hitler on that Monday morning in January 1933, Hugenberg clashed with Hitler over the issue of new Reichstag elections. Hugenberg’s position: “Nein! Nein! Nein!” While Hitler and Hugenberg argued in the foyer outside the president’s office, Hindenburg, a military hero of World War I who had served as the German president since 1925, grew impatient. According to Otto Meissner, the president’s chief of staff, had the Hitler-Hugenberg squabble lasted another few minutes, Hindenburg would have left. Had this occurred, the awkward coalition cobbled together by Papen in the previous 48 hours would have collapsed. There would have been no Hitler chancellorship, no Third Reich.

In the event, Hitler was given a paltry two cabinet posts to fill—and none of the most important ones pertaining to the economy, foreign policy, or the military. Hitler chose Wilhelm Frick as minister of the interior and Hermann Göring as minister without portfolio. But with his unerring instinct for detecting the weaknesses in structures and processes, Hitler put his two ministers to work targeting the Weimar Republic’s key democratic pillars: free speech, due process, public referendum, and states’ rights.

Frick had responsibility over the republic’s federated system, as well as over the country’s electoral system and over the press. Frick was the first minister to reveal the plans of Hitler’s government: “We will present an enabling law to the Reichstag that in accordance with the constitution will dissolve the Reich government,” Frick told the press, explaining that Hitler’s ambitious plans for the country required extreme measures, a position Hitler underscored in his first national radio address on February 1. “The national government will therefore regard it as its first and supreme task to restore to the German people unity of mind and will,” Hitler said. “It will preserve and defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests.”

Frick was also charged with suppressing the opposition press and centralizing power in Berlin. While Frick was undermining states’ rights and imposing bans on left-wing newspapers—including the Communist daily The Red Banner and the Social Democratic Forward—Hitler also appointed Göring as acting state interior minister of Prussia, the federated state that represented two-thirds of German territory. Göring was tasked with purging the Prussian state police, the largest security force in the country after the army, and a bastion of Social Democratic sentiment.

Rudolf Diels was the head of Prussia’s political police. One day in early February, Diels was sitting in his office, at 76 Unter den Linden, when Göring knocked at his door and told him in no uncertain terms that it was time to clear house. “I want nothing to do with these scoundrels who are sitting around here in this place,” Göring said.

A Schiesserlass, or “shooting decree,” followed. This permitted the state police to shoot on sight without fearing consequences. “I cannot rely on police to go after the red mob if they have to worry about facing disciplinary action when they are simply doing their job,” Göring explained. He accorded them his personal backing to shoot with impunity. “When they shoot, it is me shooting,” Göring said. “When someone is lying there dead, it is I who shot them.”

Göring also designated the Nazi storm troopers as Hilfspolizei, or “deputy police,” compelling the state to provide the brownshirt thugs with sidearms and empowering them with police authority in their street battles. Diels later noted that this—manipulating the law to serve his ends and legitimizing the violence and excesses of tens of thousands of brownshirts—was a “well-tested Hitler tactic.”

As Hitler scrambled to secure power and crush the opposition, rumors circulated of his government’s imminent demise. One rumor held that Schleicher, the most recently deposed chancellor, was planning a military coup. Another said that Hitler was a puppet of Papen and a backwoods Austrian boy in the unwitting service of German aristocrats. Still others alleged that Hitler was merely a brownshirt strawman for Hugenberg and a conspiracy of industrialists who intended to dismantle worker protections for the sake of higher profits. (The industrialist Otto Wolff was said to have “cashed in” on his financing of Hitler’s movement.) Yet another rumor had it that Hitler was merely managing a placeholder government while President Hindenburg, a monarchist at heart, prepared for the return of the Kaiser.

There was little truth to any of this, but Hitler did have to confront the political reality of making good on his campaign promises to frustrated German voters in advance of the March Reichstag elections. The Red Banner published a list of Hitler’s campaign promises to workers, and the Center Party publicly demanded assurances that Hitler would support the agricultural sector, fight inflation, avoid “financial-political experiments,” and adhere to the Weimar constitution. At the same time, the dismay among right-wing supporters who had applauded Hitler’s earlier demand for dictatorial power and refusal to enter into a coalition was distilled in the pithy observation “No Third Reich, not even 2½.”

