photo by: Creators Syndicate

Keith Raffel

For years now, I’ve tried to resist the temptation of writing a side-by-side comparison between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. I agreed with Abraham Foxman, the longtime head of the Anti-Defamation League, who said last year, “Comparing him to Hitler is an over-the-top exaggeration which trivializes who Hitler was and the horrors he brought.”

Yes, I still agree with Foxman that Trump is no Hitler. But the growing number of similarities in their words and actions can no longer be ignored.

First, there’s the claim to serving a divine purpose. Hitler ghost-wrote a biography that deemed him Germany’s “messiah.” In his victory speech in November, Trump asserted, “God spared my life for a reason.”

Even while ostensibly embracing religion, both men declared that some humans are no more than animals. Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf” of the need to “wipe out this vermin,” because “all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” Trump has said undocumented people living in the United States are “not humans, they’re animals” “that live like vermin” and are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The two men have habitually used untruths to win popular support. A U.S. intelligence analysis during World War II said Hitler thought that if you repeated a lie “frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.” Trump’s former press secretary Stephanie Grisham has stated Trump used to tell her, “As you long as you keep repeating something, it doesn’t matter what you say.”

According to Gen.John Kelly, Trump asked in his first term why U.S. generals couldn’t be loyal like Hitler’s generals. In his second term, Trump is taking steps to make his wish come true. He says the new designee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff once told him, “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”

Like Hitler, Trump is a bully on the international stage. In 1938, Hitler threatened to attack Czechoslovakia in order to annex a piece of it. In the past few months, Trump has set forth an American claim on Greenland. Like Hitler, he’s refused to rule out taking the territory by force of arms.

Then there’s the shared admiration for the Russian leader of their day. In 1939, Hitler signed a nonaggression pact with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin whom he regarded as “one of the most extraordinary figures in world history” who “knows his models, Genghis Khan and the others, very well.” Trump has called the current Russian dictator Vladimir Putin “very smart” and the Russian invasion of Ukraine “genius.”

In 1932, Hitler ran for the German presidency and lost by 6 million votes. His attempts to overturn the results based on voter fraud were dismissed by a court. Hitler did, of course, succeed in coming to power in 1933. Trump, too, sought to retain the American presidency in 2021 despite the election results. He lost over 60 court cases claiming election fraud but nevertheless won back the White House in last November’s election.

Twenty-three prominent German industrialists had a secret meeting with Hitler in February 1933 where they agreed to back him with funds in the next month’s election. Hitler told them even if he did not win, he would maintain power “by other means.” He did win. Trump has Elon Musk, the world’s richest individual and his campaign’s largest individual contributor, serving as his hatchet man in cutting and undercutting the federal civil service. The world’s next two richest persons — Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta — were also on display at Trump’s inauguration.

In its first year, Hitler’s regime passed the “Editor’s Law” under which all journalists would answer to the Ministry of Propaganda, not their publications. Non-Aryans and opponents of the regime were dismissed. Trump’s nominee to head the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, wants the commission to punish broadcasters who are unfair to Trump. Investigations into NPR, NBC and PBS have already been launched.

Hitler and Trump both took steps to round up targeted persons in their early days in office. Two months after taking office in January 1933, Hitler’s regime opened Dachau as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners” with a capacity of 5,000 people. Less than two weeks after taking office, Trump issued an executive order to expand facilities at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay “to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens.” News reports indicate plans are underway for Guantanamo to hold up to 30,000 prisoners.

Hitler called his regime the Third Reich, a successor to the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire founded by Charlemagne. Trump looks backward as well. He wants to make America great again as it was in the days of his privileged childhood in New York City when “we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do.”

There’s more, but it’s enough to say for now that Trump is no defender of democracy, nor an opponent of aggression, nor a champion of civil rights nor a speaker of the truth. Thank goodness, though, he is a long way from matching the wickedness, murderousness and destructiveness of Hitler. Still, the fact that Trump is so closely tracking the Nazi’s playbook should frighten every American.

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.