Japan is celebrated for its exceptional levels of customer service. But the behaviour of a growing number of customers and clients leaves a lot to be desired.

The rise of the abusive consumer has prompted authorities in Tokyo to introduce the country’s first ordinance – a locally approved regulation – to protect service industry staff from kasuhara – the Japanese abbreviated form of “customer harassment”.

While the Tokyo ordinance, which will go into effect in April, does not carry penalties, experts hope the move will highlight a growing social problem and, perhaps, encourage people to think twice before taking out their frustrations on staff.

A union survey this year found that almost one in two workers in the service sector – which accounts for 75% of employees in Japan – had been subjected to customer meltdowns, ranging from verbal abuse and excessive demands to violence and doxing on social media.

In one instance, an assistant manager at a supermarket in Tokyo received a call from a shopper claiming that the tofu he had bought at the store had gone off, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. When the employee visited the shopper’s home to check, he found that the tofu – a product with a short shelf life – had been bought a fortnight earlier.

Not wanting to alienate the shopper, the employee tried to remain diplomatic but was then ordered by the customer to prostrate himself and apologise.

Outbreaks of rage have crept into local government offices, with one female employee at a Tokyo ward office recounting how an elderly resident accused her of wishing she would die and invited her to drop dead instead.

“It seems that people feel they can say whatever they want when dealing with public servants because they are paying tax,” the official told the Asahi. “ I wish they could understand that employees are human beings too.”

The labour ministry is reportedly considering tightening the law further to address kasuhara across a wide range of sectors, including public transport, restaurants and call centres.

The Tokyo metropolitan assembly approved the ordinance last week under pressure from unions and industry representatives, which warned that the scourge of the disgruntled customer was spreading to other parts of the country.

Three other prefectures are considering similar measures, while some municipalities and firms now give employees the option of displaying only their given names on their ID badges. A Tokyo department store this year said it would ban troublesome customers and call the police in serious cases, while other firms, including Nintendo, have said they will not engage with abusive people.

The ordinance states that “no person shall engage in customer harassment anywhere” and that “society as a whole should try to prevent abuse”, but it recognises the value to businesses of legitimate feedback.

Writing on the Nippon.com website, Hiromi Ikeuchi, a professor of sociology at Kansai University, attributed the rise of kasuhara to several factors, including the tendency to regard customers as “gods” in the battle to stay profitable in an increasingly tough business environment – an approach that has shifted the power balance from firms to their customers.

“As Japanese society as a whole became more consumer-oriented, the tables were turned, giving some consumers an unconscious bias that has caused them to expect to be treated like gods, as well as having certain expectations of staff,” Ikeuchi wrote.

Kasuhara is one of several forms of harassment Japan has been forced to confront in recent years, along with matahara (maternity harassment), pawahara (power harassment) and jenhara (gender harassment).

The destruction of global forests increased in 2023, and is higher than when 140 countries promised three years ago to halt deforestation by the end of the decade, an analysis shows.

The rising demolition of the forests puts ambitions to halt the climate crisis and stem the huge worldwide losses of wildlife even further from reach, the researchers warn.

Almost 6.4m hectares (16m acres) of forest were razed in 2023, according to the report. Even more forest – 62.6m ha – was degraded as road building, logging and forest fires took their toll. There were spikes in deforestation in Indonesia and Bolivia, driven by political changes and continued demand for commodities including beef, soy, palm oil, paper and nickel in rich countries.

The researchers said attempts at voluntary cuts on deforestation were not working and strong regulation and more funding for forest protection were needed.

The report highlighted a bright spot in the Brazilian Amazon, where President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s new government cut deforestation by 62% in its first year.

“The bottom line is that, globally, deforestation has gotten worse, not better, since the beginning of the decade,” said Ivan Palmegiani, a consultant at the research group Climate Focus and lead author of the report.

“We’re only six years away from a critical global deadline to end deforestation, and forests continue to be chopped down, degraded, and set ablaze at alarming rates,” he said. “Righting the course is possible if all countries make it a priority, and especially if industrialised countries seriously reconsider their excessive consumption levels and support forest countries.”

Erin D Matson, a senior consultant at Climate Focus and co-author of the report, said: “When the right conditions are in place, countries see major progress. The next year, if economic or political conditions change, forest loss can come roaring back. We’re seeing this effect in the spiking deforestation in Indonesia and Bolivia. Ultimately, to meet global forest protection targets, we must make forest protection immune to political and economic whims.”

