This project came in many forms, including a plan to deport the Jews to Lublin, Poland instead of Madagascar, but the message was always clear: Get rid of the foreigners, keep Germany German. He played on hatred and ethnic resentment from the start, to be sure, but his original message wasn’t “exterminate the Jews,” it was “deport the foreigners.” Well into his political ascendancy, Hitler’s final solution to the Jewish problem was the Madagascar Project, a scheme to take all the Jews in Europe and forcibly relocate them to the African island of Madagascar, which many Germans falsely believed was where the Jews came from in the first place. In fact, that Hitlerian desire wasn’t even the way Hitler came to power. He leaves Melania’s argument, that the similarity to Hitler lives and dies on Trump’s secret, Hitlerian desire to destroy and kill everything he can reach, unchallenged. But his article focuses mainly on the highest-level machinations by political elites and takes for granted that Hitler was a savant at mobilizing mass support without exploring what made him that way. Jonathan Chait argues that Trump’s similarity to Hitler comes from his ability to play his country’s myopic and advantage-seeking conservative party for all it was worth. It might be that Hitler’s appeal is too disturbing, or too overwritten by years of hindsight, to be anything but glossed over.
But Hitler didn’t start by barking at massive crowds - he started with years of soothing justification, validation, and manipulation of growing numbers of Germans and of the language itself. Every World War II documentary that plays in American high school history classes has the same footage in the same order: A man yells incomprehensibly at a crowd, everybody salutes, and then the camera cuts sharply to German tanks rolling over Polish fields. Where does this perspective come from? For one, Hitler’s speeches aren’t often translated for the students first learning about him. It’s a retrospective view nobody had at the time. The idea that Hitler ever set out to divide his country or hurt his people (that is, the Aryan ones), and that those same people would knowingly and willingly go along with their own destruction, is a perspective that can only come from knowing that the Nazis lost the war and left their cities as smoking piles of rubble. You wait, when Hitler is at the helm he’ll be far too busy to insult the Jews.” In his 1948 book The Language of the Third Reich, German-Jewish professor Victor Klemperer remembers an argument with one of his former students during Hitler’s ascent: “All this fuss and bother about the Jews is only there for propaganda purposes.
Melania doesn’t realize it, but she’s parroting the language of some of Hitler’s earliest supporters. Her husband isn’t Hitler, she insists, because “he wants to help America. That Hitler never existed, and to think of Hitler as a cartoon villain rather than a subtle, persuasive, and above all patient manipulator of his followers is to miss both Hitler’s appeal and Trump’s danger. But both his supporters and opponents are accepting a bad premise - that the image of Hitler Americans are taught in history class-that is, a literally incomprehensible, fully formed creature of evil-is the one everyone should be comparing him to. The fault line is what he actually means by it. One of his latest victims (it can be hard to keep track) is the Jewish community, which saw an anti-Semitic image from a white supremacist message board tweeted out by the campaign with all its implications intact and then shoddily, lazily replaced and recast as a circle - no, as a sheriff’s star - no, as a fun, harmless shape like the one on the cover of the Frozen sticker book.īoth his critics and his apologists have invoked the Holocaust over this saga, but nobody contests what he’s said: There’s too much evidence for that. You know exactly what “sheriff’s star” means.ĭonald Trump’s supporters and opponents have been battling for months over whether the presumptive Republican nominee’s rise, which came on a tide of malice toward every racial, religious, and ethnic group you can think of, makes him like Hitler.
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