Germany comparisons have their merit, but I'd also caution against viewing them as identical trajectories due to some shared characteristics. Though I'm sure there are those Yankees who'd like to take it in a Nazi-Germany-like direction, the conditions look to me more like it'd reach civil war before any such unified leadership and base of support. Though you could argue some of Nazi-like stuff is already happening (e.g. with ICE), the US being systemically racist is nothing new.

I'm inclined to argue that the US is more like a precursor to Nazi Germany than it is a country that imitates it; that the US has always been similar to Nazi Germany but it couched it in white supremacy in a way that makes its horrors less stark and obvious to people who are considered white. It can still get worse, I don't deny this at all, but the way I'd characterize it in this moment is that the US is several different grifts going on at the same time (grifts like: AI is going to save us / kill us, we're strong enough and organized enough to do "America first" renewal of white supremacy and empire, we can do whatever we want). And then the reality underneath these grifts is stuff like: AI as inevitable and all-encompassing is a facade to cover up the increasingly fake economy and jobs market, attempts to renew white supremacy and empire are hastening decline, and the range of what the empire can do is increasingly shrinking to intimidation followed by taking performative concessions if they can't get anything else.

This is not to say there isn't real power still behind the posturing, but that the power does not match up to the posturing anymore and so the posturing becomes a means of trying to scare people into believing the power is still what it once was. You can see similar to this in how some US companies will use better marketing as a substitute for being able to provide satisfactory products/services. So if you think of the empire as like a corporation, and it arguably is in many ways, the marketing department is doing overtime (figuratively speaking - I don't know what their hours are) to compensate for the empire not being able to do what it once could. Shock and awe is common, as is attempts to secure spectacular yet largely meaningless wins.

We need to be able to investigate in a way that can see past the marketing veil to the nitty gritty of what the empire is actually capable of doing and what it is doing beyond impressions gathered through headlines (which can be misleading and can be part of the marketing department). It is a bad situation, I'm with you on that, but it also may be, in some ways, bad in different ways than its appearances would suggest. For example, I tend to be less concerned about well organized death camps in the style of Nazi Germany and more concerned about infrastructure collapse that is hard to reverse, of the kind that could send the country into an "every grifter for themself" death spiral. Already, the Trump admin's chipping away at federal organization is setting the stage for crises to amass. Whether it is extreme weather events (made more frequent and more destructive) without resources to properly respond to them; spread of diseases that are harder to control the spread of / respond to as needed; food safety issues that are harder to track and adjust to, along with brittle "just in time" logistics; worsening fuel costs and the knockoff effects of it due to the quagmire that is the empire trying to make Iran kneel, along with the already-existing damage done to supply chains and amount of supply and so on, that doesn't seem to have yet to fully show up but still will.

This may be one of the best times to be trying to build communist-vanguard-backed community resources to quite literally save people if/when the current system becomes unable to sustain itself.