Most countries backed the 2030 zero deforestation pledge at the UN Cop26 climate summit in 2021. The 2024 forest declaration assessment, produced by a coalition of research and civil society organisations, assessed progress towards the goal using a baseline of the average deforestation between 2018 and 2020. It found progress was significantly off track, with the level of deforestation in 2023 almost 50% higher than steady progress towards zero would require.

Matson said: “Indonesia’s deforestation alone spiked by 57% in one year. This was in large part attributable to surging global demand for things like paper and mined metals like nickel.

“But it’s also clear that the Indonesian government took its foot off the gas. It experienced the steepest drop in deforestation of any tropical country from 2015-17 and 2020-22, so we have to hope that this setback is only temporary.” In 2023, Indonesia produced half the world’s nickel, a metal used in many green technologies.

“Brazil gives us an example of positive progress [in the Amazon] but deforestation in the Cerrado [tropical savanna] increased 68% year over year,” she said.

The country has also been ravaged by forest fires that are being made more likely and intense by the climate crisis. The report found that about 45m ha have burned in the past five years.

Other countries that made progress towards the 2030 deforestation target included Australia, Colombia, Paraguay, Venezuela and Vietnam. Outside the tropics, temperate forests in North America and Latin America recorded the greatest absolute levels of deforestation.

The researchers said funding for forest protection, strengthening the land rights of Indigenous people and reducing demand for commodities produced via deforestation were needed.

The EU has proposed ambitious regulations that would ban the sales of products linked to deforestation, such as coffee, chocolate, leather and furniture. However, on 3 October, the European Commission proposed a one-year delay “to phase in the system” after protests from countries including Australia, Brazil, Indonesia and Ivory Coast.

Matson said: “This pushback is largely driven by political pressures, and it’s a shame. We can’t rely on voluntary efforts – they have made very little progress over the last decade.”

An experienced vet has been reprimanded for taking home a patient’s cat that she was told to euthanise and charging nearly £500 for the animal’s care in Suffolk.

Janine Parody decided against putting down the ill eight-month-old feline named Shadow in 2021 and, contrary to the owner’s wishes, treated him.

The vet, who had an “exceptional” reputation, told a disciplinary tribunal that she had put down three or four animals that morning and could not face euthanising another.

Parody, who worked at a surgery in Framlingham, Suffolk, said she had deemed the pet to be “happy” and curable.

She sedated the male cat and castrated it without obtaining consent from the owner, before replacing its microchip and taking it home, the tribunal heard.

The owner told the hearing that she “grieved for his little soul” before she was eventually told the truth and was asked to pay £480 for the treatment.

Referring to Shadow, Parody told the tribunal: “The drug Pentoject had already been drawn up. Upon entering the room I was greeted by a sweet young cat, which appeared healthy apart from his skin condition.

“I had already done back-to-back euthanasias that morning … and upon seeing a happy young cat, I just could not face another euthanasia.”

Parody added that despite having been a vet for 10 years, “euthanasias are never easy”.

A Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons tribunal reprimanded the vet for “disgraceful” professional conduct.

It ruled she had made a “series of very poor decisions”, although it recognised that at the time the vet was working under “extraordinarily stressful circumstances” because of the pandemic.

Parody, who has subsequently moved to a practice in Hereford, was described by colleagues at Castle Veterinary Group as an “exceptional vet” who was “very fair”.

In December 2021, a woman who regularly rescued cats and who was referred to at the tribunal only as SM took ownership of Shadow.

The owner decided to have him put down as he was “very sick” with methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacteria which causes lesions on the skin.

SM consulted other vets and Shadow was scheduled to be put down by Parody five days before Christmas.

Parody consulted a dermatologist after a colleague raised a question over whether cats with MRSA could be treated. Two days later, she shaved Shadow, castrated him and directed a colleague to remove his microchip.

The owner was eventually told Shadow had not been put down and was “shocked and elated”. SM was told she would have to pay £480 to have it returned and she accepted.

Two months later, Shadow’s condition deteriorated and he was put down. Parody resigned and an investigation was launched.

The panel noted that owing to confused communications the vet had wrongly believed the cat did not have an owner, but it said in its ruling that she “should be under no illusion of how serious it is to have a finding of disgraceful conduct in a professional respect made against her”.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is reportedly refusing calls about storm recovery from Kamala Harris, more than a week after Hurricane Helene hit the state and two days before intensifying Hurricane Milton is expected to hit the south-west of the state.

Citing a DeSantis aide, NBC News reported on Monday that the Republican governor was dodging the Democratic presidential nominee’s calls because they “seemed political”.

