On Thursday, the Biden campaign released a graphic juxtaposing Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler, the latest in a gutter-politics crusade that began in earnest with the former president using “vermin” — supposedly a word invoked in politics only by Nazis — in November.

Do they intend to make Trump look bad or Hitler look good? The reductio ad Hitlerum inevitably raises that question.

The Russians didn’t succeed in derailing Trump in 2020. So in 2024, it’s go German or go home.

In poker, players call it a tell. In literature, astute readers recognize it as foreshadowing — and irony, too. In politics, Republicans encountering Democrats calling them Nazis for over a month should have understood that it would preface Democrats unmasking their inner-Goebbels.

“Authoritarianism must be challenged,” Biden speechwriter Jon Meacham, a guy nervous of his own smile, said of the spate of Trump-Hitler comparisons, “and things need to be called by their name.”

The kind name here for the rhetoric of Meacham and company seems hyperbole. The more accurate one is mendacity.

The words “Nazi,” “Hitler,” and “fascist” seem overused in American politics, a place never hospitable even on the fringes to any of the aforementioned. Might we just call the court decision blocking Trump votes un-American instead of Colorado’s Enabling Act of 2023?

Democrats likening a riot — one hesitates to call Jan. 6 a “mostly peaceful protest” — to an “insurrection,” the same word inserted into the Constitution after a war costing more than 600,000 men their lives, strikes as preposterous along the same lines. Neither Trump nor the rioters killed anyone — despite what the New York Times falsely reported and Nancy Pelosi allowed into the articles of impeachment — yet a desperate president and his votaries compare them to violent insurrectionists and genocidal maniacs.

The court’s decision, like the criminal case against Trump in Manhattan, adopts the novel approach of states interpreting and then enforcing a federal law. In its questionable extrapolation of what one amendment says, the ruling rides roughshod over the Constitution’s “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” in disenfranchising Trump supporters and completely ignores a more relevant part of the 14th Amendment that says, “[N]or shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” One trusts that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not regard it as the purview of four Democrats in Colorado to determine whether one engaged in insurrection against the federal government.

All of this, one senses, does not happen with Joe Biden leading instead of trailing in the polls. Mike Tyson didn’t bite Evander Holyfield’s ear because he was winning. Democrats do not call Republicans “Nazis” and attempt to run Joe Biden unopposed out of confidence. They question their own standing with the people, in whom they also lack confidence.

Joy Behar admitted as much in tweeting that “the ballot box can’t compete with the third party candidates who will take votes from Joe Biden. And let us not forget the electoral college. The law must defeat him.”

Democrats appear resolved to vindicate their bête noire’s rhetoric about the establishment rigging the system, the Deep State, elites, and the rest. The four Democrat-appointed Colorado justices removing the leading candidate from the ballot caricature their own party precisely in the way Donald Trump does. These people do not defend democracy. They fear it. (RELATED: ‘Our Democracy’ Isn’t What You Think, And You Just Saw It in Colorado)

Democrats most adamant that they did not fix the 2020 election zealously labor to rig 2024. Peter Strzok’s 2016 “insurance policy” grew from catastrophic to Cadillac plan in less than eight years.

For conservatives acknowledging that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in 2020, the post-presidential impeachment designed to revoke his eligibility for federal office, numerous criminal cases threatening 717.5 years in jail, hectoring civil suits aimed to destroy Trump’s business and reputation, and now state courts curiously interpreting a federal law to remove the leading candidate from ballots qualify as, to borrow from those great political philosophers C+C Music Factory, “things that make you go hmmm.”