Opinion | I’m starting to think Donald Trump is sounding like Hitler on purpose

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Sorry! I know! You are sick of hearing about Donald Trump! “Don’t worry,” people keep saying. Donald Trump did just promise to “root out” the internal enemies who “live like vermin” in our country, but he only might be the next president. Wp Get the full experience. Choose your plan ArrowRight Trump calls political enemies 'vermin,' echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini I don’t mean to worry you, but people are running around with their hair on fire, saying they are suffering from intense, nauseating levels of déjà vu, and those people are historians. I don’t like seeing historians this stressed out. If something in my house has to emit an ominous beeping, I want it to be the alarm clock, not the smoke detector.

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“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump announced on Veterans Day. And when people complained that sounded like something Adolf Hitler would say, a spokesman responded that “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” Which, to be fair, also sounds like something Hitler would say. When you say, “What you just said sounds very much like Hitler’s rhetoric,” you don’t want that to be taken as a challenge. The response you are hoping for is something more like: “Oh no! That was not how we meant to sound, and we are going to leave political life and rethink everything about ourselves and hope that by our final day, we can say we atoned a little bit.”

This is not a problem that most candidates have! Ominous, dictatorial rhetoric is not a hard thing to avoid for most candidates. Except possibly for the ones who are running for school boards on the platform of “Let’s ban books,” which also, candidly, I do not love. I can see accidentally saying something like, “I love to stand on a balcony” or “I am interested to see more fashion by Hugo Boss,” but those are not the kinds of things we are talking about. You cannot just “oops” your way into dehumanizing huge swaths of the population.

But even more ominous is the fact that they are not saying anything like, “What a horrible mistake! We’d better go rethink our lives!” They are saying, “We will crush you for suggesting such a thing!” Trump’s spokesman later clarified that he meant to say “their sad, miserable existence” rather than critics’ “entire existence.” Which is, again, not making this better!

Frankly, I am worried. And hearing from Joe Biden’s Priorities USA PAC, one of those enormous vats of money that I guess the Supreme Court decided was the best way to support political candidacies, that the election will be “tough” but “winnable” is not soothing, either. “Winnable” is, I think, the bare minimum baseline for an election. If it is not “winnable” you have ceased to have a democracy. Which some people would, it sounds like, love!

When the alternative is being slowly lowered into a vat of grizzlies, you want better than a “Well, I guess we’ll see!” So I am feeling mildly stressed. And I’m not even a historian! I am just some person!

To those who say, “Just because Trump is using openly fascist language now, and his team is threatening to crush people who point this out, doesn’t mean that he’s going to do fascist things when elected. And just because he has promised to round up undocumented immigrants and put them into camps, and to fire huge swaths of federal employees and surround himself with loyalists, and to get revenge on his political enemies, those things also don’t mean that he’s going to do fascist things when elected.” Well, sure. Maybe language is meaningless! But what a convenient time to suddenly start operating on the assumption that language is meaningless!

Sure, he might forget! Or he might magically become an entirely different person! But those things seem unlikely! And, personally, I would rather not take that chance. If someone is announcing specific plans for rooting out internal enemies, I want to hear better reassurances than “Maybe he will forget” or “Maybe when he said that he would do that, he suddenly decided that the words meant something different.”

He is still the GOP front-runner! I am not encouraged by the fact that millions of people continue to support him; when you do that, that means that you heard somebody referring to his opponents as “vermin” and thought, “That’s fine. That doesn’t mean us. That means you,” and that’s not a great place to be as a country!