That wasn’t necessarily a given, mind you. The man who can confidently rattle off nouns like “man, woman, person” in order to prove that he does not have dementia but who stares directly into the sun during a solar eclipse despite having entire White House teams devoted to reminding him not to things like that has seldom been particularly clear on his thoughts vis-a-vis the Nazis. Or neo-Nazis. Or violently xenophobic strongman-worshipping political movements in general. But no, we now have it on the record, at least sort of, via a legal document filed by whichever of Trump’s lawyers still had free time during ongoing probes of alleged tax fraud, bank fraud, election interference, rape, and oh right the attempting to overthrow the elected United States government thing.
Trump doesn’t like being compared to Hitler. Got it. Checkin’ off the box now, the one marked doesn’t like to be compared to Hitler, so we’ll remember this going forward even if Donald Trump forgets it. No likey Hitler comparisons.
There are very few people who like to be compared to Adolf Hitler, and now we are fairly sure that Donald Trump is one of them. Yep, making another note of it now, just in case we lose the first form. Gonna file it and everything.
Unfortunately for Donald Trump, who may or may not be like Hitler, Trump’s lawsuit against CNN is still as dead as the top Nazi leadership because it genuinely doesn’t matter in America whether or not a president of the United States does or doesn’t like being compared to Adolf Hitler. Becoming president means you give up, pretty damn clearly, any pretense of being anything other than a public figure, and here in the United States of Kickass we are allowed to compare public figures to dead Nazi leaders as often as we like, whether or not the comparison holds any merit at all. The press is allowed to do it. The public is allowed to do it. It is done approximately one hundred million times a day on the internet; even as we speak, if you have any public-facing job whatsoever, somebody is probably comparing you to Adolf Hitler right now and you don’t even know about it.
Nothing else in Trump’s extremely stupid post-coup treason-soaked lawsuit matters. To be sure, Trump’s lawyers are arguing that this case shows our old free speech protections need to be torn up because, like, Donald is super upset by all of this, but that is not how these things work and even if Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who is also like Hitler if Hitler was an insufferable pedant in addition to being a malevolent strategic liar, wanted to rewrite the Constitution to give Donald Trump and his fellow nationalists a special cannot-be-compared-to-Hitler carveout, nobody in the public would listen or care or obey.
Mind you, Trump’s lawyers go out of their way to remind us that CNN has actually discussed whether Donald Trump is an Americanized version of Hitler. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” themes of national rebirth amid the supposed death of national values are extremely f–king Nazi, and the attempt by Trump, Trump’s allies, and Trump’s thuggish supporters to erase democracy through violence rather than abide the public rejection of their themes are not just fascist, but a mirror of Hitler’s own political plays.
Trump’s enemies list also matches up with the Nazi version rather well, from his declaration that a free press able to critique him is the “enemy of the state” to the movement’s assertions that anyone who is not a white native-born conservative Christian is “destroying” the nation and needs to have new laws passed to constrain them.
While Donald Trump and his now-seditious movement of national crapsacks do resemble Hitler and his Nazi movement rather uncannily, as historians have been repeatedly warning and as CNN and other elements of the press had the audacity to, you know, bring up, it’s also quite clear that the similarities are still quite narrow. There are plenty of ways Donald Trump does not resemble Hitler, and if Trump is irritated by the comparisons then he should be cheered by the many, many differences.
As various mostly seditious conservative pundits will tell you, Hitler was allegedly a vegetarian. Donald Trump is pretty much the opposite of a vegetarian, and reportedly isn’t a fan of any vegetarian food more vegetarian than ketchup.
Nazi Germany was known for its uniforms. Donald Trump’s movement can’t manage anything more coordinated than China-made hats.
Adolf Hitler may or may not have attempted to woo supporters with lotteries in which common German supporters could allegedly “win” a fancy dinner with the head blowhard himself—only for it to be later revealed that nobody ever actually won such a prize—but we can be certain that Adolf Hitler never attempted to sell extremely creepy drawings of himself in an attempt to profit off of “blockchains.”
Hitler was never reported to have difficulty walking down slight inclines in dress shoes.
Hitler never met Ted Nugent, nor did he ever invite Ted Nugent to anything.
Several German companies with ties to the wartime Nazi regime are even today successful business enterprises; Donald Trump’s companies have routinely failed within months or years of their founding.
The most important and definitive difference, however, is that Adolf Hitler died in a wartime bunker back in 1945 while Donald Trump is, mostly unambiguously, asserted to be alive. Trump is reported to visit many bunkers during the course of each of his golf trips, but has died in none of them. Hitler also died, by his own hand, alongside a woman who allegedly may have truly loved him. No matter what happens in any bunker in Donald Trump’s future, the possibility that anyone in his family or circle of friends would at this point get sand in their shoes on his behalf, much less leave the land of the alive on his whim and say-so, seems so remote that it cannot be seriously entertained. Checkmate, Hitler comparisons.
Again, all of this is noise. Trump, who has tried very hard to be Hitler but who remains for now a mere seditionist runt, is not going to win his lawsuit. It is not going to be close, unless we are all in very much more trouble than we think. All of it exists so that Donald Trump can continue his lifelong habit of being very publicly mad at someone, a need that is so great that Trump is willing to ignore the publicity he’s giving to press outlets willing to compare the violence-stoking seditionist to history’s worst and most murderous autocrats.
He can go nuts with that, but it ain’t gonna sell hats. And it’s not exactly clear that Donald Trump, who changes his mind on absolutely everything if he thinks the audience in front of him wants to hear something different from what he’s said in the past, is going to stick with his current demands that his seditious movement of chuds not be compared to the Nazis. That is why we wrote it down two separate times, so that there will be a record of the current preference. It’s only prudent to document these things.
Happy New Year! Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter is on the show today to talk about the wild garbage fire that was the Republican speaker of the House vote. Kerry and Markos also break down what this onionskin-thin conservative majority can and cannot do in the coming year, as well as what the Democratic representatives can do to make Kevin McCarthy’s life just that much tougher.
