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Phoenix is a former U.S. Navy officer who served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. His career was with the Federal Aviation Administration. He was an air traffic controller. He worked as a supervisor at airports in �鶹��ý���� and Lynchburg, and as an instructor for upcoming air traffic controllers. He retired more than 20 years ago.

Tuesday, he called me about a line deep in that day’s column. It noted that Monday, from the Oval Office, President Donald Trump summarily declared American flag-burning illegal, in spite of a 1989 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found flag burning was speech protected by the First Amendment.

Trump ordered the Department of Justice to lock up flag burners for a year, no parole, probation or early release. Trump was unclear whether he believes arrested flag-burners should be entitled to a criminal trial.

“America doesn’t allow presidents to rule by decree,” the column noted. “That’s how Hitler ran Germany.”

The latter line was the one that prompted Phoenix’s call.

“I don’t know why other people haven’t noticed this before but the parallels between 1933 Germany and today’s environment in America are incredibly, incredibly similar,” Phoenix said in the voicemail message.

In the remainder of the message, he listed some frightening similarities between Germany in the 1930s and the United States now. And later on as we spoke over the phone, we hit even more.

Phoenix and I are both fans of William L. Shirer’s extraordinary non-fiction book, Published in 1960, it checks in at more than 1,000 pages. I’ve read it five times.

Shirer was an American journalist stationed in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, where he had a front row seat to the rise of Nazism and Adolf Hitler. After World War II, Shirer gained access to a warehouse that housed all the Nazis’ captured files.

Luckily for him, the Nazis wrote down almost everything. Shirer researched the files for longer for a decade — then spent more years writing the book.

It takes readers into 20th century Germany, Austria, Poland, Britain, the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Europe — and recreates discussions in which the Nazis minutely planned every step of their evil aggression, and saved the plans.

It documents in detail Hitler’s political talents at lying, cheating and backstabbing during his rise to political power. (Sound familiar?) In all, the reader’s left feeling like a fly-on-the-wall observer of those evil and horrifying events. If you haven’t read it already, you should.

“The storm troopers are in the streets in Washington, and (Trump’s) starting to invade Chicago and New York,” Phoenix continued in the voicemail. “He already invaded Los Angeles.

“There are deportation centers throughout the country,” he noted, likening the makeshift prisons to Nazi concentration camps.

“The ICE agents are like the Gestapo … “It’s getting worse,” Phoenix added. “The parallels between 1930s Germany and today’s America are just so much similar no one seems to recognize that, but thanks for mentioning that in your column.”

Friday we talked on the phone for a while about “Rise and Fall,” and even more similarities between Germany then and the United States now.

With respect to Adolf Hitler, one point many Americans forget is, the Nazi dictator rose to power legally via a democratic government that later was unable to check his rampant authoritarianism.

Germany’s president appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933, and the German legislature later handed Hitler dictatorial power by enacting The Enabling Act, which allowed Hitler to rule by decree.

Trump’s pretending to have such power now. That’s the point of his ridiculous executive-order signing ceremonies, where cabinet members embarrassingly fawn over the president, like king’s courtiers in the fairy tale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

“He’s issuing all these, ‘enabling laws’ and spineless Congress members like Morgan Griffith and Ben Cline stoop and bow,” Phoenix told me. Like the members of Germany’s parliament did in 1933.

Another similarity we discussed between then and now was the 1938 Anschluss, or Germany’s annexation of its smaller neighbor, Austria. That year the German Army moved into Austria almost unopposed, not unlike Russia’s takeover of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014.

Who’s been talking annexation recently? Trump. He’s publicly mused about annexing both Greenland and Canada.

We spent the most time comparing Trump to Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister in 1938 who was perhaps the greatest placater of Nazis in world history.

Chamberlain believed he could prevent World War II by allowing Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, which in 1938 was a German-speaking section of western Czechoslovakia.

At the Munich Conference that year, Hitler solemnly promised (and Chamberlain stupidly believed) that the Sudetenland would be the end of Germany’s territorial aspirations. Chamberlain left that meeting as an advocate for giving that part of Czechoslovakia to Germany.

It’s similar to the way Trump emerged from his recent meeting with Putin about the Ukraine conflict in Alaska. The U.S. president came out of that arguing that, as the price for peace, Europe should recognize Russian’s gains in Eastern Ukraine and allow Russia to swallow that territory.

But rather than preventing World War II, the Sudetenland “gift” to Germany only fueled Hitler’s appetite for more territory. And that set the stage for Germany’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the beginning of World War II.

The lesson from the Munich Conference is that you can’t secure peace by giving a dictator territory he demands. Instead, that encourages war.

And right now, Trump is in the similar position as Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

“It’s Munich all over again,” Phoenix said on the phone, Friday. “Trump is another Neville Chamberlain. He’s bowing and stooping to Putin.”

Phoenix said: “The parallels between what’s going on in the U.S. right now and Germany in 1933 are eerily familiar.”

And more than a little scary, I would add.