‘America’s Hitler” is Yale-educated JD Vance’s label for Trump in a 2016 Facebook post. VP Vance now disavows this attention-grabbing comparison.
Character distinctions can be subtle and unreliable: is Trump “America’s Hitler” (history’s most reviled figure) or more appropriately likened to George Washington (devoted American patriot)? Tough for some to differentiate: a likely challenge for Trump enthusiasts like The Proud Boys, the KKK, Trump’s 2022 dinner guest, the fascist Nick Fuentes; or the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” marchers who waved swastika flags (those “fine people”). And for Elon Musk too: at an inaugural rally he lustily thrust his right arm and palm out in the unmistakable rigid and angled fashion of the Hitler salute. “My heart goes out to you,” Musk smugly added as an ineffective escape hatch.
Comparisons to Hitler are fraught. For one, they dilute the pure, unnatural evil of Hitler and are to be avoided for that reason alone, which will be honored here. Nevertheless, depravity is rarely fully revealed at the outset and disturbing “parallels,” present years ago, are mounting.
Cadet Bone Spurs, if consistent, would consider Hitler to have been a “sucker” for having served in WWI in the German army and a “loser” for having been a casualty (requiring extended hospitalization).
The Mein Kampf reader’s Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, murderously attacking police to thwart Biden’s installation as president, while targeting his own vice president (Pence) for execution by hanging — harkens back to the 1923 Munich Putsch and the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives” (the killing of fellow Nazis Ernst Roehm and his associates).
Trump’s executive order to reinterpret the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship standard and his attempted legal ban on trans-gender-status recognition reacquaints us with the 1935 Nuremberg Laws on German citizenship.
The planned corralling and deportation of immigrants recalls the heinous 1938 Kristallnacht and its aftermath.
Trump’s insistence on personal loyalty over competency (a corrupted DEI for rapists, child molesters, other felons, drunks, and science nut-cases; and the pardoning of violent insurrectionists) is even more perverse than the pre-war personal loyalty pledges extracted by Hitler from the military and, during WWII, the cashiering of generals deemed insufficiently compliant, replaced by more ideologically zealous Nazis.
Hostility to democracy and ethnic hyper-nationalism with comprehensive bigotry that repudiates our 1776 Declaration of Equality are fascistic. “Make America [Germany] great again.”
The mobilization (“stand back and stand by”) of paramilitary armed thugs (the 1933 Brownshirts and the 2020 Oath Keepers).
Claims of internal threats calling for a police-state response: the 1933 Reichstag fire, conspiracies (the WWI “stab in the back” and Q-Anon), “sane-washing,” political party coverups, press hostility, and abusive investigatory probes of critics.
The employment by both of the “big lie” as a propaganda device.
The zealousness aroused at some of Trump’s campaign events evokes the Nuremberg rallies.
Trump’s proto-predatory inclination for territorial acquisition (Canada, Panama, and Greenland) recalls the 1938 Austrian Anschluss.
Trump’s reported consideration of withdrawing from NATO and pressuring Ukraine into a settlement reminds us of Britain and France’s facilitation, in the 1938 Munich appeasement, of Hitler’s rape of Czechoslovakia, as well as the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, carving up Poland.
Worse, the parallels don’t end with this preliminary inventory. But then, while recognizing the threat, we also need to guard ourselves against sinking into despair. Although not a problem for the millions of registered voters who couldn’t be bothered last November.
Gregg Mumm is a Wednesday Journal subscriber and Oak Park resident since 1991.
