Donald Trump Is No Hitler, But He's A Dead Ringer For Adenoid Hynkel
When will commentators understand that he actually means what he says?
Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940).
We all had a good horselaugh when Trump lawyer John Lauro said last weekend that when then-President Donald Trump asked then-Vice President Mike Pence to toss out legitimate electoral ballots and substitute phony ones “he asked him in an aspirational way,” and that likewise when Trump told Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” that, too, was an “aspirational ask.” How absurd!
But no small part of the commentariat—David Von Drehle at the Washington Post, David Brooks at the New York Times, etc.—is similarly arguing that Trump just being Trump is not a crime—or anyway, not a crime that a jury will likely convict him of—because everybody knows Trump is a lowlife, that’s part of the deal, and anyway the meritocracy has a lot to answer for. But give me a break. The indictment names Donald Trump, not the Phi Beta Kappa Society or the Council on Foreign Relations. My latest New Republic piece calls out this hand-wringing and reiterates my longstanding distaste for creative explanations for what Trump means when he says something ghastly or tells a deliberate lie. Trump isn’t Adolf Hitler, but I’m ready to compare him to Adenoid Hynkel, the parodic Hitler that Charlie Chaplin portrayed in The Great Dictator, in the famous speech where Hynkel raves like a lunatic in mock-German as a polite commentator translates everything he says euphemistically. “Demotcrazie stunk!” translates to “Democracy is … fragrant” and so on. Anyway, you can read my piece here.
It’s bizarre that guys like Brooks and Von Drehle are still stuck in the “Trump’s a silly billy doofus” mindset after all this time.
I think even worse than either the Brooks or Von Drehle columns is this excrement by Jack Goldsmith, which call the prosecution of Trump "unseemly" because it comes so close to the election, as if Trump running is some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, and ropes in the Mueller investigation (which resulted in numerous convictions) and the Hunter Biden nonsense (which resulted in charges, and a disputed plea deal) as examples of biased prosecutions. In other words, he treats Republican complaints as good faith ones, and takes them at face value, while claiming he is not engaging in "whataboutism" (spoiler alert: he is). In the end, Trump's charges are a result of the "politicization of crime," regardless of whether or not he committed the crimes and will lead to "tit-for-tat investigations" by some future Republican-led Congress (he somehow misses what's going on with the current one).
What's funny is that Goldsmith ignores Trump's actual politicization of the DOJ: First, when he tried to get Ukraine to give "dirt" on Biden to the DOJ (which is what the first impeachment was about); then he tried to get Jeffrey Clark installed as acting director, in order to shore up the fake electors scheme. One could argue the the politicization of crime goes all the way back to Nixon asking Hoover to go after his "enemies" more aggressively, the Constitution be damned (and even for Hoover that was a bridge too far).
Goldsmith ends with this: "None of these considerations absolve Mr. Trump, who is ultimately responsible for this mammoth mess. The difficult question is whether redressing his shameful acts through criminal law is worth the enormous costs to the country." Clearly, the only way to prevent this from happening again is to not prosecute the person responsible for it happening in 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/opinion/trump-indictment-cost-danger.html