When you lose the debate over immigration, inflation, crime at home, and chaos abroad, shift the conversation to Adolf Hitler.
That’s the “Packers Sweep” from the Democratic Party’s desperation playbook. The Fuhrer seems not very 2024. But when you cannot make every day Jan. 6, 2021, then best to make every election year 1939.
Kamala Harris said on CNN Wednesday that her opponent “admires dictators and is a fascist.”
The remarks furthered a narrative propelled by Jeffrey Goldberg’s dubious article in the Atlantic that relies on two anonymous sources to claim that, in his waning days in the White House, Donald Trump announced: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.”
John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff for about 18 months, simultaneously described his former boss to the New York Times as a “fascist” who once said that “Hitler did some good things.”
“I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches — spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” author Burt Neuborne insists. He buttresses his claims by a list of similarities between Trump and Hitler, which include “Both orchestrated mass rallies to show status,” “They relentlessly attack mainstream media,” and “Both found direct communication channels to their base.”
He omitted the startling similarity that both politicians gave speeches and that their names number 11 letters. Coincidence?
Few long-dead evil dictators boast the staying power of Hitler. The Germans could not keep him alive by secreting him to South America. Democrats boast greater success in resurrecting him in time for elections that look like losers.
Rep. William Clay of Missouri accused Ronald Reagan of attempting to replace the Bill of Rights with Mein Kampf. “As a test of the state of ‘Bush the Nazi’ rhetoric,” the late John Leo wrote in 2004, “I went to Google and typed in ‘Bush is a Nazi’ and got 420,000 hits, well behind ‘Hitler was a Nazi’ (654,000 hits), but then Hitler WAS a Nazi and had a 75-year head start.” Even Barry Goldwater, with a Jewish father and no chance to win, endured such demagogic abuse. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, glimpsed “dangerous signs of Hitlerism” in the Republican’s agenda.
It’s not just that reductio ad Hitlerum can’t work because Democrats already used it against Reagan or Goldwater (and Mitt Romney, too). It fails as an October Surprise because for the last nine years Trump–Hitler comparisons have been a staple of Democratic rhetoric. Democrats got the “October” part right. Surprise? Calling Trump “Hitler” seems about as much a surprise as when Lance Bass came out of the closet. A boy-who-cried-wolf quality colors the spate of Democrat rhetoric and reports.
Beyond its failure as an effective political strategy, its indecency repels. Two would-be assassins targeted Donald Trump this summer. The idea of an equivalence between Hitler, who set up concentration camps to murder people and invaded nearly all of the countries in Germany’s immediate proximity, and Trump, who as president neglected to establish anything resembling Auschwitz and used the American military almost as a pacifist might, predictably instills in weaker-minded people the moral righteousness of murdering this man. If he really is Hitler, then what must moral people do?
Democrats lose this election because they inflated the currency to such a degree that our dollar buys less than what 80 cents did at the end of Donald Trump’s term. A similar phenomenon envelops the terms “Hitler,” “fascist,” and “Nazi.” Applying words associated with the historically singular evil plaguing Europe roughly eight decades ago to everything that now displeases us politically not only trivializes something grave but devalues the weight of those terms.
The typical conservative celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ every spring. The typical progressive summons the resurrection of Adolf Hitler every fourth fall.
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