“Kamala was trying to reach out, and we didn’t answer,” the DeSantis aide told the outlet. DeSantis does not appear to have spoken to Joe Biden, either, to the aide’s knowledge.

The Florida governor has, however, been in touch with the Fema director, Deanne Criswell.

Last week, DeSantis said Biden had called him, but he was flying at the time so could not take the call. A source familiar with the planning for Biden’s trip to north Florida to survey Helene’s damage said that the Biden team had invited DeSantis to the event but their schedules conflicted.

The response to Hurricane Helene has become an intense political issue one month before the presidential election. The White House and local Democratic leaders have appealed for an end to misinformation about the storm and the response to it.

Both Trump and Vice-President Harris have made trips to some of the affected states. Republicans have linked the disaster relief effort to immigration, including false claims that Fema had spent disaster funds on immigration relief. The White House and the agency itself have disputed that characterization.

At a White House briefing on Monday, the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, reiterated that the government would mount “a robust federal response” to the oncoming storm.

“Anything else, I would have to leave it to the governor, to his actions, to how he wants to move forward. In this, that is for him,” Jean-Pierre added.

The White House press secretary added that “misinformation, disinformation, is a problem across the board … Whether it’s the election or what we’re seeing with Hurricane Helene or with Hurricane Milton on its way.”

After Helene hit, DeSantis told reporters that the federal government should focus on North Carolina.

“Florida, we have it handled,” DeSantis said. “We have what we need … Most of the effort should be in western North Carolina right now because you still have active rescues that need to take place.”

DeSantis also sent Florida resources to North Carolina, including members of the Florida national guard and officials from several state agencies.

Far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is facing condemnation following several conspiratorial comments amid the devastation of Hurricane Helene that seemed to suggest she believed the US government can control the weather.

In a post last week shared with her 1.2 million X followers, the US House representative from Georgia wrote: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Greene does not specify to whom “they” is referring, but she has a history of promoting conspiracy theories around the federal government and other groups.

She appeared to double down on these comments with a post on Saturday, sharing a clip from a 2013 CBS News broadcast about experimental efforts to induce rain and lightning using lasers. “CBS, nine years ago, talked about lasers controlling the weather,” Greene wrote, apparently mistaking the year of the broadcast.

Greene, who is no stranger to misinformation including once raising the idea of Jewish space lasers being behind wildfire outbreaks, was met with a wave of criticism for her blatantly false statements.

The US government’s top disaster relief official condemned on Sunday false claims made about Helene and its relief efforts, stating that such conspiracy theories, including those made by Donald Trump as he seeks a second presidency, are causing fear in people who need assistance and “demoralizing” the workers who are providing assistance.

“It’s frankly ridiculous, and just plain false. This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people,” said Deanne Criswell, who leads the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people, and that’s what we’re here to do.”

Shawn Harris, who is running for Greene’s congressional seat, condemned the incumbent’s comments.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiracy theories are sickening, but she does it to distract from her failed effort to block crucial funding for Fema as Hurricane Helene was making landfall,” Harris wrote in a post on X.

Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and popular internet personality, seemed to poke fun at Greene’s comments while also factchecking her false claims.

He suggested on X that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true – but added: “I can assure you that the Hurricane Helene weather modification theory is not one of them.

“I would know, too.”

In an email to his supporters, the Republican US senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina also seemed to condemn conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene, though he did not specify the rightwing source of the theories.

“The destruction caused by Helene is incomprehensible and has left many communities in western North Carolina absolutely devastated. The last thing that the victims of Helene need right now is political posturing, finger-pointing, or conspiracy theories that only hurt the response effort,” the email stated.

In an opinion piece on Saturday by its editorial board, North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer criticized Trump because of his falsehoods over the government response to Helene, saying the state’s affected parts were “not a political football” and “not a campaign opportunity”.

Criticism of Greene’s conspiracy theories even made it to the sports world, with the tennis legend Martina Navratilova using her platform to call out not only Greene as well as Trump’s running mate in November’s election, JD Vance. Vance had praised Greene at a rally just hours after she posted her conspiracies.

“Marj is even more stupid than we thought possible,” Navratilova wrote on X. “And Vance is not stupid – he is just a cowardly sycophant. Which is actually worse.”

Greene is also facing criticism for her hypocrisy of peddling conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene while she was photographed in attendance at the University of Alabama’s home football game against the University of Georgia with Trump on 28 September. She reportedly left her state of Georgia to attend the game in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while Helene devastated communities across the state she was elected to represent.

Tim Bradley quite rightly wonders why heat pumps are so expensive in the UK (Letters, 1 October). He can’t be alone. The simple answer surely must be price gouging, partly due to the heat pump grant.

