Godwin’s law holds that as an argument grows longer, the probability that one of the people involved will invoke Adolf Hitler or the Nazis approaches 100%.
On Tuesday, that law was put to the test on television, and it passed.
Following President Trump’s annual State of the Union address, MSNBC contributor Jonathan Alter argued that the Republican chief executive adopted tactics similar to those used by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister of propaganda of Nazi Germany, by not mentioning impeachment even once during his speech.
In this manner, Alter argued, Trump had given the impression that his impeachment trial didn’t even exist.
“It actually worked for him,” the MSNBC contributor said. “He is a master marketer, and he understands, as Mark Twain said, that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”
First, Twain did not say that. Second, if we wanted to adopt Alter’s method of argument, we would presumably, at this point, find an example of Goebbels misquoting someone and accuse Alter of engaging in Nazi propaganda tactics. But that would be stupid.
“It’s one thing to lie in tweets, and, you know, the people are absorbing them at different times,” Alter continued, “and it goes through the news cycle. But when you’re doing it repeatedly, in real time, and part of it is Goebbels, the ‘Big Lie.’”
Goebbels famously propounded the theory of the “Big Lie” theory, which holds that a falsehood told often enough by people in power will be accepted eventually as truth by the general populace.
“If you’re saying you’re protecting people with preexisting conditions when you’re in court trying to strip them of those protections at the same moment, that’s not just a lie. That’s a big lie,” Alter said Tuesday, once again comparing the president’s State of the Union address to Nazi tactics.
And all this because Trump failed to mention impeachment in his speech:
Alter’s analysis is not only extraordinarily lazy, jumping right into the Nazi comparisons immediately, but it is also self-defeating.
If one is concerned about Trump and if one believes genuinely that he represents a grave danger to the republic, there is no surer way to discredit oneself and get people to ignore this danger than to scream that the president is like a Nazi. This sort of hair-on-fire analysis does nothing to win over supporters. Alter is preaching only to the far-left choir.
Moreover, the real issue here seems to be a misapprehension on the part of Alter and other Beltway media types that the impeachment trial is front and center in people’s minds.
Guess what? It is not.
They cannot comprehend Trump giving such a speech when his political life is hanging by a thread because they have deluded themselves into thinking that his political life really is hanging by a thread.
As Mark Twain once said, Donald Trump will not be removed from office.
