![\"trump_hitler1-1-354x354\"](\"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/Trump_Hitler1-1-354x354.jpg\")
<\/a>Hear me out here. This shouldn\u2019t be interpreted as high praise, as \u201cNot Hitler\u201d is a pretty low threshold to cross. One can be all kinds of despicable and still not approach the evil of slaughtering six million people in a deliberate, state-sponsored genocide. One can also be legitimately and justifiably opposed to Trump, frightened by Trump, enraged by Trump, and sickened by Trump even if he doesn\u2019t round up people and put them into gas chambers.<\/p>\nWhich, honestly, he\u2019s not going to do.<\/p>\n
Again, understand the needle I\u2019m trying to thread. Trump\u2019s call to keep all Muslims from entering the country is xenophobia at\u00a0its worst. (He\u2019s backed down to something called \u201cextreme vetting,\u201d but the standards he\u2019s using to accomplish this would essentially accomplish the same goal.) He\u2019s now talking about a Muslim immigrant \u201cregistry\u201d that sounds embryonically Hitler-ish, and so I understand the concerns, and I\u2019m not encouraging complacency. As Trump proposes\u00a0awful things, and he will continue to propose awful things, he needs to be vigorously and unrelentingly opposed, and I intend to be part of that opposition.<\/p>\n
Now for the needle-threading. Is cracking down on Muslim immigration a step toward Muslim concentration camps? Is it a precursor to Trump rounding up Muslim-American citizens and authorizing the police to smash their windows, loot their shops, and throw them into ghettos before engineering a \u201cfinal solution?\u201d And after he\u2019s done purging Islam from America, are we going to see ethnic cleansing against Hispanics or Jews, too?<\/p>\n
All these things are possible, I suppose, but they\u2019re also very, very unlikely. And here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n
In the first place, Trump is not smart enough to be Hitler. Keep in mind that by the time Hitler came to power, he had already written Mein Kampf<\/i> and laid out for the world his rancid reasoning for blaming the Jewish people for all the world\u2019s ills. Hitler was evil, vile, and wrong, but he was not a casual or shallow thinker. One of the reasons he was able to rise to power is that the elites didn\u2019t take him seriously, and they assumed he didn\u2019t really mean all the vile things he had said and written. They were horribly wrong. Hitler knew exactly what he wanted to do, and he let the world know well in advance that genocide was at the top of his agenda.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump has not only not written a book; he\u2019s never read a book. I don\u2019t think he\u2019s even read his own books. (Read this piece by the ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal <\/i><\/a>to get the full extent of Trump\u2019s ignorance.) A couple of years before running against Hillary Clinton as a pro-life conservative, he was praising Hillary Clinton as \u201cterrific\u201d and reiterating his support for partial-birth abortion. This is a man without any discernible ideology who believes only in his own ego and whose thinking seems to be a byproduct of\u00a0his bleached and ludicrously-swirled hair. He is only a racist when it\u2019s convenient to be a racist. He lacks the sustained and bilious passion necessary to codify American genocide.<\/p>\n \u201cAh,\u201d I hear you say. \u201cBut what about Steve Bannon<\/i>?\u201d<\/p>\n For those of you living under a rock, you should know that Bannon is Trump\u2019s \u201cwhite supremacist\u201d appointee who will serve as the Karl Rove of the new Trump administration. Ostensibly,\u00a0Trump will be a vapid and thoughtless puppet having his strings pulled by Wormtongue Bannon, who will sneak into the sleeping president\u2019s bedroom every night with wireless earbuds so he can subliminally expose the Puppet Fuehrer to an iPod looped with Nuremberg Rally speeches.<\/p>\n The problem is that the case that Bannon is a \u201cwhite supremacist\u201d is hanging on a pretty thin reed. The smoking gun is a single statement by his ex-wife made in the crucible of a heated divorce, wherein she claimed he didn\u2019t want his daughter to go to school with Jews. The fact that the daughter did, in fact, go to school with Jews would suggest that perhaps one statement from an angry ex-wife is not sufficient to convict Bannon of being a 21st-Century Goebbels. Bannon has been the subject of many supportive columns from Jewish defenders<\/a> who know the man and insist that genocide is not at the top of his agenda, and I\u2019m inclined to believe them.<\/p>\n Once again, do not mistake this as an endorsement, or even a defense, of Steve Bannon, who may well be an anti-Semite. Certainly he\u2019s a thug, a bully, and a bigot. He\u2019s also said a number of things about Mormons<\/a> that demonstrate conclusively that he\u2019s Grade-A pond scum. My point is that pond scum is pond scum, and, generally speaking, I would prefer that pond scum weren\u2019t in the White House.<\/p>\n But pond scum is still a whole lot better than Hitler.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the rhetorical problem of the fact that we\u2019ve seen too many instances of the Boy Who Cried Hitler in recent years. We were told that Bush was Hitler; we\u2019re told that Obama is Hitler. Now that there\u2019s someone who\u2019s exponentially more Hitler-esque than either of the previous Hitlers, we need to be really worried, because, well, this one\u2019s really<\/i> Hitler.<\/p>\n Okay. Maybe this one is. But can we admit, then, that the previous ones were not? And can we also consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this new Hitler may not be Hitler, either?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019mgoing to try and thread a needle here that may not be threadable. So if I fail, it\u2019s Donald Trump\u2019s fault.Indeed, I want to be clear at the outset that a lot of things are Donald Trump\u2019s fault. I have believed, from the outset of the campaign, that he is wholly unfit to be President ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4092"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5176,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4092\/revisions\/5176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}