Trump: The Man, the Meme
Yet while the frank demagoguery of Trump’s most incendiary statements makes these historical comparisons particularly tempting, he is just the most recent in a line of American politicians to be, in effect, Hitlerized. Hillary Clinton has been reimagined as “Hitlary,” and when Barack Obama, with his plans for extended health coverage, wasn’t being portrayed as the Joker, he was shown made up like the Fuhrer. Before that, it was George W. Bush who was Hitler. This may just be a particularly potent example of what is known as Godwin’s law, which has it, more or less, that every argument will eventually devolve into one side referring to the other as Nazis.
.. If every politician is like Hitler, than what do you call someone who isreally bad? Rosenfeld emphasized that he disagreed with Trump on nearly every issue, but said that there were plenty of homegrown versions of Trump’s kind of rhetoric readily at hand in the history of the United States, including the nineteenth-century Nativist movement, making a reach back to Berlin in the nineteen-thirties not only historically inaccurate, but unnecessary.
.. “The idea that Donald Trump is a Fascist or a Nazi artificially distinguishes him from the rest of the Republican field,” he said. “A claim that he is a Fascist means that the others are somehow qualitatively different. And while Trump is clearly more rhetorically extreme, he shares much in common with the nativism and nationalism of the other Republican candidates.”