I received two quotes from the same supplier for the same house, one with a £5,000 grant and another with the new higher £7,500 grant. The first quote, shared with me on 27 Sept 2023, came to £3,700 on top of the £5,000 grant – a total of £8,700. The second, which I received on 26 August 2024, was a strangely specific £5,585.42 on top of the £7,500 grant – a total of £13,085.42. A 50% rise even when the grant increased by 50%!

I want to go green and get a heat pump, but when even with an enlarged grant prices can be double or even quadruple the cost of a new boiler, it makes absolutely no sense. Something must be done to change the market, as currently this shiny green transition is just a grubby and tarnished money grab.
Adam Halawi
Brighton, East Sussex

Donald Trump’s supporters have threatened the consultancy firm Deloitte with the loss of lucrative government contracts if he returns to the White House after the election in November because one of its employees leaked critical comments about his presidential performance made by his running mate JD Vance.

The Republican nominee’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, led the warnings of retribution after the Washington Post published correspondence that showed Vance expressing negative views about the Trump administration long after he claimed he had become a supporter. The correspondence also showed Vance forecasting – accurately – that the former president would lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Ethics experts seized on the threats to punish Deloitte for the actions of an individual employee and warned that it might be a harbinger of how a second Trump administration would use its power over the federal government.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” the senior director of ethics at the non-partisan Campaign Legal Centre, Kedric Payne, told the Washington Post. “You can’t imagine that if one employee out of thousands made a statement that offended an official, that then the government contracts would be in jeopardy.”

The Post did not name the individual to whom Vance had expressed the anti-Trump messages privately on social media but merely reported that their recipient had shared them with the paper.

However, in a post on X, Trump Jr – who was instrumental in persuading his father to install Vance as his running mate – revealed the correspondent to be a consultant working at Deloitte. He suggested that the company’s contracts with the US government should be annulled.

“An executive at @Deloitte … decided to interfere in the election & leak private convos with JD Vance to help Kamala Harris,” the former president’s son said.

“Deloitte also gets $2B in govt contracts. Maybe it’s time for the GOP to end Deloitte’s taxpayer funded gravy train?”

Trump Jr tagged the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, in his message and attached a screen shot of Deloitte’s contracts with the government and the employee’s company profile.

The post, which has received more than 2 million views and been retweeted 13,000 times, was circulated by Vance’s spokesperson, William Martin, and followed up by the rightwing news site, Breitbart. The site ran a story naming the Deloitte employee in question, focusing on his job.

Jason Miller, an advisor to Donald Trump Sr, reacted to the post by writing that the employee “FAFO”, short for “fucked around and found out”.

Trump Jr followed up his original 27 September post with another two days later, saying: “We’re not forgetting this.” That was shared by Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator for Montana, who called the matter “outrageous” and demanded that Deloitte “immediately and publicly respond to this scandal”.

Trump Jr justified his comments about the firm’s government contract in a statement to the Washington Post, saying the employee “had a right to leak the communications, Washington Post had a right to print them and … I have a right to speak my mind about where my tax dollars go”.

Vance’s messages examined by the Post – reported to have been triggered by an essay the Deloitte employee had written about the relationship between Catholicism and politics – reveal a far more negative view of Trump’s presidency as it approached the end of its term than he has previously acknowledged.

In February 2020, he wrote: “Trump has just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy).”

“I think Trump will probably lose,” Vance wrote in June 2020 in a forecast of the outcome for that year’s election, which he subsequently falsely claimed was stolen by the Democrats, echoing the former president.

Vance has previously admitted to being a former critic of Trump, who he labeled around the time of his 2016 election triumph as “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler”. But Vance claims he was won over by Trump’s performance as president.

When a number of factors in a situation go wrong with enough precision to maximise damage, we tend to call it a perfect storm. Pay attention and you’ll hear it all the time; a few days ago, the lack of social housing in England was blamed on a perfect storm, similarly America is currently bracing itself for a perfect storm of election chaos, and outer space recently enjoyed a perfect storm of solar activity. The term, of course, is based on a 2000 film where George Clooney sailed a boat in a hurricane.

However, I would like to propose a change. From now on, instead of calling something a perfect storm, I recommend calling it a Daddio. This is a real election Daddio. Wow, the social housing in this country is really Daddioed. Did you see the sun Daddioing the other day?

I wish to propose this, because a fault on a recent Qantas flight resulted in every passenger being forced to watch Daddio, a film that has an erect penis in it.

