The Left has found the smoking gun that proves Donald Trump a fascist.

He compared his political enemies to vermin, and so did Adolf Hitler.

Perhaps they understate their case. Hitler, like Trump, also wore pants, and “Donald Trump,” like “Adolf Hitler,” contains 11 letters.

What more evidence do you need?

“Today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” the former president said last week in Nuremberg New Hampshire in a speech conspicuous for its omission of umlauts.

Note that he did not call the listed group vermin. He compared them to vermin. That amounts to a difference with a distinction. Saying one is like something is not the same as saying someone is something.

Note also that people who use Nazism and fascism interchangeably omit the inconvenient truth that among the various groups Trump compared to vermin he included fascists. Do fascists usually liken fascists to vermin? Maybe he inserted that as he omitted the umlauts to throw eagle-eyed progressives, who notice everything to include that which is not there, off his track.

Do you remember when the Washington Post three years ago depicted Republicans as rats? No? Well, barely anyone outside of Fox News fussed about of it.

The same newspaper now portraying Donald Trump as the second coming of Adolf Hitler for comparing his political enemies to vermin used almost a full page of its newspaper to verbally and pictorially dehumanize Republicans as vermin. Ann Telnaes took the time to draw more than 100 rats and affix the names of Republican politicians — Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Lee Zeldin, Jeff Van Drew, etc. — supporting Donald Trump’s efforts to challenge the validity of the 2020 Electoral College results to the cartoon rats. They were wrong, not rats.

A Los Angeles Times columnist compared Nikki Haley, Elaine Chao, and other Trump administration officials critical of the former president in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, to “rats” abandoning a “sinking ship.” They should have known better long prior, Michael Hiltzik argued, before instructing readers that “none of them deserves credit for abandoning Trump now.”

Three years later, rat analogies are verboten — a word surely soon verboten because Hitler used it — at the Los Angeles Times. The headline of its editorial on the controversy read: “Trump’s dangerous ‘vermin’ speech would have been at home in Nazi Germany.” It would have been at home in the Los Angeles Times, too, if only it had targeted Republicans and conservatives and MAGA.

This narrative all seems so preposterous — comparing a former president to a maniac who exterminated 6 million Jews — as to make one wonder whether those behind it wish to damage Trump or rehabilitate Hitler.

It’s not as though Trump deserves praise for comparing his political enemies to animals — and quite unpopular animals at that. But such harsh language, if not common, remains, as the Post and the Times show, all too common.

A worse political epithet exists than calling people vermin. Its very name conjures up a dehumanizing creature, the application of which to a political figure itself aims to dehumanize. This refers, of course, to “Hitler.”

If one wishes to eradicate language that demonizes, dehumanizes, and destroys, then restricting that name to a stern-looking fellow with a silly mustache seems a pretty good start. Invoke the name when discussing actual genocidal warmongers rather than people one finds merely displeasing maybe as the exception to the general prohibition. The reductio ad Hitlerum, especially during a time when fanatics murder Jews for being Jews, seems in worse taste than even vermin.