We are saturated in the climate of violence that the Democrats and their media adjunct have fostered. It is easy to take it as a given, but the assassination of Charlie Kirk prompts us to pause over it, as John did in “Why do they call Trump Hitler?” Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Victor Davis Hanson this past Friday reminded me of this classic expression of the conventional leftist cliché. This they believe.
We chose the cover image, based on a well-known 1932 Hitler campaign poster, for a precise reason: that anyone transported back to 1932 Germany could very, very easily have explained away Herr Hitler’s excesses and been persuaded that his critics were going overboard. After all,… pic.twitter.com/x79Rkh86O1
— The New Republic (@newrepublic) July 7, 2024
What has become the conventional leftist cliché represents the conventional wisdom of the left. It extends far beyond Trump to those of us who support him, such as Charlie Kirk. It runs so deep that Joe Biden thought he would ride it to reelection in 2024 despite his patent incapacity.
We recall the leftist tarring with the Hitler brush of every Republican president going back to Ronald Reagan. Reagan was Hitler. George H.W. Bush was Hitler. Don Henley made contributed in his own way in “The End of the Innocence.” He turned Bush 45 into “that sad old man we elected king,” but that was in June 1989, within six months of Bush’s inauguration. Harsher words were yet to come. George W. Bush was of course Bushitler. You can look it up.
The theme returned in a big way with Donald Trump. Indeed, Trump has given birth to a genre of political books in which he is really Hitler.
Anne Applebaum has written two books exploring the theme. Timothy Snyder has turned the theme into an industry. The prominent historian made his name at Yale but decamped to the University of Toronto, where the livin’ is free and easy. He too has two Trump is Hitler books. See Peter Savodnik’s Free Press essay “Timothy Snyder Spent Years Studying Fascists. He Thinks Trump Is One.”
Snyder’s former Yale colleague Jason Stanley is now Snyder’s University of Toronto colleague. He has joined Snyder in Canada. Stanley’s wife told a Canadian magazine: “I have two black Jewish kids, and I want them to grow up in a free country.” Stanley’s contribution to the Trump is Hitler genre is How Fascism Works.
Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zibalatt drew on a global roster of recently failed democracies to identify symptoms of would-be autocrats. Bill Keller noted parenthetically in the New York Times: “Donald Trump checks all the boxes.”
And so on.
With Trump’s reelection, Trump’s supporters need to be dealt with. President Obama seemed to encourage violence to thwart the political opposition: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” That illuminates the true meaning of Michelle Obama’s admonition “When they go low, we go high.” In any event she abandoned it in the interest of defeating…well, you can probably guess by now.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened the Supreme Court itself. He went to the steps of the Supreme Court to lob this bomb: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh: You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” As we have learned, Nicholas Roske was listening.
President Biden extended the Trump is Hitler theme to MAGA world. Democrat Senator Chris Murphy extended it to the current political situation with his clarifying advice: “We’re in a war right now to save this country. And so you have to be willing to do whatever is necessary in order to save our country.”
As I say, the theme here has saturated the culture. In Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate and the related movies, Communist “brainwashing” programmed an American assassin to take out a presidential candidate. Now the Democrats, the academy, the publishers, the media generally have achieved a similar effect. It’s not brainwashing exactly when a light rinse would suffice. However, they seem to have generated a crew of assassins to do the work of Condon’s Raymond Shaw in the service of “the Manchurian candidate(s).”
In his first administration President Trump was himself derided as the Manchurian candidate through the device of the Democrats’ Russia hoax. Looking back, one might think it was another case of leftist projection.