You may have already read the story. If not, here’s a brief recap. On flight QF59 from Sydney to Tokyo, a technical fault meant that passengers were unable to choose their own individual movies from the in-flight selection. However, the fault allowed every seat to be shown the same movie at once. According to Qantas, staff then polled the passengers on which film they would like to see. The winner was apparently Daddio, a new drama starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn.

However, Daddio contains a few spicy sequences, which means it is not suitable for all passengers. Unfortunately, the fault meant the screens couldn’t be paused, dimmed or turned off. And, to make matters worse, passengers couldn’t avoid the scenes by simply removing their headphones either, because all the sequences take the form of sexting. Someone texts “Help me cum” and “Cock so hard” before, that’s right, sending a photo of their penis. Eventually Qantas saw sense and replaced it with a children’s film, but clearly the whole affair was a Daddio of epic proportions.

Now, obviously, mistakes can happen. If the Daddio incident reminds me of anything at all, it’s the time that our science teacher accidentally let us watch a VHS of the 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme film Timecop at the end of Year 9, only to slam it off in a bluster of red-faced nervousness during the scene where a fully naked woman writhes around on a satin bed. So this sort of thing does have precedence.

However, the question remains: why Daddio? The Qantas in-flight entertainment selection contains a number of big hitters, including Inside Out 2, The Fall Guy, A Quiet Place: Day One and Bad Boys: Ride or Die. These are all big, mainstream films with a varying range of broad appeal. And yet the passengers apparently chose Daddio.

In truth, despite the sexting, the headlines about the Daddio incident were a little misleading. While it’s true that the film is inappropriate – there’s no way to look past the penis – for the most part, it is extremely boring. The entire film takes place in a taxi travelling between an airport and a city, and is just one long dialogue between Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. There are a lot of pauses, plenty of meaningful glances. It’s fine as an experiment, and perfectly decent if it’s something you sought out yourself.

But this is a film that was apparently chosen by the majority of an entire airliner. Hundreds of people, when asked how they would like to spend a tedious nine-hour flight, apparently responded by singling out a ruminative, dialogue-heavy two-hander over something fun like The Fall Guy. Who on earth are these people? What sort of ridiculous pathology causes a majority of passengers to decide that, to silence the niggling thought that human flight is a betrayal of God’s wishes and that only a thin sheet of metal separates them from an unimaginably horrible death, they should watch one hour and 41 minutes of Dakota Johnson mournfully gazing through a car window?

It doesn’t make sense. It’s entirely troubling to me, and I don’t think I can rest until I get concrete answers. Forget the penis, this choice was the real Daddio.

If genealogy is destiny, as Donald Trump believes, then “poison in the blood” – a phrase Trump repeatedly uses – determines the fate of nations. By Trump’s logic, “blood” is the true and final measure. Trump, like Hitler, appears to classify people and countries by “blood” on a scale of their innate racial characteristics. Those features define the essence of nations, which are themselves delineated on a racial pyramid, with the purest and whitest, the most Aryan, at the pinnacle. True to his doctrine, the Nazis on his family tree must explain his penchant for Hitlerian rhetoric.

“Poison in the blood” was the core of Hitler’s race doctrine as well. Hitler, too, believed it explained the rise and fall of civilizations. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” stated Hitler. It is also Trump’s fundamental trope. “We’re poisoning the blood of our country, and you have people coming in, think of it, mental institutions all over the world are being emptied out into the United States,” he said on Fox News in March. “Jails and prisons are being emptied out into the United States. This is poisoning our country.”

Just recently, on 31 August, addressing Moms For Liberty, a rightwing group devoted to book-banning, he raised again the menace of “poison in the blood”: “But what’s happening to our country, our country is being poisoned, poisoned!”

At a rally on 18 September, Trump elaborated: “They’re coming from the Congo, they’re coming from Africa, they’re coming from the Middle East, they’re coming from all over the world – Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia … And what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer, and you got to get rid of these people.”

“Blut und Boden” – blood and soil – was adopted as an official slogan of the Nazi regime to express its ideal of the nation rooted in the authentic unity of Aryan blood. The community of its people – Volksgemeinschaft – comprised only those of shared ethnic blood. Aliens corrupting the blood, principally Jews, but also Slavs, Poles and Roma, were described as disease carriers and “vermin” – Volksshadlinge – and posed an existential threat. Only those people of the blood belonged to the Heimat, a concept the Nazis cast as the racially pure home, intrinsic to Blut und Boden.

