Springtime for Trump-Hitler

Springtime for Trump-Hitler

By Abe Greenwald for Commentary 

Here we go again. Another Donald-Trump-as-dictator media cycle is upon us. Last week, Larry David wrote a satirical piece for the New York Timescomparing his fellow comic Bill Maher’s dinner with Trump to dining with, and being charmed by, Adolf Hitler. Liberal law professor and Democratic adviser Laurence Tribe told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Trump’s crackdown on Harvard  is redolent of tactics used by Hitler, Viktor Orban, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. At the Guardian, Simon Tisdall compares Trump to Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, and Vladimir Putin and says of Trump, “In key respects, he’s worse.”  

Yes, Trump, just like Hitler, is trying to use the federal purse strings, immigration enforcement, and tax law to rein in or deport genocidal anti-Semites. Just like Putin and Milosevic, Trump is putting months of effort into an idealistic attempt at ending a war of invasion. And just like Assad, he’s negotiating (pointlessly) to get Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. 

But, of course, Trump is worse than all these men combined because, in Tisdall’s worlds, of his greater “willingness and capacity to harm the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, wreak global economic mayhem and threaten nuclear annihilation.” 

In my last newsletter, I wrote that Trump-watching can get kind of boring. Let it be known, however, that watching Trump’s enemies lose their mind never gets old. 

It’s interesting to watch because hypocrisy is always riveting. People who sat on their hands (at best) for a year and a half while a wave of exterminationist terror-support broke across the U.S. are now bracing themselves for a Nazi takeover. Those who ignored or defended the Biden administration’s campaign of partisan vengeance are now warning of authoritarianism. The same commentariat that watched Joe Biden gift Afghanistan to the Taliban, invite Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and enrich Iran in the run-up to October 7 are suddenly losing it over global instability. We all enjoy the hypocrite’s moment of unmasking.    

The Trump-Hitler talk is also fascinating because it raises an important question: Why can’t Trump’s liberal critics stick to fighting him on legitimate ground? It’s something his conservative detractors do all the time. There’s so much to work with. You can argue that Trump is flirting with unconstitutional action, emboldening bad actors abroad, weakening ties with our allies, causing global economic tumult, weaponizing his own Justice Department, and disrupting the necessary functions of the federal government—all without comparing him to history’s greatest mass murderers. 

Here’s the answer: They can’t critique Trump’s policies and actions strictly on the factual details because, for them, the very fact of Trump’s being in the White House, yet again, casts a shadow so vast that all the particulars of his presidency become lost in the darkness. 

Stop calling it Trump Derangement Syndrome. That’s too vague and blandly reminiscent of less pathological episodes of liberal pathology. This is more consequential. What we’re actually looking at deserves the old psychoanalytic diagnosis of “Hysterical Blindness.” The people who can’t see in Trump anything but a reincarnated monster are still suffering from the unresolved trauma caused by finding out that everyone in the country didn’t agree with them back in 2016, when Trump was first elected. That was the equivalent of being told that world as they knew it was an illusion. A trauma that massive—it’s unlikely they’ll ever get over it.

As with many psychoanalytic conditions, the Hysterical Blindness of the Trump-traumatized is self-sustaining. Every time the Trump-Hitler chorus speaks up, they give Trump a boost he didn’t know he needed. They are made foolish. They go too far in their countermeasures, and he benefits by comparison. The man they call worse than Hitler ends up looking less unhinged than they do. And that irony is the final compelling element of the whole spectacle. Compare Trump to the founder of Nazism and your name is forever linked with minimizing the enormity of the Holocaust. Trump, for his part, just moves on.