Comparing Trump to Hitler Is Appropriate

Never in America's history has there been a presidential candidate who has signaled that he wants to overthrow the U.S. Constitution, jail or kill his political adversaries, and to silence those in the media that tell the truth about him and his frightening agenda.  Even Richard Nixon on his worst days never sought to end American democracy and the republic. Just as frightening, Trump is - in my view - is knowingly adopting rhetoric and making hate based statements reminiscent of Adolph Hitler and his horrific regime.   Perhaps just as frightening is the fact that the MAGA base, like many in late 1920's and early 1930's Germany, are embracing the message of dehumanizing others and the use of violence against those they deem as "not true Americans."  They are eagerly drinking up Trump's claims that immigrants and by extension all non-whites, are "poisoning the blood" of America and seem all too ready to put their self-designated enemies in concentration camps or worse. Working hand in glove with Trump and his enablers and acolytes within the Republican Party are the evangelicals and "Christian" nationalist who seek a white, Christian nation where their enemies are subjugated or, better yet in their minds, erased.  In the face of such hate mongering, some continue to fall on their fainting couches at accurate comparisons of Trump to Hitler and calling out the danger he and his henchmen and followers pose.  A column in the Washington Post argues such comparisons are appropriate and need to be made to America's history ignorant population.  Here are highlights:

 My very minor status as an authority on Adolf Hitler comparisons stems from having coined “Godwin’s Law” about three decades ago. I originally framed this “law” as a pseudoscientific postulate: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” (That is, its likelihood approaches 100 percent.)

[W]hen people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.

And that’s why Godwin’s Law isn’t violated — or confirmed — by the Biden reelection campaign’s criticism of Trump’s increasingly unsubtle messaging. We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.

Trump has the backing of political actors who are laboring to give the would-be 47th president the kind of command-and-control government he wants. Their proposals for maximizing and consolidating the powers of the federal government under a single individual at the top — provided that the individual is appropriately “conservative” — don’t sound like an American democracy. Sorry, sticklers, they don’t even sound like an American republic, either. What they sound and look like is a framework to enable fascism. And we have to thank Trump for being admirably forthcoming that he plans to be a dictator — although, he says, only on “Day One.”

What’s arguably worse than Trump’s frank authoritarianism is his embrace of dehumanizing tropes that seem to echo Hitler’s rhetoric deliberately. For many weeks now, Trump has been road-testing his use of the word “vermin” to describe those who oppose him and to characterize undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Even for an amateur historian like me, the parallels to Hitler’s rhetoric seem inescapable.

Unsurprisingly, though, there are plenty of people who push back whenever anyone or anything gets compared to Hitler or the Nazis — or to related subjects like the Holocaust or the confinement of Jews to ghettos or the systematic killing of civilian populations.

First, has the sheer absurdity of so many hyperbolic Nazi comparisons in popular culture made us less vigilant about the possible reemergence of actual fascism in the world? I think it shouldn’t — comparisons to Hitler or to Nazis need to take place when people are beginning to act like Hitler or like Nazis.

Second, is Germany’s specific culture of remembrance — which privileges the idea that the Holocaust is unique — working, as some have said Godwin’s Law has also functioned, to quash appropriate comparisons of today’s horrors to the 1930s and 1940s? I continue to insist that Godwin’s Law should never be read as a conversation-ender or as a prohibition on Hitler comparisons. Instead, I still hope it serves to steer conversations into more thoughtful, historically informed places.

And Trump’s express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.

Will Trump succeed in being crowned “dictator for a day”? I hope not. But I choose to take Trump’s increasingly heedless transgressiveness — and, yes, I really do think he knows what he’s doing — as a positive development in one sense: More and more of us can see in his cynical rhetoric precisely the kind of dictator he aims to be.