BY MOSHE HILL OPINION COLUMNS OCTOBER 15 2024
Last week, former President Donald Trump made a special trip to the Ohel in Queens on the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks in Israel. There, he was joined by Ben Shapiro, arguably the most famous non-rabbinical religious Jew in America, so they could say a prayer at the final resting place of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
The pictures that went around social media would be considered unremarkable to the casual observer, but to the Jewish Trump voter, they were anything but. Seeing Trump don a black kippah and place a stone on the Rebbe’s grave in commemoration of those killed a year previously was nothing short of a magnificent display of adoration for the Jewish people. There are many things that Trump could have done that would have taken less time and less effort (Kamala Harris, for example, put some dirt on a pomegranate tree outside the Vice President’s residence for some reason), yet there he was, flying to New York, a state that has civilly and criminally prosecuted him, a state that he was driven out of, but a state that is home to more Jews than any other in America.
The maddening thing about this, however, is the continued accusation from Trump’s detractors that he is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. The New Republic published an issue with a picture of Donald Trump with a Hitler mustache and haircut. People Magazine, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and others all wrote op-eds saying that Trump’s deportation plan was “Hitlerian.” Politico claimed that it watched 20 Trump rallies and they were “a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology.” Democratic strategist James Carville said about Trump’s planned October 27 rally in New York, “I did not realize [Trump] was going to schedule a rally at Madison Square Garden to mimic the Nazi rally of 10 February 1939.”
There is only one natural conclusion to draw from these comparisons. Either these people don’t know what Hitler did, or they don’t think what he did was all that terrible. We have already had a Trump presidency. At no point during his presidency did he create and execute a sophisticated plan to round up and exterminate any group of people. In fact, under Trump, there was less war, less terrorism, more economic prosperity, and even fewer deportations than Obama.
Assuming they are not completely ignorant of the crimes of Hitler, the only assumption is that they are willing to downplay them to score cheap political points against Trump. The problem is that continual use of the comparison not only makes those points worth less, it influences the younger generation. If you were constantly told that Trump is Hitler, then you would have to assume that Hitler was basically a low-tax politician who thought that deporting illegal immigrants was a high priority. You would, essentially, think that Hitler was not so bad.
The fact is that Hitler’s ideology was one that he obsessed over for decades prior to his ascent to power. It was not about fixing the problems of the day; it was about rooting out the main threat to what Hitler considered a pure Aryan race – that threat being the Jews. Trump is neither obsessed with racial purity nor has been fomenting his ideology for decades prior to entering politics. Trump is as reactionary a figure as we’ve ever seen in America. He sees a problem, and he attempts to solve it. He saw ISIS; he gave his military heads the tools they needed to defeat ISIS. He saw an aggressive North Korea; he used credible threats of force to calm Kim Jong Un down. He saw an expanding Russia; he shut down Nord Stream 2 and used his bully pulpit to get NATO countries to pay more for their own security. He deals with all these issues the same way he deals with his political opponents: hitting back when he’s hit.
This is far from Hitlerian. To compare him to Hitler is an insult to the 6 million who died and the millions who survived. Trump is the most philo-semitic and pro-Israel president in American history. The notion that he’s a megalomaniac despot who seeks genocide and global domination would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. Perpetuating this myth is an injustice. Those who spread this lie do not care about the ramifications of their actions. The only thing they deserve is to lose this election to prove to them how absurd their claim was in the first place.
