Have You Heard? Trump Is Hitler

Until the next Republican nominee in 2028, who will be Super-Hitler

How can you tell Democrats are panicking about the election? Because they’ve gone full reductio ad Hitlerum. It’s official. The Atlantic has declared that Trump is "literally” Hitler.

This is hardly new with Trump. I’ve been through the catalogue before, but let’s have it fresh once again from the top.

In the first few days following Trump’s surprise election in 2016, the head of the Joint Center for Political Studies, which the Washington Post describes as a “respected liberal think tank,” reacted to Trump’s victory thus: “When you consider that in the climate we’re in—rising violence, the Ku Klux Klan—it is exceedingly frightening.” Castro said right before the election: “We sometimes have the feeling that we are living in the time preceding the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.”  Claremont College professor John Roth wrote: “I could not help remembering how economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism—all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I—to send the world reeling into catastrophe… It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our post-election state with fear and trembling.”  Esquire writer Harry Stein says that the voters who supported Trump were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.” Alan Wolfe of Boston College went up in the New Left Review: “The worst nightmares of the American left appear to have come true.” And he doubled down in The Nation: “[T]he United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.”

Did I say Trump? Oh, wait, I got confused. Leftists belched those quotations about Ronald Reagan the week immediately following his landslide election in 1980. You can see how one could become confused, since Reagan was also Hitlert, as we all know.

Every modern Republican gets the reductio ad Hitlerum treatment sooner or later. Barry Goldwater got the most complete treatment of it in 1964.

California Gov. Pat Brown said that Goldwater’s famous acceptance speech “had the stench of fascism. . .  All we needed to hear was ‘Heil Hitler;’”

San Francisco Mayor John Shelley said the Republicans “had Mein Kampf as their political bible.”  Most of the media was happy to amplify this chorus.  Columnist Drew Pearson, for example, wrote that “the smell of fascism has been in the air at this convention.”  The Chicago Defender ran the headline: “GOP Convention, 1964 Recalls Germany, 1933.”

Nixon was also Hitler. George McGovern, his rival in 1972 who won only one state, said that the Watergate break-in was ‘the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler.’” Never mind that Democrats such as LBJ had bugged Republican campaigns aggressively and repeatedly.

And then there was Newt Gingrich. Surely he was Hitler.

Rep. George Miller said the morning after the landslide 1994 election: “It’s a glorious day if you’re a fascist.” Rep. Charlie Rangel said of the GOP’s proposed budget cuts: “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things.” This is, strictly speaking, true: Hitler never proposed cutting Medicare or Social Security, so I guess we have to give this one to Wrangel.

Rep. Major Owens said, “These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they’re worse than Hitler.” Worse!

George W. Bush was such a Hitler that the left modified his name into “Bushitler” just to make sure we got it.

Memo to liberals: stipulate for the purposes of discussion that Trump is as vile as you say he is. Maybe you shouldn’t have talked like bloody fools for the last 60 years about every Republican who threatened to beat you in an election. Have none of you read the old fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf?

Did I say “the last 60 years”? How about 70?

The lede:

CHICAGO, Oct. 25 -- A Republican victory on election day will bring a Fascistic threat to American freedom that is even more dangerous than the perils from communism and extreme right "crackpots," President Truman asserted here tonight. . .  “Before Hitler came to power, control over the German economy passed into the hands of a small group of rich manufacturers, bankers and landowners," he said.

And it didn’t begin with Truman. In 1940, FDR’s next vice president, Henry Wallace, fought the election with the slogan “Keep Hitler out of the White House.” Wallace said “You can be sure that every Nazi, every Hitlerite, and every appeaser is a Republican.” At their harshest, fervent New Dealers dropped the qualifiers and pronounced Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s middle-of-the-road Republican opponent, “the man Hitler wants elected president.”

Expect a familiar pattern to assert itself. Every previous Republican was a saint, and decidedly non-Hitler after they are gone from office. “Why can’t we have Republicans like Reagan and Bush?”, say the people who hated Reagan and Bush when they were in office. And the next GOP candidate is always the real Hitler thing. When it looked like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis might be the next GOP nominee, guess what? He’s Hitler! Business Insider reported:

Florida gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried compared Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to a "dictator" and doubled down on an assertion that DeSantis' actions were comparable to Hitler's.

And the Democrat-media complex is already ramping up the same treatment for Trump’s like successor in four years. Here’s The Hill:

Exit meme: