Comparing ANYTHING to Nazi Germany and Adolph Hitler has been the third rail of American political debate for 74 years. And rightfully so. Even when our leaders have made the most egregious policy decisions such as the second Iraq war or failure to intervene in foreign instances of genocide, never has the president of the United States proposed the elimination of an entire demographic. And that is an important defining distinction between the Third Reich and any actual or perceived American transgression.
However, three events yesterday should make us contemplate if the time has come to reconsider whether this long-standing norm of political decorum still applies. The first was an opinion piece by Gideon Rachman (pictured here) in the Financial Times. He asked whether we should be examining the same questions in 2019 that Sebastian Haffner raised in his 1939 memoir Defying Hitler. While Rachman qualified his column, saying that he was not trying to compare Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to Hitler or Mussolini, he wondered if he was feeling what others sensed in the 1930’s.
Then, as now, political moderates were constantly having to ask the question, how serious is this? Is it just distasteful or is it truly dangerous? And is the right response to plunge into politics or to retreat into private life?
Which brings me to event #2. For a majority of Americans the distasteful line in the sand was crossed in June, 2015 when Trump announced his candidacy for president. And Trump has done nothing since to step back behind it. As his verbal attacks have increased in both number and volume, there is little doubt they have incited violence. Yesterday, lawyers for Cesar Sayoc, who sent 12 explosive devices to Democratic leaders and news outlets, admitted Trump’s influence over their client.
A rational observer may have brushed off Trump’s tweets as hyperbole, but Mr. Sayoc took them to heart…Because of his cognitive limitations and mental illness, he believed outlandish reports in the news and on social media, which increasingly made him unhinged. He became obsessed with ‘attacks’ from those he perceived as Trump’s enemies…President Trump did nothing to dissuade this message.
Could this be the first time in legal history a defendant pleads not guilty by reason of another person’s insanity? Regardless, this moves the needle from distasteful to irresponsible, but it still does not meet the Hitler comparison test.
Until event #3. During an Oval Office photo op with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, in response to a question about the continuing presence of U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan, Trump responded:
I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone. It would be over in — literally in ten days. And I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to go that route.
But a man who values winning at any cost, in this case 35.6 million Afghans, just might. Or a man, whose first wife Ivana, in a 1990 interview with Marie Brenner of Vanity Fair, described how she had “told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.”
To be fair, one still should not equate Trump with Hitler. After all, the German fuhrer tried to keep his efforts at ethic cleansing a secret. Donald Trump brags about the possibility from the Oval Office. Hitler did not have access to nuclear weapons and it took years to round up his victims one by one. Trump does and merely needs to issue the code and it will all be over “literally in ten days.”
In his FT op-ed, Rachman asks, “When do you sound the alarm?” There is only one response now. As Veronica Quaiffe (Geena Davis) warns in David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly when told by scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) there is nothing to worry about concerning his teleportation experiment, “No! Be afraid! Be very afraid!”
For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP
Free floating anxiety now. Should we blow the 2020 elections, fear will stalk the streets. No choices at this point are clear as to how effectively to deal with Trump’s criminality, sedition, and probable treason. Timing, chances of success, and impacts on Trump’s base and our general electorate all play critical roles in making any decision to bring impeachment proceedings. I am paying close attention to the nuances in Robert Mueller’s testimony. Too much, too soon? Too little, too late? Do we keep the heat on and slow boil the creep in his own juices, hoping for a positive election outcome because his enablers will either not show up at the ballot box – or vote for anyone else. Here is an interesting link from one of my West Coast friends… I still like Biden – and/or anyone else who can win.
https://www.ft.com/content/44f96050-ac56-11e9-8030-530adfa879c2?fbclid=IwAR0mMVfQfvqGwso9LeoAPbcaPFryJLuWOfJu98Yy7ui-wJ-tZxUakr4m6wA