SERVICE NOTE: Splitsville will not appear next week, as we take a well-deserved vacation break.
Look, can we all at least agree that Donald Trump is not the second coming of Adolph Hitler? Good.
Because, for one thing, Hitler actually wrote…okay, dictated, the book with his by-line. The only thing Trump is capable of writing at this point is his signature. If, as some speculate, he dictates his Truth Social posts, the results speak—i.e., scream, rant, gibber, and lie—for themselves.
Plus, Hitler was, or at least eventually claimed to be, a vegetarian. Trump scarfs cheeseburgers like nobody’s business. Hitler, early on as Fuehrer, made some audacious and successful military moves. Trump’s “military moves” have been either idiotic (kidnapping some schmuck from Venezuela), useless (killing fishermen in little boats), or abysmal failures (Iran).
So that’s it. Trump is not Hitler, and we’ll say no more about it.
Although, as in the Monty Python sketch about the complete absence of cannibalism in the Royal Navy, when we say there are absolutely no similarities between Hitler and the Nazis, and Trump and his administration, by that we mean that there are some to a certain extent.
Let’s start with the general, unsexy, slightly boring ones. Like Hitler, Trump is using the government for his own evil purposes, rather than overthrowing it. (The idea of Trump throwing anything, like a baseball or a beanbag, is to laff.) And—according to no less an authority than Claude—like Hitler, Trump’s
…plans to acquire Greenland and Panama, defunding foreign aid, mass firing of federal workers, and the Oval Office confrontation with Zelensky —[resembled] the kind of aggressive, boundary-testing behavior associated with 1930s expansionism and institutional disruption.
But the most commonly cited parallel between Trump and Nazis—
…is dehumanizing language toward outsiders. Critics point to Trump’s description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country” as echoing Hitler’s racist rhetoric, and to his use of the word “vermin” for opponents as recalling Nazi propaganda like the 1940 film The Eternal Jew, which juxtaposed footage of rats with Jewish people.
Okay, so that’s bad. In fact it’s loathsome. We have no doubt that Trump chose the word “vermin” precisely because Hitler used it. Immigrants are to Trump as Jews were to Hitler. Does anyone here think that if Trump thought he could get away with constructing death camps for the industrial-scale murder of immigrants, he wouldn’t do it?
In fact, maybe that’s the plan! Many with-it hepcats are concluding that the scale of the buildout of AI data centers is anywhere from five to ten times bigger than the demand will support. If the AI frenzy is a bubble that bursts, it will leave some data centers uncompleted and others completed but with no apparent use. It is easy to imagine Resident Ghoul and High Priest of Evil, Stephen Miller, clicking his heels, saluting smartly, and saying to his boss, “Mein President! I have conceived a glorious idea! We shall seize these idle data centers and convert them into factories for the disposal of our immigrant population, and thus mitigate its pollution of our sacred race, our holy bloodline, and our exalted future!”
Does anyone seriously think Trump would say, “No, Steve. That’s going too far”?
Because once you get past Claude’s general, maybe-Nazi-adjacent similarities, the on-the-nose, Ach-du-Lieber-That’s-a-Nazi examples come thick and fast.
First, of course, are the ICE concentration camps. As of July 20, per The Guardian, there have been 582,040 arrests, while 65,770 people are in detention. Total deportations number 590,600. Some of these people are American citizens. Some have green cards, or have followed proper procedure to get them. The vast majority of them, even if they’re “here illegally,” have built lives, raised families, paid taxes and, in sharp contrast to Trump, obeyed the law. (Come to think about it, has he ever paid taxes?)
The only thing that distinguishes ICE from the Nazi gestapo or the East German Stasi is that the thugs and sadists of the latter two didn’t feel it necessary to hide their faces. So score one for American exceptionalism.
IT’S NATIONAL BACON LOVERS DAY, NATIONAL RADIO DAY, AND WORLD MOSQUITO DAY. SO WHETHER YOU’RE A BACON LOVER, A RADIO, OR A MOSQUITO, CELEBRATE IN A WAY THAT ACTUALLY MEANS SOMETHING.
And then we have the matter of Trump’s use of local police forces. (Here we might pause and utter a prayer of thanks for the fact that Trump, an idiot, has done everything humanly possible to alienate the armed services, from calling them “suckers” and “losers,” to disparaging POW-hero John McCain, to naming cartoon tough guy/bonehead/snot-pomaded Pete Hegseth as SecDef, to declaring that the deployment of a ship full of filthy, starving, suicidal sailors has been “not nearly long enough,” to demanding the replacement of magnetic aircraft carrier catapults with inferior, old-fashioned steam ones because a guy he talked to some years ago preferred them, to asking for a new, expensive fleet of long-outdated destroyers—that could be easily stymied by cheap drones—because he likes the way they look in old war movies.)
