Where Do You Go After ‘Literally Hitler’?

[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

Every Republican president is Hitler, of course, but Donald Trump is somehow even Hitlerer than all of them. It was a theme in his first term, but during this election, even the corrupt eggplant masquerading as the incumbent got into the act. Trump was Hitler – no, he was Super Hitler. He was more Hitler than Hitler. And it’s a constant theme among the lesser lights of the Democrat Party. “This is what fascism looks like,” intone very serious politicians who seem to have no idea what fascism looks like. And the Trump/Hitler thing is all over social media. Every day, as Trump exercises the legitimate powers granted to him by the American people via winning the election, another leftist mediocrity with a five-digit follower account figuratively throws up his, her, or their soft, girlish hands and says, “OK. I’m calling it – he’s Hitler.”

A different news organization than the Associated Press gets to ask Trump questions. Hitler!

Layout do-nothing government flunkies get asked to give five bullet points about what they’ve done in the last week to demonstrate their value to the American people. Hitler!

He lets feminine euroweenies know that the United States is no longer going to pick up the tab for their national defense so they can focus on giving free stuff to Third World invaders even as they arrest their own people for the crime of speaking freely. Hitler!

Elon lifted his right arm. Oh yeah, Hitler!

Whatever. It’s all stupid, and it doesn’t work anymore if it ever worked at all. You can’t call Trump “Hitler” for the nearly ten years since he came down the escalator in the farthest thing ever from a Leni Riefenstahl rally and, after he fails to grow a tiny mustache, start wearing Hugo Boss uniforms and invade Poland, expect people to take it seriously. And people don’t care. It’s now just background noise. Trump is Hitler. What else is new? What else you got?

“He’s Hitler” is a shorthand for leftist disapproval, much like the term “racist.” If you’re not a leftist – and sometimes if you are – you’re a racist. It’s not what you’ve done. It’s who you are. And the term is tossed around so promiscuously no one respects it. It doesn’t matter if you do thing X that they say is racist because you’re still going to be racist anyway. You can’t win. And when you can’t win, it’s not fair. And when it’s not fair, no one takes it seriously. It becomes a joke. No one cares. It’s like the boy who cried wolf, except they don’t teach that story in schools anymore because it privileges the male gender experience. And no, the story wouldn’t work if the boy who cried wolf were the she-male who cried wolf because the trans folks are often the ones crying “wolf,” and they hate irony almost as much as using the right restroom.

There’s no point in explaining that America First people aren’t racist, just like there’s no point in demonstrating that Donald Trump is not only not literally Hitler, but not Hitler in any sense of the word, nor Hitler adjacent in any way, shape, or form. Trump is a lot of things, but a disciplined, hard-core ideologue who obsesses over the lives of others to the point of starting programs against them is not one of them. It’s all of a kind with the mental defectives who don those red handmaiden costumes to warn of the Trumpian sexual repression that awaits them at some date that is ever receding into the future. Yeah, there’s nothing Donald Trump hates more than a beautiful, uncovered woman. That’s why he spent the first 40 years in the public eye, wandering around Manhattan with his burka-clad concubines.

That it is all so embarrassingly stupid may actually be the point of the exercise. Remember that the leftists have this thing demonstrating their fealty to the movement by loudly and publicly proclaiming that which is obviously, utterly untrue. By abdicating any shred of dignity in this way, they sacrifice their own integrity on the altar of Marxist nonsense. “Look at me! Look what I’m willing to do for the cause! Trump is Hitler! Men can have vaginas! Joe Biden is honest and not at all demented! I will say what must be said to prevail! This is the depth of my commitment!”

It’s easy to see this as insane, but it should be seen as insidious. Certainly, there are stupid people who believe this nonsense. Rep. Jasmine Crockett comes to mind, as she always does when the word “stupid” gets tossed around. But others aren’t so dumb. They’re intelligent in the sense that they’re able to process information and do not need to be reminded to breathe. They understand that no, Donald Trump is not Hitler or even Hitlerish. They just don’t care. They assume that those listening to them are either stupid enough to believe them, which is a satisfactory outcome, or, better, that the listeners will appreciate the depths of their commitment as demonstrated by lying, loudly and publicly, for the good of the party.

Normal people just think it’s stupid, and that’s kind of a problem. All the people susceptible to this nonsense have long ago been self-selected and enlisted in the struggle. The challenge now is to appeal to the masses, and the masses don’t see stating obvious mistruths as either persuasive or honorable. Why would they listen to someone who’s telling them that Trump is a dictator when they just voted for Trump? The underlying premise is that Trump’s rule is illegitimate, but a plurality and near majority of Americans voted for Trump, meaning when you call Trump “Hitler,” you’re basically telling nearly half of Americans that they have no legitimate claim to participate in their own governance via elections. A lot of Americans, particularly those of us who escaped from communist countries like my wife or served their country in war like me, take that personally. It stops being funny when the real message becomes clear – that our attempts to act as American citizens are morally illegitimate, not because of anything we’ve done or Trump did, but because the Hitler hollerers are mad that they’re not in office anymore.

So, what do they do? They can hardly go harder. What’s harder than the malignant Austrian housepainter? What are they going to say, that he’s Double Secret Hitler? When you cross the Hitler line, there’s not much of anywhere else to go. They could focus on his personal proclivities, and they have, and Americans have made their peace with those allegations that they believe and ignored the ones they don’t. But when calling somebody a sex pervert, racist, reincarnation of Hitler only earns a shrug, you can’t really double down. You’ve already tripled down.

Now, they could go in the other direction. They could attack Trump and his policies substantively. But this has several problems, not the least of which is that his policies are substantively awesome. One is that they don’t know how to do this. Leftists haven’t had to argue for decades. It’s the “The Daily Show” effect. They are smart, you see, so they don’t contend with the ideas of the bad people; they mock the bad people. The bad people are unworthy of having their ideas refuted. They should simply accept that they suck and submit. But what happens when the normal people stop caring about your insults and jibes? Then you’ve got nothing.

Plus, there’s another problem – if you meaningfully contend with the views of the bad people, your own side is going to accuse you of normalizing them. This is weird because these people are normal. But the left’s strategy in this century has been to place every idea besides those it embraces outside of the allowed range of views. The natural response of the American populist movement has been to accept that challenge – we’re not going to argue with them either. We’re just going to take power, use it to the fullest, and let them cry about it, because they’re going to cry one way or the other.

That’s the Hitler part, the part where we win an election and dare to impose our policies. That’s what Trump’s done in the last couple of months. He’s made no apologies for using the powers the Constitution invests in the presidency. This freaks out the left because they’ve been able to browbeat past Republicans, including Trump during his first term when he was surrounded by squishes for much of it, into not using the full scope of their authority. Perhaps having the left try to put him in jail for the rest of his life, if not murder him, gave Trump a different perspective this time. Now, he’s using his constitutional powers as intended, which doesn’t make him Hitler. It makes him worse than that to the left. It makes him effective.