Calling Trump ‘Hitler’ Trivializes Horrors of Nazism, Undermines Historical Understanding
Dennis Prager /
It may be impossible to overstate the damage done to morality by the Democrats and other leftists calling Donald Trump a fascist and a Nazi and declaring him “Hitler.”
Asked by Anderson Cooper on CNN if she believes Trump is a “fascist,” Kamala Harris said, “Yes, I do.”
With regard to calling Trump “Hitler,” Newsweek’s fact-checker concluded: “Harris didn’t directly call Trump ‘Hitler.’ However, many will think she came very close to it: She confirmed that she believes Trump is a fascist, quoted [retired four-star General, and one of Donald Trump’s White House chiefs of staff, John] Kelly’s unfavorable comments (Kelly said Trump ‘wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had’) and suggested Trump would ‘invoke’ Hitler.”
Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, compared the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden to the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden.
Many Hitler historians have done similarly. In a 2017 essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ron Rosenbaum, author of a New York Times bestselling biography of Adolf Hitler, “Explaining Hitler,” compared Trump to Hitler:
[The views of] Trump and his minions … come out of a playbook written in German. … The playbook is ‘Mein Kampf.’
What I want to suggest is an actual comparison with Hitler that deserves thought. It’s what you might call the secret technique, a kind of rhetorical control that both Hitler and Trump used on their opponents, especially the media.
Alan Bullock [the first major Hitler biographer] … had initially argued [that] it was likely [Hitler] had believed in nothing and just used the Jew-hatred to advance his cause with the nitwit thug segment of the German people. Just as Trump appealed to his nitwit thug racist, antisemite followers. … This is the comparison I’d been seeking.
In April, the Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece, “Trump Turns His Trials Into a Soapbox. Does He Know He’s Channeling Hitler?” It was written by another Hitler scholar, Timothy W. Ryback, a former lecturer at Harvard (surprise!) whose most recent book is “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power.”
His conclusion: “The alarm-clanging couplet of Hitler’s and Trump’s courtroom appearances, two demagogues—separated by a century—exploiting their constitutionally guaranteed rights to free speech and due process in an effort to undermine democratic processes and structures, should serve as a sobering warning as we approach an election to determine who will be running the next government of the United States.”
The abuse of language is a fundamental characteristic of the Left. Leftists have done this not only to “Hitler,” “Nazi,” and “fascist” but to “genocide,” “apartheid,” “racist,” and virtually every other term connoting evil. It started with Stalin calling Trotsky a fascist and it continues to this day.
The harm, as I wrote above, cannot be overstated.
Calling Trump “Hitler” and “Nazi” utterly trivializes Hitler and Nazism. Young people, the recipients of a largely worthless education in American schools—especially regarding history—know little, if anything, about Hitler and Nazism. For most of them, therefore, if Trump is Hitler, then Hitler was Trump. Hitler was nothing worse than a German version of Trump—not the instigator of World War II and the creator of the Holocaust; just a German Donald Trump.
It is beyond belief that American Jewish organizations and American veterans groups have not greeted the labeling of Trump “Hitler” with howls of protest. It is difficult to know if Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust will ever again evoke the horror that these words have heretofore evoked.
That Jewish groups have not vigorously protested labeling Trump “Hitler” and “Nazi” only shows how deep the left-wing influence has been on most American Jewish organizations, especially the Anti-Defamation League, the organization founded to protect American Jews and combat antisemitism.
Likewise, it beggars belief that veterans organizations haven’t vociferously condemned the trivialization of Hitler and Nazism. Did hundreds of thousands of Americans die fighting a German Trump? Was the D-Day invasion of Normandy about fighting Trump supporters?
If Trump represents the same embodiment of evil as Hitler and the Nazis, the word no longer has meaning.
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