On June 26, 1940, the head of Texaco, a man named Torkild Rieber, arranged a dinner for some corporate titans at the Waldorf Astoria. Edsel Ford was reportedly among the attendees. The guest of honor was a certain Gerhard Westrick, a German national who was in America to establish relationships between U.S. corporations and Nazi Germany. The reason for the dinner? To celebrate—yes, celebrate—the fall of France.
I wouldn’t say that pro-fascist sentiment dominated the American corporate landscape of 1940. But if the heads of Texaco and Ford were toasting Adolf Hitler the day after he destroyed the French Republic, then that sentiment obviously reached up to its highest levels. Other forces in American society were less overtly pro-Nazi, but positioned themselves as being on Germany’s side against France and England—notably the America First Committee, headed by the chairman of Sears Roebuck and represented at public events by the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. Finally, among the American public, open pro-Nazi sentiment was rare, but clear majorities, according to polls of the day, opposed U.S. involvement in Europe’s war.
In the face of all this, what did President Roosevelt do? He fought back. He put his country firmly on the anti-fascist side. In the light of recent events, one can’t help but wonder if Donald Trump, had he been president in 1940, would have done the same.
The lazy answer to the question is: Yes, of course he would have; after all, Germany declared war on the United States after Pearl Harbor, and once Germany did that, any president would have fought the Nazis.
That’s true as far as it goes. But the crucial period here was before Pearl Harbor, as Hitler was rampaging his way across western Europe—and courting the favor of influential Americans. It was during this period that FDR steadily steered the United States firmly toward the side of democracy, eventually overcoming political headwinds at home to help prevent the fall of Britain and prepare the U.S. for the war footing it would need to adopt after December 7, 1941.
Let’s quickly review some steps he took, because they reveal the actions of a president aware of his historical moment and committed to the course of action that moment demanded. In 1939, he secured passage of an amendment to the earlier Neutrality Acts of the 1930s that ended the blanket munitions embargo those earlier acts imposed. He increased the defense budget. He signed a law in July 1940 that vastly expanded the size of the Navy. During the Battle of Britain, he directed the U.S. to take up development of technology that had originated in the U.K. that led to great advances in radar. In December 1940, he declared the U.S. the “arsenal of democracy.”
That declaration was quickly followed by the crowning act, the passage of the Lend-Lease bill, which provided England—and other anti-fascist countries, including the Soviet Union—with food, oil, and war materiel for free. Yes, that’s right: free. A total of around $50 billion was spent on this during the war, which would be more than $1 trillion today.
Roosevelt faced strong opposition to all this, mostly from isolationist Republicans. Democrats in both houses of Congress backed the bill with large majorities. In the Senate, 17 Republicans voted against, while 10 supported; in the House, the GOP vote against Lend-Lease was a whopping 135–24.
There were, in sum, two clear sides. One side that saw plainly that the world would have to unite to defeat fascism, and another side that either saw fascism as someone else’s problem or outright embraced it as the future destiny of a world enfeebled by this antique obsession with “democracy” and “rights.”
Now, let’s pause to consider which side in this debate the United States would have been on if Trump had been president instead of Roosevelt.
Had enough time to decide?
Ukraine is an imperfect democracy, and Volodymyr Zelenskiy is a very imperfect democrat. He shut down opposition media after Russia invaded. He and the Parliament delayed elections. There are some practical reasons for this—for example, voters in the war-torn east could be disenfranchised compared to those in the comparatively unscarred west. Still, no one is mistaking Zelenskiy for Nelson Mandela.
But two facts tower over the rest. First, Zelenskiy is a democratically elected president. He defeated the incumbent in 2019 by a thumping 73–24 percent margin. Second, Russia invaded Ukraine. Period and end of story.
Putin’s apologists can make all the excuses for him they want. NATO expansion eastward was always, to me, a debatable proposition. But Russia didn’t want a debate. And nothing excuses an all-out invasion aimed directly at a country’s capital city (remember those endless lines of tanks at the beginning of the war, sights set on Kyiv?).
Putin is in an important sense the leader of the unfree world. One might hand that dubious crown to Xi Jinping; certainly, he has more economic and military power than Putin. But Putin has paraded his anti-freedom agenda in a way even Xi has not: his frequent comments about Western decadence, his positioning of Russia as Christian civilization’s last best hope against the relativists, his detentions of enemies of the state, and all those people accidentally falling out of windows.
That’s the side the United States has chosen to take.
Is 2025 like 1940? Not quite: Putin’s expansionist dreams are at least limited to what he calls the “near abroad”—the former republics of the USSR. So the potential consequences of taking Putin’s side aren’t as far-reaching. Nevertheless, the moral choice for democratic countries is exactly the same. Which side are we on?
Franklin Roosevelt knew clearly. So does Donald Trump. But tragically, he’s chosen the other side. It’s not the side most Americans wish to be on. But it is the side on which he, his lackeys, his media-propaganda outlets, and the invertebrates in his party have placed us, in this country that is becoming, more quickly than any of us would have dared imagine, the land of the unfree.
