The most tired cliché in political discourse, which I myself reserve only for instances in which it’s merited, is to compare your political opponents to Hitler and/or the Third Reich.
“The Nazis did this, X did something that is vaguely, through logical contortions, similar, therefore X Is Hitler,” it goes. It’s very predictable and, almost always, indicates a grasping at straws by the side making the argument that is out of other means of arguing.
(As an aside, it’s interesting that the comparison is almost never made between X and, for example, Stalin, the leader of the USSR, who was also notoriously repressive, including against Jews, and who racked up a higher civilian body count over his reign than Hitler. But that’s a story for another day.)
Related: You’ll Never Guess to Whom Hillary Clinton Compared Trump (Actually, You Will)
The corporate state media has been calling Trump Hitler for years now. That’s hardly breaking news. But the intensity of the smears have ramped up recently following a speech Trump gave in which he claimed unchecked illegal immigration at the southern border is “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Via ABC News (emphasis added):
Former President Donald Trump defended anti-immigrant comments he made earlier this week that critics said echoed racist sentiments of Adolf Hitler -- saying Friday he knows nothing about the leader of Germany's Nazi Party and is "not a student of Hitler."
In a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt Friday, Trump was asked about comments he made at a recent rally in New Hampshire where he said illegal immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country."
"First of all, I know nothing about Hitler. I'm not a student of Hitler. I never read his works," Trump said to Hewitt. "They say that he said something about blood. He didn't say it the way I said it, either, by the way. It's a very different kind of a statement. What I'm saying when I talk about people coming into our country is they are destroying our country."
At a campaign stop in Iowa, he said he has not read "Mein Kampf," the manifesto written by Hitler that provided the philosophical basis for Nazi Germany and, ultimately, the murder of more than 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
Trump reiterated that he hadn't read the manifesto during his conversation with Hewitt, saying that he "never knew that Hitler said it."
Let’s get this out of the way upfront: this is not an aspersion against Trump, but whatever one thinks of him, it is patently obvious that he is not an avid reader of books, “Mein Kampf” or otherwise, nor does he nerd out on history. It’s just not what he’s into. His political ethos runs entirely on instinct.
But even if he did read Hitler, and he borrowed the phrase directly from him, would that be the end of the world? Is the claim that Hitler, by virtue of his crimes against humanity, never said anything true or insightful? Or that echoing a single sentence he once uttered is somehow an endorsement of the Third Reich at large? This is very simplistic, but it demonstrates the quasi-religious, propagandistic power of constructing boogeymen and turning them into Satan incarnate, eliminating all nuance in the process. George Orwell wrote extensively about this in “1984.”
Furthermore, the context in which Hitler made those statements was a matter of internal policy prescription directed at “undesirables” within Germany in 1930s Europe, not regarding transnational illegal immigration in North America a century later.
Anyway, none of that has done anything, obviously, to assuage the pearl-clutchers from running hog-wild with the Trump-as-Hitler routine. It’s everywhere in the legacy media.
