Is the Trump Hitler Analogy Appropriate?

Offensive comparison, or important parallel?

Few modern political figures inspire such polar reactions as Donald Trump. Those who support him often view him as something akin to a savior. Those who oppose him fear him. They consider the threat that he poses as one tantamount to the great tyrants of history.

Though I’ve voted for a Democrat in each election since 2016, I’m not what those on the right would call a “Liberal.” I take issue with my political party, the progressive movement, and the idea that “cancel culture” is the new law of the land. I grow frustrated with the people on my side of the aisle who’ve seemingly spent the last 8 years coming up with new and creative ways to lambast their former leader. In my family, the dinners we have with each passing holiday have turned into little more than excuses to complain ad nauseam about everything Trump and his party are doing wrong.

They’re hardly alone. The sentiment that Trump is the next Adolf Hitler isn’t uncommon. On one hand, comparing Trump to Hitler has a way of diminishing who exactly Hitler was, and the extent of the atrocities that he committed.

But on the other hand, there was a time when Hitler’s horrible plans hadn’t yet come to fruition. There was a time when the tyrant was little more than words. There was a time when people couldn’t have begun to imagine things like concentration camps or ghettos within their own country.

Trump has invited parallels between himself and the infamous German despot. In his repeated use of the word “vermin” and claims that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” it’s hard not to find a similarity to the writer of Mein Kampf. A bevy of sources throughout the years have claimed that Trump even owns a copy of the book and has a private admiration for Hitler. While it’s something Trump has been reluctant to admit in public, in his not-so-secret praises for the despots of the present day, from Rodrigo Duterte and Vladimir Putin to King Jong Un, Jair Bolsonaro, and especially, Victor Orbán, it’s hard not to see an aspiring autocrat.

In his repeated claims of absolute rule and immunity, Trump, at the very least, is an undemocratic danger. His revenge-centered ambitions for his second term are representative of far greater perils than those that come with most democratic elections. He’s vowed repeatedly to seek retaliation against his political opponents. And when asked about his specific plans, there are few extremes he’s been unwilling to entertain.

Whether Trump would get as far as mass genocide is something on which I still have my doubts. But in order to remain in power, I think that there’s very little he wouldn’t do. In his willingness to allow armed militants to roam the capital, erect guillotines, and chant “Hang Mike Pence!” I see a megalomaniac. I see a man indifferent to the death of his citizens and supporters. I see someone who would sooner watch his country war with itself than willingly forfeit rule. I see a sociopath who’s not above imprisoning dissenters and I see a sprawling mass of supporters that would cheer if he ever did.

One of the strange things to consider about Hitler’s rise to power is that the German citizens who allowed it to happen are little different than us. It’s people everywhere who fall in line with the beliefs and actions of the masses. It’s people everywhere who obey orders when given by a high enough authority.

The Milgram Experiment, conducted in 1961 by psychologist Stanley Milgram, revealed the unsettling ease with which individuals obey authority figures, even when orders conflict with their personal morality. In the experiment, participants, under the guidance of an authority figure, administered what they believed were electric shocks to strangers. The shocks they inflicted grew in intensity as the test continued.

The experiment confirmed that it was a disturbing majority of participants who were willing to send innocent peers into writhing pain just so long as the authority figure had directed it.

Under authoritarian leadership, ordinary people can commit heinous acts.

Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment also explored the level of evil that people were capable of when assigned positions as guards and prisoners. Within little time, the subjects involved were reduced to extremes of sadism and submission. While the study was intended to extend for two weeks, it was clear after only six days that the participants could endure no more.

When asked how people could ever be driven to the level of inhumanity of Germans during the Holocaust, one high school teacher, Ron Jones, sought to prove how in a simple shift to his teaching methodology. He aimed to demonstrate how easily people could be swayed into supporting a movement that resembled a fascist regime.

Within just five days of his new approach to instruction, the experiment saw students adopting a sense of superiority and displaying loyalty to the group over their own individuality. The unwitting subjects were instructed to adopt new mannerisms and hand signs reminiscent of Nazi salutes. They began recruiting new members and excommunicating the unloyal ones. They wore armbands and created a secret police force to ensure the rules of the “Third Wave Movement” were obeyed.

As with the Stanford Prison experiment, the study needed to be abruptly halted before it began to result in major, real-world consequences. On the final day of the experiment, Jones sat down his subjects before a TV. On it was a reel of WWII footage. He revealed to the shell-shocked class what they’d become in only a week.

Numerous people who’ve endured the horrors of The Holocaust have likened life in the United States to the portentous years before the war first broke out. One survivor claimed that it was like life in pre-war Berlin.

Another survivor, Irene Butter, stated that “Four years ago, we could not have guessed that rioters with Nazi symbols would break into the Capitol to subvert a fairly elected president. None of us can afford to be a bystander to history.”

When asked about his thoughts on the January 6th riot a year after the fact, professor, linguist, and activist Noam Chomsky explained:

“Well, an effort to overthrow an elected government is what’s called a coup. It almost succeeded. It’s now been reported extensively. We have videotapes, we have details…. But it has been followed by a soft coup, which is taking place before our eyes. You read about it every day. The Republicans are planning carefully to ensure that next time, their coup will succeed. They’re doing it very systematically, perfectly in the open, at the state level where elections take place,… [trying to] ensure that if people vote the wrong way, the vote won’t be counted. The Republican Party is no longer a political party. It’s a neofascist party.”

But it isn’t only leftists that feel this way. 2012 Republican presidential candidate and long serving United States Senator Mitt Romney stated plainly that “Donald Trump represents a failure of character, which is changing, I think in many respects, the psyche of our nation and the heart of our nation. And that’s something which takes a long time, if ever, to repair. A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

Trump isn’t yet Hitler. But the instruments Hitler used to gain power are alive and well in Trump’s continued candidacy. He employs the “Big Lie” technique as effectively as Hitler himself, repeating untrue claims over and over until they’re believed and spouted by masses. He did it with the claim that Biden stole the 2020 election and he repeatedly recycled falsehoods throughout his term and both of his impeachment trials.

Trump derides the people who disagree with him and he speaks of immigrants as though they’re something less than human. He scapegoats minorities and triumphantly assures his supporters that he’s the one true solution for the struggling nation.

Whether he’d get as far as the tyrants of the past is uncertain. But if there’s one thing I learned from my time in Israel, it’s that there was an entire lead-up to the holocaust before people began losing their lives and being crammed into train cars like cattle. There was a time when the discrimination was only in words and all of the anti-Jewish propaganda was uniformly dismissed as hyperbole.

Leaving the country’s Holocaust museum, one of the messages its workers were most careful to impart was that unconscionable tragedies can happen. Genocides can occur. Throughout history they’re far more common than we’d like to believe: it happened in Rwanda, Bosnia, East Timor, Darfur, Guatemala, and Cambodia. These massacres aren’t only confined to our history books. It’s when enough people say and do nothing that atrocities take place. It’s when enough people dismiss rhetoric like Trump’s and ask “What’s the worst that could happen?” that irreconcilable mistakes are made.

Trump hasn’t threatened genocide yet. But as he continues vowing revenge and parroting history’s worst tyrants, it’s clear that allowing leaders like this to hold office isn’t a gamble our world can afford to make. Though Trump isn’t Hitler, I’m not convinced that he’s above Hitler’s actions. I don’t think he has the diplomacy or foresight to carry them out on his own. But that there are now legions of armed supporters that blindly act on his every word is no longer a matter of dispute. Even incipient tyrants need to be stopped.