Trump and Hitler: The Similarities Are Chilling

Eight years ago I wrote a blog called “Trump and Hitler”. It drew comparisons between Donald Trump, who’d just burst onto the American political scene with his presidential candidacy, with the German dictator and maniacal mastermind of the Nazi Holocaust. It flashed an early warning sign of Trump’s flirtation with authoritarianism, and cautioned against lulling one’s self into a false sense of security that the atrocities in 1940’s Europe could never happen again, especially here in America.

At the time, very few in the media were comparing Trump to Hitler. Or comparing the horror of Nazi Germany to Trump’s behavior here. It was actually frowned upon in mainstream circles, considered a dramatic overstatement, and was also viewed as an affront to Holocaust victims and their families. As a Jew and as someone with functioning eyes and ears, I respectfully disagreed.

To the contrary, I wrote, it was to draw chilling foundational parallels between Hitler’s genocide, the hateful propaganda and scapegoating that preceded it, and the kind of dangerous demagoguery that was being spewed daily from Trump’s mouth. And, that we cannot be afraid to make such comparisons, because doing so gives the hate-mongers and Nazi-lovers a free pass.

Huffington Post, on whose front page my pieces regularly appeared, refused to publish…