When you compare someone to the late Adolf Hitler, it’s important to remember one thing.
There are people in this country — far too many — who would find that a positive comparison.
Ever since Donald Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015, people have been drawing comparison between him and the German fuehrer. So much so, in fact, that Trump used to play down the comparison by lying about his ancestry. Trump’s grandfather Friedrich had emigrated from Germany in 1885 and stayed for good in 1904, but his grandson used to claim his family on that side had been Swedish.
Trump has always been somewhat fascinated with Hitler. His first wife Ivana said he kept “My New Order,” a collection of Hitler’s speeches, on his bedside table and leafed through it from time to time. For a man who is notorious for not reading, that’s meaningful.
In 2018 in France, Trump told his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” He also complained to Kelly that American generals weren’t as loyal to him as Hitler’s generals had been to Der Fuehrer.
Of course, that’s all just talk. Sadly there has been a Nazi subtext on the far right in our country ever since the 1930s. There are plenty of places in the south and the mountain west where the sigh of swastikas isn’t that rare at all.
A big part of that is there are plenty of dim bulbs in this country who think authoritarian government would never be tough on people like them. Trump may be the least American of our presidents when it comes to freedom. He talks about executing people, and he was practically wetting himself with excitement on January 6th, 2021, when the insurrectionists were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”
Far more sinister, though, and a much bigger deal is the way that “us against them” –particularly in the area of immigration — has always been Trump’s biggest issue.
And as his situation becomes more and more desperate with the law, Trump comes closer and closer to going Full Hitler. In an interview with a far-right website “The National Pulse,” Trump was asked about the southern border.
He replied:
“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”
Those are exactly the things Hitler used to say, that outsiders were poisoning the pure Aryan blood.
He may not be Hitler, but he is definitely a Nazi.