By invoking the Holocaust in criticizing President Trump’s words and deeds, critics may believe they are performing a valuable service in raising alarms about creeping tyranny in the U.S.
In reality, they are only helping Trump.
To be sure, critics may not believe Trump is literally the second coming of Hitler, or that we are currently living in a Nazi state. Yet that hasn’t stopped many of them from using their platforms to declare it loudly, write about frightening parallels, send out tweets comparing Trump’s immigration policy to Auschwitz, or from promoting Trump-Hitler memes. Others have simply argued that Trump and his supporters don’t deserve tempered rhetoric.
Michael Hayden, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency who invoked Auschwitz-Birkenau to criticize the family separation policy, later explained that, “I showed the picture of Birkenau in 1944, but my story is Berlin 1933. You had a new government in power with a cult of personality, a cult of nativism, a cult of untruth, a cult where it was acceptable to punish the marginalized segments of society…I’m not saying we’re becoming Nazis. But…the way I described it to myself before I hit send was, the skies are darkening, and I want to send up a flare.”
Over 1.1 million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, so of course it isn’t 1944 in America, but we aren’t close to being in 1933, either. In that year, Hitler became chancellor and claimed “emergency” powers that suspended rights to assemble, to freedom speech and of the press, and effectively allowed him to enact laws without parliament. In Trump’s America, we’ve seen regular nationwide protests, a media that has rediscovered its legitimate adversarial role in society, and harsh denunciations of the president from politicians, athletes, movie stars, and business leaders. In response, the perpetrators have been largely subjected to mean tweets. It’s also worth remembering that eight years before gaining power, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had written about the extermination of “vampire” Jews.
So not only is it inaccurate to describe what America is today as being what Nazi Germany was in 1944, it is also ridiculous to compare it to Germany in 1933 or to compare Trump to Hitler even in 1925. The comparisons are inaccurate at any point in the history of Nazism, without even getting into the broader historical differences between Weimar Germany and contemporary America.
The fact that Nazi comparisons are so demonstrably false means that those who resort to such comparisons are actually helping Trump and his supporters defend objectionable actions, such as the harsh realities of the child separation policy, or his defenses of totalitarian leaders such as Kim Jong Un.
The problem with comparing things to the Holocaust is that very few events in world history, if any, are comparable to the Holocaust, so by resorting to such comparisons, critics are lowering the bar for Trump and his defenders.
Instead of defending the merits of a given policy, defenders can distract from the issue by swatting away unhinged Nazi Germany comparisons.
A world in which all Trump supporters have to prove is that his policies are not akin to Hitler is a world in which it becomes easier to get away with morally indefensible policies just because they still come up well short of Nazism.
It’s bad enough to downplay the experiences of the millions of innocent people who were systematically slaughtered by Nazis by trying to compare them to U.S. immigration policy. But even those unswayed by such considerations should learn to recognize that Nazi comparisons only make Trump and his allies less accountable rather than more. Instead of reaching for historically inaccurate comparisons that weaken their case, they should focus on criticizing policies on their own.