Where were we…Oh, yeah: local police. For this we turn to the excellent Dean Blundell, a Canadian writing and podcasting from Toronto about American politics. Last Friday Trump visited the Nassau County Police Academy in Garden City, NY, to endorse the Republican candidate for governor, Bruce Blakeman. As he stood at the podium, behind him were rows and rows of (white) police in uniform. Trump turned to them and said, “I don’t see the people behind me being big on DEI... That’s not a DEI group. I can tell.”
As Blundell put it:
The President of the United States looked at a wall of police officers — sworn to protect a county of 1.4 million people of every race, religion, and background — and publicly sorted them by appearance. He looked at the faces, decided they were the right kind of faces, and told them so. Out loud. On camera. To applause.
That’s not a gaffe. That’s the message. The uniforms weren’t the backdrop for a speech about crime. The whiteness of the uniforms was the backdrop. He was telling his audience: these armed men and women are ours. Look at them. They look like us. They’re with us.
And every officer standing there, in uniform, on the clock, silently became a prop in that message — whether they wanted to be or not. That’s the whole grotesque genius of it. You don’t need every cop to be a loyalist. You just need the picture.
To Trump and his MAGA horde, the letters “D.E.I.” stand for “Everybody Who Isn’t A White Male Christian.” It’s the sort of thing Goebbels would understand—as, indeed, he would understand and applaud Trump’s penchant for putting his face on coins, money, passports, and giant hangings on government buildings. Was the insurrection of January 6 all that different from the Munich Beer Hall Putsch that brought Hitler to public notice? Was there a way to regard the arguably-creepy (and, per CNN, “overwhelmingly white”) Patriot Games and not think about Hitler Youth?
And one more thing: It’s called Communism. A lot of people don’t know that. And it’s back! But look out! It’s just as evil and scary as when the Nazis ran against it in Germany in the 1930’s. The entire Republican Party, Trumpified to the eyeballs, is ready to call anyone they don’t like a “communist.” Who cares if no one—not the people saying it, not the people they say it to—knows what it means? Who cares if Tommy Potatotown (sorry; Tuberville) wouldn’t know a communist if it punched him in the nose and seized his means of production? Republicans are yakking about communism because it beats having to explain why they’ve helped Trump make a disgusting, criminal, dysfunctional mess of the entire US government while Trump himself has succeeded at nothing except grifting, theft, and the destruction of DC architecture.
And that, believe it or not, may be what in the end prevents the Trump administration from successfully imitating the Third Reich. If Trump isn’t Hitler, it’s not for lack of trying. He wants to be Hitler. It’s aspirational. Perhaps we can say that he’s Hitler in spirit. Or he’s a mini-Hitler—a, if you will (and you’d better!), littler Hitler.
The thing is, though, to be a world-historical, murderous dictator whose name will echo forever through the halls of infamy and be spoken by men (and women!) as the very synonym of evil is hard. It’s especially hard if, like Trump, you’re stupid, lazy, insecure, in constant need of the praise of lickspittles, are tailed everywhere by a human printer, given to rages and thunderstorms of spite, and if you’re shielded from bad news so completely that you have no idea what is and isn’t working in your master plan on top of the fact that you’re losing your marbles with an audible clatter and you literally have no idea of what is real.
And so (we said this last year) Trump will succeed in becoming Hitler the way he succeeded at owning casinos. He has done and will continue to do incalculable damage to the Federal government, to the US economy, to America’s reputation and place in the world, to the Earth and its climate, and to the minds, hearts, and souls of most of the American people.
And there’s your Splitsville (our term for a geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations”) angle: In one nation you’ve got Littler Hitler and his Nazi-ish Party, his ICE gestapo, his MAGA cultists, and former television presenter Natalie Harp.
In the other, you’ve got everyone else. And integral to the character of everyone else is the fact that, unlike Germany and Austria (and, for that matter, Russia, China, Japan, France, Great Britain, North Korea, and so many other countries), we have no history of autocratic rule—no royalty, no kaiser, no czar, no emperor. (Yeah, we had a king, once, but that was before we invented the USA. We weren’t ourselves back then.) Trump can ape Putin and Xi and Kim and Orban (and Adolph) all he wants—as the poet says, he can suck dictator dick--but that sort of thing doesn’t fly here. We don’t do autocrat.
So let’s just stop all this silly Hitler talk and start setting up the Nuremberg trials. (There’s a Nuremberg in Pennsylvania, ZIP code 18241. Somebody give ’em a call.)
IN THE SPLIT, THE RED AND THE BLUE STATES HAVE PEACEFULLY SEPARATED INTO TWO COUNTRIES. OF COURSE IT’S FICTION. FOR NOW.
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