Jews were Heimatlos – a people separate from the Heimat, without a true home, wanderers, cosmopolitans and globalists, a menace to the sanctity of the culture and the identity of the nation. They were not simply outsiders, or the Other. They were a different species – subhumans, Untermenschen – and must be eradicated to preserve the blood of the race. “Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal,” instructed a pamphlet entitled Der Untermenschen, illustrated with distorted photographs of these lower beings to depict the “bestial” nature of the subhuman Jews and Slavs. Four million copies were published in 1942 under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.

“In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion,” Trump said this March. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.” When they are removed, it will be, says Trump, “a bloody story”.

Friedrich Trump, Trump’s grandfather, was deported from his native Bavaria as an undesirable and had his German citizenship revoked in 1905. Born in the town of Kallstadt in 1869, he dodged compulsory military service and emigrated to the United States in 1885. In and around Seattle and the Yukon, he owned restaurants and hotels that also did a brisk business as brothels. He returned to Germany a well-to-do man, married Elisabeth Christ, and took her to New York. But his wife did not like America and was homesick.

He returned to Kallstadt to settle, but the authorities investigated him and ruled he should be banished for dodging military service. He wrote the Prince of Bavaria a letter begging to stay. “Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family.” His plea was rejected. He was expelled. Upon his return to New York, in October 1905, a son, named Fred, was born. The Trump family saga began.

The Trump and Christ families, with the exception of Friedrich and Elisabeth Trump, remained in Kallstadt. Many of them served in the Nazi army. Some were members of the Nazi Party. Two of these relatives of Donald Trump are now known to have fought and died for Hitler. It appears that they were involved in the early stage of the Holocaust. (The research of a certified professional genealogist distinguished in the field discovered these Trump Nazi soldiers, but prefers to remain anonymous to avoid retribution.)

Ernst Christ, of the Christ branch of the family, a first cousin once removed of Donald Trump, the son of his great-uncle Johannes Christ, born in Kallstadt, was a Nazi. Unteroffizier Christ, a corporal, served in the 1st Company of the Panzerjager-Abteilung 670, an anti-tank unit that saw action on the western front in Belgium and France before being transferred to participate in the invasion of Russia.

In July 1942, Christ’s company occupied the town of Polodovitoye, about 100 kilometers south of Stalingrad. The Nazi soldiers rounded up about 100 Jewish families who had fled there from throughout the region. According to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust research center in Jerusalem, “Jews were loaded onto trucks, supposedly to be taken home. In fact, the victims were taken outside the village toward a ravine located 50 meters south of the village. There the victims were shot or probably severely wounded and then doused with some highly flammable liquid and then set on fire.” A month later, on 13 August, Unteroffizier Christ was killed in battle.

Three days before, on 10 August, the Wehrmacht reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. On that day, Private Eduard Freund, born in Kallstadt, was killed. He was the first cousin once removed of Donald Trump, the son of Donald’s great aunt Elisabetha Trump and Karl Phillip Freund. Private Freund served in a security unit, the fourth company of the Sicherungs-Battalion 790, whose task of guarding supply lines and police work quickly turned, like that of all such units, into the operation of wholesale brutal terror. He was one of those soldiers from “all walks of life” described in historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, who found themselves occupiers in eastern Europe to execute the regime’s policies, often under the control of the SS, where “mass murder and routine had become one”, murdering partisans and civilians alike, and systematically killing Jews. The policy was justified in a phrase – Jude gleich Bolschewik gleich Partisan, or “Jew equals Bolshevik equals Partisan”.

If “blood” is the biological marker of indelible personal, racial and ethnic character, by his own reasoning Trump’s organic linkage to Nazis must inexorably explain his unapologetic Hitlerian politics. On Fox News, in March, Howard Kurtz, the host of its show Media Buzz, interviewed Trump. “Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’?” he asked. “The press, as you know, immediately reacts to that by saying, ‘Well, that’s the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used.’” To which Trump replied, “Because our country is being poisoned.”

But another Trump relative stands as a repudiation of Trump’s theory. John G Trump, Fred’s younger brother, did not go into real estate. Instead, he earned a master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in electrical engineering. He became a co-inventor of high-voltage electrostatic generators, which during the second world war he applied to advancements in radar. He served as the secretary of the microwave committee created by the federal government’s new National Defense Research Committee. After the war, he was appointed director of MIT’s High-Voltage Research Laboratory, whose work he used in cancer research and on environmental pollution.