On February 18, the center-left newspaper Vossische Zeitung wrote that despite Hitler’s campaign promises and political posturing, nothing had changed for the average German. If anything, things had gotten worse. Hitler’s promise of doubling tariffs on grain imports had gotten tangled in complexities and contractual obligations. Hugenberg informed Hitler during a cabinet meeting that the “catastrophic economic conditions” were threatening the very “existence of the country.” “In the end,” Vossische Zeitung predicted, “the survival of the new government will rely not on words but on the economic conditions.” For all Hitler’s talk of a thousand-year Reich, there was no certainty his government would last the month.

Over the eight months before appointing Hitler as chancellor, Hindenberg had dispatched three others—Heinrich Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher—from the role, exercising his constitutional authority embedded in Article 53. And his disdain for Hitler was common knowledge. The previous August, he had declared publicly that, “for the sake of God, my conscience, and the country,” he would never appoint Hitler as chancellor. Privately, Hindenburg had quipped that if he were to appoint Hitler to any position, it would be as postmaster general, “so he can lick me from behind on my stamps.” In January, Hindenburg finally agreed to appoint Hitler, but with great reluctance—and on the condition that he never be left alone in a room with his new chancellor. By late February, the question on everyone’s mind was, as Forward put it, how much longer would the aging field marshal put up with his Bohemian corporal?

That Forward article appeared on Saturday morning, February 25, under the headline “How Long?” Two days later, on Monday evening, shortly before 9 p.m., the Reichstag erupted in flames, sheafs of fire collapsing the glass dome of the plenary hall and illuminating the night sky over Berlin. Witnesses recall seeing the fire from villages 40 miles away. The image of the seat of German parliamentary democracy going up in flames sent a collective shock across the country. The Communists blamed the National Socialists. The National Socialists blamed the Communists. A 23-year-old Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught in flagrante, but the Berlin fire chief, Walter Gempp, who supervised the firefighting operation, saw evidence of potential Nazi involvement.

[From the May 1944 issue: What is German?]

When Hitler convened his cabinet to discuss the crisis the next morning, he declared that the fire was clearly part of a Communist coup attempt. Göring detailed Communist plans for further arson attacks on public buildings, as well as for the poisoning of public kitchens and the kidnapping of the children and wives of prominent officials. Interior Minister Frick presented a draft decree suspending civil liberties, permitting searches and seizures, and curbing states’ rights during a national emergency.

Papen expressed concern that the proposed draft “could meet with resistance,” especially from “southern states,” by which he meant Bavaria, which was second only to Prussia in size and power. Perhaps, Papen suggested, the proposed measures should be discussed with state governments to assure “an amicable agreement,” otherwise the measures could be seen as the usurpation of states’ rights. Ultimately, only one word was added to suggest contingencies for suspending a state’s rights. Hindenburg signed the decree into law that afternoon.

Put into effect just a week before the March elections, the emergency decree gave Hitler tremendous power to intimidate—and imprison—the political opposition. The Communist Party was banned (as Hitler had wanted since his first cabinet meeting), and members of the opposition press were arrested, their newspapers shut down. Göring had already been doing this for the past month, but the courts had invariably ordered the release of detained people. With the decree in effect, the courts could not intervene. Thousands of Communists and Social Democrats were rounded up.

On Sunday morning, March 5, one week after the Reichstag fire, German voters went to the polls. “No stranger election has perhaps ever been held in a civilized country,” Frederick Birchall wrote that day in The New York Times. Birchall expressed his dismay at the apparent willingness of Germans to submit to authoritarian rule when they had the opportunity for a democratic alternative. “In any American or Anglo-Saxon community the response would be immediate and overwhelming,” he wrote.

More than 40 million Germans went to the polls, which was more than 2 million more than in any previous election, representing nearly 89 percent of the registered voters—a stunning demonstration of democratic engagement. “Not since the German Reichstag was founded in 1871 has there been such a high voter turnout,” Vossische Zeitung reported. Most of those 2 million new votes went to the Nazis. “The enormous voting reserves almost entirely benefited the National Socialists,” Vossische Zeitung reported.

Although the National Socialists fell short of Hitler’s promised 51 percent, managing only 44 percent of the electorate—despite massive suppression, the Social Democrats lost just a single Reichstag seat—the banning of the Communist Party positioned Hitler to form a coalition with the two-thirds Reichstag majority necessary to pass the empowering law.

