When we compare Trump with Hitler, we aren’t comparing him to Hitler in the 1940’s. We compare him to Hitler when he was coming into power in the 1930’s. It is never a literal comparison. Both were psychopaths. Both didn’t value all human lives equally. Both demonized certain groups of people including regular people and their enemies. Trump has plans to deport people and makes veiled threats to imprision enemies and not exterminate them.
It is chilling that reasonable people like us, who avoid using hyperbole just for the sake of using hyperbole, say things like "what they will do when Trump starts ordering Putin-style assassinations? Some will try to thwart him and some will pull the trigger, as they have throughout centuries." This is from a Sabrina Haake reply to a comment I made on one of her Substacks.
I think the "Putin the assassin” analogy is appropriate. So are many Nazi analogies as long as they are qualified and explained.
It isn't just the wrtten word where Nazi comparisons are made. Sometimes we just post photos. Do a Google Image search for Stephen Miller and Joseph Goebels:
Some of us, me for example, put Hitler moustaches on Trump and Tom Homan on BlueSky:
There may be a time when even mockery like mine, above, isn’t remotely amusing. If things get as deadly serious as they might become so dire that even those desperate to find something to smile about will realize that they are trying to fiddle while the country burns. For example, two weeks ago I wrote that it was time for Rachel Maddow to stop chuckling and get deadly serious. Now things have gotten so much worse that even smiling over a major Trump failure or faux pas is, at least to me, disquieting.
Part of my sensitivity to this is being Jewish and growing hearing my partent talk about the Holocaust. I think about a Jewish family in Nazi German listening to a comedy show on Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (Nazi radio)) while they see that down the street the Gestopo is dragging their neighbor’s family into a van.
As for the “Morning Joe” show, I see a time when they will eliminate their sports chatter and show biz coverage.
While on the topic of MSNBC I found something I approved of. Joy Reid had Nayyera Haq on this morning. She was a senior advisor in the State Department and also worked in the White House ( Here's her website bio: https://www.nayyera.com/about The panel was discussing how Vance met with the far-right German party leader and not the chancelor. What I found gratifying and noteworthy is when another panelist asked her what she made of this, she said it was an embrace of Nazis and Nazism. This is the first time I've heard the word Nazi on an MSNBC show.
Here in our Substack-sphere many of us don't hesitate to say, basically, that if someone walks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, and acts like a Nazi, they are Nazi.
Obviously, I don’t mean one of those wackos like Hitler loving Holocaust denying Kanye West. I mean small “n” nazi:
From my online dictionary here’s the defintion of Nazi “Not a member of the far-right National Socialist German Workers' Party, rather a person with extreme racist or authoritarian views. or a person who seeks to impose their views on others in a very autocratic or inflexible way.”
Because most people aren't that familiar with the abbreviations for the agencies that replaced the KGB - the SVR, FSB, FSO, and GRU, I always use the term Gestapo to describe the personal enforcement group of thugs Trump wants at his command to carry out his psychopathic orders.
Hitler had Himmler, Göring, and lesser known names, to run his Gestapo and SS. We will have Thom Homan and, if he is approved, will have Kash Patel.
Hardly a week goes by that I don't replay the final scene of "Apocalypse Now" in my mind with a dying h Brando saying "the horror, the horror."
Addendum:
There is a place for finely honed satire and humor devised to send a message to a population which is being propagandized by a despotic regime. Here’s an article about how the British did this during World War II.
Excerpts:
The BBC’s German Service used satire to reach ordinary Germans in World War Two. Its aim was to break the Nazi monopoly on news within the Third Reich.
It’s a late night in London in 1940, and Austrian exile Robert Lucas is writing at his desk. Bombs are raining down on the city every night, Hitler’s army is winning throughout Europe and the invasion of England has become a genuine prospect. In spite of the air-raid sirens and, as he put it “the hell’s noise of the war machinery" going off all around him, Lucas is focused on the job at hand: to “fight for the souls of the Germans”. He is composing a radio broadcast aimed at citizens of the Third Reich. But this is not a passionate plea for them to come to their senses. This is an attempt to make them laugh.
Example:
The quirky content of the programmes should be understood in the context of this curious alliance. Adolf Hirnschal is a series of fictitious letters written by a German corporal on the front line to his wife. The protagonist reads the letters to his fighting comrade before they are posted. On the surface Adolf Hirnschal is devoted to his “beloved Führer”. Yet so far-fetched are his exclamations of loyalty that the intention is clear: to expose the shallowness and mendacity of Nazi proclamations. In his first letter after war is declared on Russia in 1941 he tells his wife how he welcomed the news from his lieutenant that they are being transferred to the Russian border:
I jump up in joy and say: ‘Mr Lieutenant, kindly asking for permission to express that I am tremendously pleased that we are now fraternising with the Russians. Did not our beloved Führer already say in 1939 that our friendship with the Russians is irrevocable and irreversible?’
Thus Hirnschal exposes the hypocrisy of Hitler’s policy towards Russia, all under the cover of absolute loyalty.