In mid-November the Washington Post included an article: “How Trump’s rhetoric compares to Hitler’s.”
Here are some excerpts:
Donald Trump has long toyed with the language of famous autocrats, authoritarians and fascists. Think: “enemy of the people,” “retribution” and the frequent, years-long allusions to political violence.
But even by his standards, the former president is now mining darker territory — with overtones of some of the ugliest episodes in recent world history.
The Washington Post this weekend summarized Trump’s Veterans Day speech in a headline thusly: “Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini.”
Trump had not only likened his political opponents to “vermin” but also suggested that they represent a “threat from within” that is more dangerous than the threats from beyond our borders. Both are themes seized upon by strongmen to foment populist movements.
Trump’s campaign responded by seemingly taking issue with that “ridiculous” framing. But in the same breath, it also promised that Trump’s “snowflake” critics’ “entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
As that response indicates, they’re not exactly apologizing for this type of rhetoric. It is, at the very least and to be quite charitable, a calculated attempt at provocation. And after years of this kind of rhetoric and events like Jan. 6, you could certainly forgive people for worrying that it’s more than that.
“The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told The Post. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.”
Just how similar is Trump’s language to the actual words of those figures? Let’s examine how his recent comments compare to Adolf Hitler’s.
Trump said Saturday: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
As The Post’s story noted, likening one’s political opponents and certain elements within the country to vermin and beasts was a tactic employed by Hitler.
Hitler used the construct to justify the extermination of Jews and to attack Marxists, while Trump has used it more broadly to suggest that his opponents are subhuman.
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