The next day, the National Socialists stormed state-government offices across the country. Swastika banners were hung from public buildings. Opposition politicians fled for their lives. Otto Wels, the Social Democratic leader, departed for Switzerland. So did Heinrich Held, the minister-president of Bavaria. Tens of thousands of political opponents were taken into Schutzhaft (“protective custody”), a form of detention in which an individual could be held without cause indefinitely.

Hindenburg remained silent. He did not call his new chancellor to account for the violent public excesses against Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews. He did not exercise his Article 53 powers. Instead, he signed a decree permitting the National Socialists’ swastika banner to be flown beside the national colors. He acceded to Hitler’s request to create a new cabinet position, minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, a role promptly filled by Joseph Goebbels. “What good fortune for all of us to know that this towering old man is with us,” Goebbels wrote of Hindenburg in his diary, “and what a change of fate that we are now moving on the same path together.”

A week later, Hindenburg’s embrace of Hitler was on full public display. He appeared in military regalia in the company of his chancellor, who was wearing a dark suit and long overcoat, at a ceremony in Potsdam. The former field marshal and the Bohemian corporal shook hands. Hitler bowed in putative deference. The “Day of Potsdam” signaled the end of any hope for an Article 53 solution to the Hitler chancellorship.

That same Tuesday, March 21, an Article 48 decree was issued amnestying National Socialists convicted of crimes, including murder, perpetrated “in the battle for national renewal.” Men convicted of treason were now national heroes. The first concentration camp was opened that afternoon, in an old brewery near the town center of Oranienburg, just north of Berlin. The following day, the first group of detainees arrived at another concentration camp, in an abandoned munition plant outside the Bavarian town of Dachau.

Plans for legislation excluding Jews from the legal and medical professions, as well as from government offices, were under way, though Hitler’s promise for the mass deportation of the country’s 100,000 Ostjuden, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was proving to be more complicated. Many had acquired German citizenship and were gainfully employed. As fear of deportation rose, a run on local banks caused other banks and businesses to panic. Accounts of Jewish depositors were frozen until, as one official explained, “they had settled their obligations with German business men.” Hermann Göring, now president of the newly elected Reichstag, sought to calm matters, assuring Germany’s Jewish citizens that they retained the same “protection of law for person and property” as every other German citizen. He then berated the international community: Foreigners were not to interfere with the domestic affairs of the country. Germany would do with its citizens whatever it deemed appropriate.

Adolf Hitler's address to the Reichstag on March 23, 1933, at the Kroll Opera House. On this day, a majority of the delegates voted to eliminate almost all constitutional restraints on Hitler’s government. (Ullstein Bild / Getty)

On Thursday, March 23, the Reichstag delegates assembled in the Kroll Opera House, just opposite the charred ruins of the Reichstag. The following Monday, the traditional Reich eagle had been removed and replaced with an enormous Nazi eagle, dramatically backlit with wings spread wide and a swastika in its talons. Hitler, dressed now in a brown stormtrooper uniform with a swastika armband, arrived to pitch his proposed enabling law, now formally titled the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich.” At 4:20 p.m., he stepped up to the podium. Appearing uncharacteristically ill at ease, he shuffled a sheaf of pages before beginning to read haltingly from a prepared text. Only gradually did he assume his usual animated rhetorical style. He enumerated the failings of the Weimar Republic, then outlined his plans for the four-year tenure of his proposed enabling law, which included restoring German dignity and military parity abroad as well as economic and social stability at home. “Treason toward our nation and our people shall in the future be stamped out with ruthless barbarity,” Hitler vowed.

[Read: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

The Reichstag recessed to deliberate on the act. When the delegates reconvened at 6:15 that evening, the floor was given to Otto Wels, the Social Democratic leader, who had returned from his Swiss exile, despite fears for his personal safety, to challenge Hitler in person. As Wels began to speak, Hitler made a move to rise. Papen touched Hitler’s wrist to keep him in check.

“In this historic hour, we German Social Democrats solemnly pledge ourselves to the principles of humanity and justice, of freedom and socialism,” Wels said. He chided Hitler for seeking to undermine the Weimar Republic, and for the hatred and divisiveness he had sowed. Regardless of the evils Hitler intended to visit on the country, Wels declared, the republic’s founding democratic values would endure. “No enabling act gives you the power to destroy ideas that are eternal and indestructible,” he said.