His obituary in Physics Today in 1985 by a colleague paid tribute to his personal virtues as well as his scientific contributions: “Trump’s remarkable personality mix contributed to all of this achievement and success. He was remarkably even-tempered, with kindness and consideration to all, never threatening or arrogant in manner, even when under high stress. He was outwardly and in appearance the mildest of men, with a convincing persuasiveness, carefully marshaling all his facts.” Furthermore, wrote his eulogist, “He cared very little for money and the trappings of money.”

In other words, John Trump was nothing at all like his bullying, ignorant and greedy nephew, who bears the middle name “John”, the only apparent correspondence between them. The resemblance, regardless of genetics, is nil. Yet Trump cites him as proof of his intelligence, a case positive of “blood”. “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr John Trump. A genius,” Trump said in an interview with CNN in 2015. “It’s in my blood. I’m smart. Great marks. Like really smart.” From time to time, he brings up his uncle as his forebear of his own “genius”. “Good genes, very good genes. OK, very smart.”

Through his distorted lens, Trump’s uncle, who was the opposite of a narcissist, serves as a rationale for his narcissism. He is held up as an example of Trump’s “blood” mania, though the scientist in the family had no use for the sort of malevolent superstition the Nazis propagated and his nephew mimics.

Trump designates his blood as superior and the blood of those he chooses to demonize as inferior. “Well, I think I was born with a drive for success,” Trump told CNN in 2010. “I’m a gene believer. Hey, when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse. And I really was – you know, I had a – a good gene pool from the standpoint of that.”

“I have an Ivy League education, smart guy, good genes. I have great genes and all that stuff, which I’m a believer in,” Trump informed a crowd in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 2016. He had recently called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.

“You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump told another nearly all-white rally during his 2020 campaign in a Minnesota town that had voted against accepting refugees. “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.” He compared and contrasted. “Every family in Minnesota needs to know about sleepy Joe Biden’s extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet.”

“Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” Trump bemoaned in a White House meeting in 2018. He pointed to Haiti – “take them out” – El Salvador, and the entire continent of Africa. “We should have more people from Norway.”

This April, at a fundraiser with donors at Mar-a-Lago, Trump proudly recalled his “shithole countries” moment to elaborate on his categories of acceptable and unacceptable immigrants. “And when I said, you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries,’ I’m trying to be nice. Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

Trump claims he has not read Mein Kampf. His first wife, Ivana Trump, said he “reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed”, Vanity Fair reported in 1990. Trump explained it was a gift from a Jewish friend. Then, he told Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

As Trump ginned up his third campaign, Hugh Hewitt, a rightwing radio talk show host, tried to help cleanse Trump of taint from his “poison in the blood” incantations. “Now, Mr President,” said the deferential Hewitt, “your critics say that you are using Hitlerian language that was used to dehumanize Jews by saying that Jewish blood cannot be part of German blood. Do you have anything like that in mind when you say poisoning our blood?”

“No, and I never knew that Hitler said it, either, by the way,” Trump replied. “And I never read Mein Kampf. They said I read Mein Kampf. These are people that are disinformation, horrible people that we’re dealing with. I never read Mein Kampf.”

Asked again by Hewitt, Trump answered, “First of all, I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way.” Then, after showing he was familiar with Hitler’s “blood” obsession that he had just said he did not know about, he repeated his “poison” meme eight times.

“I know nothing” was the comic punchline of Sergeant Schultz, the buffoonish Nazi prisoner-of-war camp guard from the 1960s television series Hogan’s Heroes. “I know nothing” has been a useful if transparently false tactic of deflection for Trump, from David Duke – “I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?” – to the Proud Boys.

After the violent neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017, ringing with chants of “Jews will not replace us,” attended by a number of Proud Boys, Trump infamously stated, “There are fine people on both sides.”

When Chris Wallace, the moderator of the 2020 CNN presidential debate, asked Trump if he would denounce white supremacists, he replied, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” a message to the neo-fascist paramilitary group that would be the shock troops in the attack on the Capitol on January 6. After the debate, he told reporters, “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are.” Now, he has pledged to pardon those Proud Boys and others serving prison terms for their actions in the insurrection of January 6. He refers to them as “hostages”.

White supremacists, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis attach themselves to Trump, sometimes appearing as more than a fringe – including, recently, the self-proclaimed “Black Nazi” Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, whom Trump called “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

Neo-Nazis just seem to pop up weirdly on Trump’s property. At Mar-a-Lago, on 22 November 2022, Trump had a night to remember: dinner with the anti-Semitic rapper Kanye West, aka Ye, and Nick Fuentes, a neo-Nazi, who was a leader at the Charlottesville march and riot, present in the mob on January 6, and has built an antisemitic following he calls the “Groypers”. Afterward, when the press reported on the dinner, Trump issued a statement that Ye brought “a guest whom I had never met and knew nothing about”.

