The Left’s Hitler Derangement Syndrome

I grew up being told—though I, of course, could never verify it since their corpses were roasted to ashes in the crematoria—that 200 of my relatives were murdered during the Holocaust. 

You, on the left, who contend President Donald Trump has something to do with Hitler and the Gestapo, likely know approximately what happened to them. You’re just not taking it seriously.  

Because they were Jewish, they were herded out of the ghettos where they had been barely subsisting, packed into cattle cars, and transported to one of Hitler’s various highly-efficient death camps.  

The very young, the very old, and many others were immediately selected for death. Perhaps one in five of the rest were preserved in order to endure unimaginably cruel conditions as laborers, lasting as long as they could, which often wasn’t very long at all. Their demonic overseers and the Polish winter made sure of that. 

Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, always poised to launch a seismic inanity, called Trump a “wannabe Hitler” during a July 20 TV appearance, which at least suggests he’s not quite there yet. Former Vice President Al Gore, veteran Democrat strategist James Carville, and comedian Larry David have all in recent weeks likened Trump to Hitler. Analogies to the Gestapo, the SS, and Joseph Goebbels are liberally applied to anyone who works for Trump.  

It’s all part of the “You’re Hitler” chorus that has plagued the administration from its first day with the contention, strikingly ambitious in its stupidity, that Elon Musk was delivering the fascist salute during a post-Inauguration rally. 

I get the politics here, and it’s abhorrent. But no doubt some of this is true belief. So, for those stricken with advanced Trump Derangement Syndrome, a few comments. 

Trump bears no resemblance to Hitler, and any contention otherwise is, whether stated to win elections or out of conviction, an insult to everyone who died at the Fuhrer’s hand.  

Hitler was a sociopathic failed artist who wrote a book about the mayhem and murder he planned to unleash, and then, after obtaining power, got right down to business.  

Trump is a gregarious extrovert with legions of friends and a small army of children and grandchildren, not storm troopers. He succeeded mightily in mainstream society as a businessman, bestselling author, and TV star, and then got himself elected president twice. Sure, he doesn’t exemplify polite society, but he’s a high-achieving iconoclast, not a pathological deviant. 

The faceoff between Trump’s executive branch and the judiciary that is underway is a serious matter that is still playing out. The Constitution and the law must be upheld. But this is not the burning of the Reichstag. 

Republicans didn’t play the Hitler card when President Joe Biden appointed a commission to study packing the Supreme Court. Or when he defied the court by forgiving student debt. “The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me,” Biden said. Is that not an authoritarian boast? 

They didn’t cast the card when the Democrat Party made sure its constituency didn’t get a choice during the 2024 presidential primaries, and then, when Biden withdrew from the race, rammed the nomination of Kamala Harris through to the winner’s circle instead allowing a truncated primary. No one called the left Nazis when they tried to lawfare their most feared political opponent, Trump, into prison. Nor when they sent a swarm of armed agents into his home in a search for documents. Nor when the top brass at our spy and federal police agencies plotted to undermine an election by falsely tying Trump to Russian election interference. 

The rise of the bureaucratic state in the U.S. hasn’t drawn comparisons to the Nazis’ expansionary fiscal policies and their lethally virulent bureaucracy. Trump’s dramatic effort to rein in the U.S. bureaucracy is described without irony by Democrats and the press as an assault on democracy rather than what it is, an effort to scale back state power over Americans’ daily lives. 

So, if you want to head down this road, there’s a lot of Hitler to go around. But no one has earned the comparison. 

What surely has been earned, with the careless invocation of Hitler, is the recognition that these Democrats do not care enough about Nazism and the Holocaust to recognize what those things truly were about. They are callous, heartless, and in their absence of compassion for its victims, guilty of imperiling the essential vow Jews have repeated to themselves and the world for 80 years: Never forget.  

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