Hitler rose. “The nice theories that you, Herr Delegate, just proclaimed are words that have come a bit too late for world history,” he began. He dismissed allegations that he posed any kind of threat to the German people. He reminded Wels that the Social Democrats had had 13 years to address the issues that really mattered to the German people—employment, stability, dignity. “Where was this battle during the time you had the power in your hand?” Hitler asked. The National Socialist delegates, along with observers in the galleries, cheered. The rest of the delegates remained still. A series of them rose to state both their concerns and positions on the proposed enabling law.

The Centrists, as well as the representatives of the Bavarian People’s Party, said they were willing to vote yes despite reservations “that in normal times could scarcely have been overcome.” Similarly, Reinhold Maier, the leader of the German State Party, expressed concern about what would happen to judicial independence, due process, freedom of the press, and equal rights for all citizens under the law, and stated that he had “serious reservations” about according Hitler dictatorial powers. But then he announced that his party, too, was voting in favor of the law, eliciting laughter from the floor.

Shortly before 8 o’clock that evening, the voting was completed. The 94 Social Democrat delegates who were in attendance cast their votes against the law. (Among the Social Democrats was the former interior minister of Prussia, Carl Severing, who had been arrested earlier in the day as he was about to enter the Reichstag but was released temporarily in order to cast his vote.) The remaining Reichstag delegates, 441 in all, voted in favor of the new law, delivering Hitler a four-fifths majority, more than enough to put the enabling law into effect without amendment or restriction. The next morning, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Sackett sent a telegram to the State Department: “On the basis of this law the Hitler Cabinet can reconstruct the entire system of government as it eliminates practically all constitutional restraints.”

Joseph Goebbels, who was present that day as a National Socialist Reichstag delegate, would later marvel that the National Socialists had succeeded in dismantling a federated constitutional republic entirely through constitutional means. Seven years earlier, in 1926, after being elected to the Reichstag as one the first 12 National Socialist delegates, Goebbels had been similarly struck: He was surprised to discover that he and these 11 other men (including Hermann Göring and Hans Frank), seated in a single row on the periphery of a plenary hall in their brown uniforms with swastika armbands, had—even as self-declared enemies of the Weimar Republic—been accorded free first-class train travel and subsidized meals, along with the capacity to disrupt, obstruct, and paralyze democratic structures and processes at will. “The big joke on democracy,” he observed, “is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.”

When all the votes in November’s race for North Carolina’s state supreme court were counted, the incumbent, Allison Riggs, had won more. The question is whether that will be enough for her to take office.

The race began as a heated yet normal battle over political control for a key judgeship. But the challenger, Jefferson Griffin, is asking the state’s courts to throw out about 60,000 ballots and hand him victory. This has transformed the contest into something more fundamental: a test of democracy’s basic mechanics. Now it’s up to the state’s Republican-led supreme court to decide whether to side with voters or with a fellow Republican judge.

Yesterday, the court issued an order staying the certification of Riggs’s election while it considers Griffin’s petition. (Riggs, a Democrat, recused herself; the court’s other Democrat dissented.) Certification had been scheduled for Friday.

Riggs didn’t win the election by much: She garnered just a few hundred votes more than Griffin, who sits on the state’s court of appeals. The race was a major focus for both parties; in 2022, the GOP gained control of the state supreme court, which has been involved in many high-profile political decisions. On Election Night, Riggs trailed by thousands of votes, but as absentee and provisional ballots were counted, she ended up with a lead of 625 votes out of more than 5.5 million.

[Read: We’re entering an era of ‘total politics’]

Griffin requested a machine recount, in which ballots are run through tabulators once more. That process actually expanded Riggs’s lead to 734 votes. Griffin then requested a second recount, in which officials take a random sample of ballots and examine them by hand, comparing their tally to the machine count. If clear discrepancies appear, a candidate can request a full, statewide hand recount; the state board of elections concluded no such evidence existed.

By this point, Republican attempts to keep contesting the race had started to appear desperate. In 2020, when sitting Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, a Democrat, requested recounts in a race she lost by 401 votes, Republicans ridiculed her as a sore loser wasting her dignity and everyone else’s time. (Beasley eventually conceded.) Yet now Griffin was going further. He filed a request with the state board to throw out some 60,000 votes, arguing the voters were not properly registered.