Trump’s footsie with Nazis mingles narcissism with Nazism. But it is his belief in the far-right “replacement theory”, which is the central idea of his campaign, that provides the greatest illumination on what are more than overlapping coincidences. The historical lineage of poisonous ideas, rather than “poison in the blood”, explains Trump’s doctrine of a master race, whether Trump is aware or not of the origins of his venom.

Trump’s embrace of the replacement theory may owe a good deal to its relentless promotion by its chief exponent, Tucker Carlson, who also serves as an intellectual mentor to JD Vance. On more than 400 shows when Carlson was on Fox News, according to the New York Times, “he has amplified the idea that a cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration”.

On his 2 September podcast, Carlson interviewed a self-proclaimed “non-racist fascist”, Darryl Cooper, whom he introduced as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States”. For two hours, he held forth on Winston Churchill as the “chief villain of the Second World War” and the Holocaust as an accident forced on Hitler. Despite Carlson’s Nazi fascination, his principal influence has been as a recent popularizer of a doctrine developed more than a century ago.

Trump’s replacement theory is derivative of the nativism of eugenicists and “race scientists”, especially Madison Grant, whose 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, warned against “the old stock being crowded out” by “swarms of Polish Jews” and other aliens, who were pushing aside “the Nordic man”, and fostering “suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race”.

Grant served as an adviser to the congressional members who wrote the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration of those ethnic groups from eastern and southern Europe that he deemed inferior, closing out Italians and Jews. He also helped write laws in the south banning interracial marriage.

Hitler regarded Grant’s book in his speeches as scientific proof and wrote him an admiring letter telling him it was his “Bible”. “It was America, in spite of its enormous territory, that was the first country to teach us by its immigration law that a nation should not open its doors equally to all races,” Hitler told the New York Times in an interview on 20 December 1931, before he seized power. “Let China be for the Chinese, America for the Americans and Germany for the Germans.” In 1936 the Nazis promoted The Passing of the Great Race as essential reading for Germans.

“The irony is that by putting Madison Grant’s theories into practice, the Nazis discredited those theories forever,” wrote the historian Jonathan Spiro in his biography of Madison Grant, Defending the Master Race.

That is, until Trump.

When Trump says immigration, he means race. When he says crime, he means race. When he says communism, socialism, or Democrat, he means race. When he says America is declining, he means race. When he says “American First”, he means race. When he says blood, he means race. When he says poison, he means race.

When he says race, he means Black people. When he says race, he means Hispanics. When he says race, he means Muslims. And when he says race, he means other white people, too, some less white, less pure, less clean, less acceptable depending on their ancestral origin, than others. When he says race, he means the replacement theory.

Trump has Hitler on the brain in unknowable ways until he lets his admiration seep out. “Well, but Hitler did some good things,” Trump remarked to his White House chief of staff, General John Kelly. “Well, what?” asked Kelly. “Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy,” Trump replied. Kelly was outraged. He told him, “Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.” Kelly reflected, “It’s pretty hard to believe he missed the Holocaust, though, and pretty hard to understand how he missed the 400,000 American GIs that were killed in the European theater,” Kelly told Jim Sciutto, the CNN correspondent. “But I think it’s more, again, the tough guy thing” – Trump’s insatiable need to playact.

On 17 September, Trump launched a new theme with an old echo. He made a prophecy about who should be blamed if he is defeated in the election. “I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss,” he said. Then, he repeated, “If I don’t win this election – and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because if 40%, I mean, 60% of the people are voting for the enemy…” He complained that as “the most popular person in Israel” he was not “treated right” by American Jews.

Trump’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner, his converted Jewish daughter Ivanka, his Jewish grandchildren, his Jewish adviser Stephen Miller, who is poised to be the implementer of the replacement theory and deportation of millions, including legal immigrants, and his Jewish supporters and donors are exempt from his condemnation of “the Jewish people”. Trump’s family ties don’t give him pause from his obsession. His “blood” makes them kosher. In the case of an inconvenient contradiction his narcissism prevails.

Trump’s blame game is his version of the Dolchstosslegende – the stab in the back legend – that Germany did not lose the first world war in battle but was betrayed on the home front by Jews and leftists. Hitler traced his political awakening to his understanding of the Dolchstoss.

Now, after all Trump has done for the Jews, after all he has done for Israel, “the Jewish people” are ungrateful. Too many of them support “the enemy”. Trump is warming up his myth of a scapegoat.