The Left's Fascism Follies

So actually, the comrades don't really think that Trump's the American Hitler

Better not take their word for it

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A bit of backing-and-forthing on Notes has confirmed my long-held suspicion that Democrats, progressives, and leftists are just blowing smoke with their claims that Donald Trump is the American Hitler, and that the MAGA mobs are his stormtroopers. No, in the great tradition of American politics, it’s just a smear.

As is well known by now, the comrades of the Resistance profess to believe that the former president is a fascist who is plotting to eviscerate “our democracy,” tear up the Constitution, abolish civil rights, imprison his political enemies, and set himself up as Dictator for Life, as detailed in Project 2025. It was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump that provided me with a method of testing the sincerity of those who make such claims.

I reasoned as follows. If the above claims are true, then Trump is indeed the American Hitler, and we’re living through the Trumpian Kampfzeit: prelude to the Fourth (American) Reich. Now, personally I think that’s nuts, but lots of people on the Left beg to differ. Should they be taken at their word? Do they really believe it? Here’s my test question: If you’re sincere in your claim that Donald Trump constitutes “an existential threat to our democracy,” then shouldn’t he be stopped by any means necessary, violence included?

Assuming that Trump really is the American Hitler, that his election would mean the end of “our democracy” and the establishment of a fascist regime, the answer to this question must obviously be yes. But I didn’t get a single yes. Now that someone has tried to assassinate the former president, the comrades are falling all over themselves to renounce violence. Apparently, their heroic defense of “our democracy” would never rise to the level of armed resistance.

With no intention of doing so, Trump’s would-be assassin served the Left with a brutal reality check: Here’s how you deal with an existential threat to our democracy. But most people on the broad Left—indeed, the vast majority—would never dream of assassinating Donald Trump—not really. Mendacious, malicious, wrong-headed though they may be, they’re not killers. And it follows, therefore, that they don’t believe what they say about Trump. The truth is that they think he’s a bad man whose return to the White House would be bad for the country, and that’s fair enough. I think much the same of Joe Biden.

But I don’t think that Biden’s the American Stalin. (But Brezhnev? Maybe!) And the comrades don’t think that Trump’s the American Hitler. That’s just the narrative they settled on when it became clear that Trump intended to run for restoration in 2024. Really, it was a kind of extended, long-running negative political ad that turned out to be remarkably ineffective and has now become a positive embarrassment.