The largest group of registrations that Griffin has challenged are North Carolina residents whose voter registrations don’t include driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers. This is now required by law, but these voters registered using old forms that didn’t include the requirement. (They were not required to re-register.) The second set is overseas residents who have not lived in North Carolina, such as the adult children of North Carolinians who live abroad. A third is overseas voters who didn’t submit a photo identification with their ballot.

[Read: We drew congressional maps for partisan advantage. That was the point.]

The first is the most notable tranche. These voters likely understood themselves to be legally registered, and elections officials had concluded they were registered. Prior to the election, the Republican National Committee challenged 225,000 registrations on the same basis, but a federal judge dismissed the case. The state board also concluded that the registrations were valid, and said that fraud was virtually impossible. For one thing, voters are required to show photo ID before voting, in accordance with a state law that went into effect this year. (The group includes both of Riggs’s parents, as well as a politics editor at WUNC, a public-radio station in Chapel Hill.)

Now that the election has been completed and the votes have been counted, Griffin wants these votes to be thrown out after the fact. It’s exceedingly hard to justify this as anything other than pure partisan power politics. Doing such a thing would violate not only precedent, but any basic sense of fairness. As ProPublica’s Doug Bock Clark reported, the theory that Griffin is using was considered and rejected earlier this year by election deniers who deemed it too extreme.

The state board of elections, which has a 3–2 Democratic majority, rejected all three arguments, and pointed out that they should have been made far earlier. Griffin then appealed the decision directly to the state supreme court. The state board had the move shifted to federal court, but on Monday, the federal judge Richard Myers, a Trump appointee, sent the matter back to the supreme court, deeming it a state matter. In their order yesterday, the state supreme court justices set a schedule for briefing later this month.

[Read: The Supreme Court finds North Carolina's racial gerrymandering unconstitutional]

North Carolina is not new to vicious election fights. (Riggs rose to prominence as a progressive attorney focused on voting-rights cases.) In 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court demolished key elements of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans passed a sweeping law restricting voting. A federal judge eventually struck the law down as targeting “African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The state has also seen decades of battles over redistricting; after previous maps were struck down as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, the GOP instead pursued an aggressively partisan map. In the previous Congress, both Democrats and Republicans from North Carolina held seven seats; under a new GOP-drawn map, Republicans won 10 seats to Democrats’ four in November.

Even so, the reaction to Griffin’s attempted maneuvers has been sharp, and not only on the left. In a recent article, the conservative writer and former GOP operative Andrew Dunn wrote that while he had often criticized Democrats’ “dishonest nonsense” about Republicans in the past, he could not do so now.  

“If the Supreme Court sides with Griffin, the fallout will be immediate and brutal,” he wrote. “This isn’t just bad optics; it’s potentially a credibility-shattering disaster for the court, the party, and conservatism in North Carolina. Overnight, this becomes a national story about Republicans ‘stealing’ a Supreme Court seat. The allegation would be impossible to defend against.”

Dunn is right. If the court ultimately sides with Griffin and throws the votes out, it will be a plain message that the Republican majority is more interested in grabbing power by any means available and adding an amenable colleague than in letting voters have a say. Faith in its objectivity has already been shaken by a pair of 2023 decisions, in which the new Republican majority reversed decisions about gerrymandering and the voter-ID law that had been made by the prior court. (The GOP-led state legislature also stripped powers from incoming Democratic Governor Josh Stein late last year, passing the changes just before Democrats broke a veto-proof supermajority. Stein has challenged the moves in court.)

[Read: North Carolina's deliberate disenfranchisement of black voters]

What happens in the North Carolina Supreme Court race is worth watching for voters around the country for reasons other than moral outrage. For the past 15 years, the Old North State has been an early indicator for national trends, including the 2013 voting law and the battles over partisan gerrymandering. The independent state legislature theory, floated by Trump allies as a way to overturn the 2020 presidential election, first reached the U.S. Supreme Court via a North Carolina case. Republican legal challenges to the 2016 election for governor were a template for Trump’s challenges to the 2020 presidential election. As goes North Carolina, so goes the nation.