On Thursday, the phrase “Trump Isn’t Hitler” began trending on Twitter. Now, before you begin wondering whether some semblance of rationality suddenly descended on the chaotic foodfight that is Twitter, understand that the phrase only trended because it was part of the title of an article claiming that, at root, Trump is sort of Hitler. That article came from Charles Blow of The New York Times, and was titled in full, “Trump Isn’t Hitler. But His Lies…”
The article isn’t merely flawed in terms of argument. It’s also one of the most brutally written major op-eds I’ve ever seen run in a major publication. It contains this paragraph, for example:
Maybe I have crossed the ink-stained line of the essay writer, where Hitler is always beyond it. But I don’t think so. Ignoring what one of history’s greatest examples of lying has to teach us about current examples of lying, particularly lying by the “president” of the most powerful country in the world, seems to me an act of timidity in a time of terror. It is an intentional self-blinding to avoid offending frail sensibilities. I have neither time nor patience for such tiptoeing. I prefer the boot of truth to slam down to earth like thunder, no matter the shock of hearing its clap.
Why are “boots of truth” slamming down to earth like thunder, creating a clap? What freshman writing seminar teaching assistant failed to train Blow not to write self-indulgent phrases like “ink-stained line of the essay writer”? Why would “intentional self-blinding” avoid offending others’ sensibilities? Wouldn’t self-silencing better achieve that effect? Why must Blow constantly use the passive voice, turning each sentence into a useless thicket?
These and other mysteries of the universe go unanswered in Blow’s wretched piece.
But the really stunning thing about the piece is Blow’s trite connection between Hitler’s lies and Trump’s. After disowning any connection between genocidal Hitler and Trump, Blow proceeds to tie together “Hitler the liar” and “Trump the liar.” How so? By once again relying on the cliché of the “big lie.”
Now, I have been pretty clear that I think Donald Trump is dishonest on a routine basis. Hell, I cut a video during the campaign to that effect:
But is Trump a Hitler-style liar? Not even close. Hitler’s lies were clever and purposeful, not self-inflating verbal tics. Hitler didn’t succeed in his lies because they were big, contrary to common opinion — he succeeded because they were difficult to debunk, being broad claims about events behind the scenes, repeated by millions of others (see, for example, the stabbed-in-the-back myth about World War I).
The Hitlerian conceit that the big lie is always easier to promulgate than the small lie isn’t actually true. It’s the vague lie, often repeated, that is easiest to push. Big lies — lying that the sun is green or that government is turning the frogs gay — are notoriously difficult to push or maintain for any serious period of time.
But according to Blow, Trump follows the diktats of the Big Lie theory.
Trump is no Hitler, but the way he has manipulated the American people with outrageous lies, stacked one on top of the other, has an eerie historical resonance. Demagogy has a fixed design.
This gives far too little credit to the American people. Most Americans don’t trust Trump. In the 2016 exit polls, 64% of Americans said they didn’t find Trump honest or trustworthy. The reason Trump won isn’t because people think he’s honest; it’s because they think Democrats are just as dishonest or more so. But because Blow can’t concede the dishonesty of his own side, he is forced into the position of calling Americans fools, easily taken in by Trump’s Hitlerian dissembling.
Now, Blow is correct that Trump has some fascinating verbal tics that demonstrate when he’s fibbing, “a lot of people are saying” and “I was told” among them. But Blow then blows this small insight all out of proportion:
This is not a simple fear of the truth; it is a weaponizing of untruth. It is the use of the lie to assault and subdue. It is Trump doing to political ends what Hitler did to more brutal ends: using mass deception as masterful propaganda. … Trump isn’t necessarily a direct threat to your life — unless of course you are being kept alive by health care that he keeps threatening, or if you’re in Puerto Rico reeling in the wake of two hurricanes — but he is very much a threat to your quality of life.
This is where most Americans get off the boat. If we’re talking about weaponizing untruth, which is more damaging: Trump telling easily debunkable lies, or President Obama lying repeatedly for years that if you liked your doctor, you could keep your doctor? Which untruth was more “weaponized”: Trump stating that Obama wiretapped him, or Obama stating that racism was inextricably embedded in America’s DNA?
So no, Trump isn’t Hitler, even in his lies. And please, somebody at The New York Times, hire an editor for Charles Blow.