76 Years of the Left's Hitlers: From the Little Man on the Wedding Cake to Donald Trump

pjmedia.com

On Saturday evening, we saw where the left’s overheated rhetoric leads.

Leftists have called Trump a traitor, an insurrectionist, a dictator, and much more. Above all, they have repeatedly likened him to the man whose name has become synonymous with evil, Adolf Hitler. Is it any wonder, in light of the way the left has portrayed Trump since 2015, that someone tried to kill him?

Trump, however, is by no means the left’s first Hitler, and likely won’t be the last. You probably remember “Bushitler,” but this reprehensible and incendiary tactic goes back for earlier than Bush 43. The left has been using it for decades, and despite the assassination attempt, Donald Trump isn’t even likely to be the left’s last Hitler.

Leftist propaganda outlets have resorted to this tactic unashamedly. The June 2024 issue of the New Republic features a Photoshop blend of Trump and Hitler. On Dec. 20, 2023, the Washington Post published an op-ed by none other than Mike Godwin, the originator of “Godwin’s Law.” This “law” has been characterized as the idea that in any argument where someone characterizes his opponent as Hitler, the one who makes the comparison loses, for a person would have to be monstrously evil to warrant comparison to the mass murder of millions. Yet Godwin’s op-ed is entitled “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.”

In fact, Godwin has grandiosely given us permission to liken Trump to Hitler many times over the years. Hey, thanks, Mike, but it doesn’t look as if anyone was waiting around for your blessing to smear Republicans in this way. In Sept. 2012, The Hill reported that a delegate to the Democratic National Convention from Kansas “invoked Hitler while criticizing the accuracy of Romney campaign talking points. ‘It’s like Hitler said: If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big lie, and if you tell it often enough and say it in a loud enough voice, some people are going to believe you.’”

In Aug. 2008, Madonna, who would go on to fantasize publicly about blowing up the Trump White House, released a video in which she juxtaposed photos of John McCain and Hitler, inviting the viewer to regard the Republican candidate as just like the Führer.

Comparisons of George W. Bush to Hitler were common. Unfunny leftist comedian Janeane Garofalo called the Bush administration the “43rd Reich.” Actor David Clennon said: “I’m not comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler—because George Bush, for one thing, is not as smart as Adolf Hitler. And secondly George Bush has much more power than Adolf Hitler ever had.” Yeah, right. None other than George Soros warned that Bush subscribed to the “supremacist ideology of Nazi Germany.”

Before Bush, the Republicans fielded two presidential candidates, George H. W. Bush and Bob Dole, who actually fought the Nazis. Tough to call them Hitler. Ronald Reagan, however, was a serious Hitler; a Democrat congressman, William Clay of Missouri, claimed that the Gipper was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” Nixon, of course, got it, too: in Aug. 1972, Democrat candidate George McGovern said that the Watergate break-in was “the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler.”

An even earlier Hitler was the Republicans’ 1964 candidate, conservative trailblazer Barry Goldwater. When he visited a U.S. base in Germany, a CBS Evening News correspondent said: “It is now clear that Sen. Goldwater’s interview with Der Spiegel, with its hard line appealing to right-wing elements in Germany, was only the start of a move to link up with his opposite numbers in Germany.”

The left’s first Hitler, however, was one of history’s most famous losers, the little man on the wedding cake, the man who all the polls predicted would be elected president in 1948 but whose moving plans were upended as incumbent President Harry Truman won a stunning and totally unexpected victory: Thomas E. Dewey. The potted history of the 1948 election is that Truman won by being honest and down-to-earth, dealing with the real concerns of Americans while the haughty Dewey confined himself to lofty generalities. Old Give-‘Em-Hell-Harry gets kind treatment from historians; they’ve forgotten, or don’t want us to remember, how ugly Truman’s campaign really was…