Like all mediocre white men with an inexplicable cult following, Beto O’Rourke’s only selling point is that he feels things. No, he’s, like, really, extra deep, and when he gets deep, he gets angry. The 2020 hopeful won a few good headlines after yelling about Trump and publicly crying after the white supremacist El Paso shooting, so why wouldn’t he criticize the president by comparing him to … Adolf Hitler?
As you may recall from two and a half news cycles ago, Trump decided to double down on his demands that Jewish Americans have dual loyalty toward Israel, either through idiocy or transactional bigotry, promulgating an anti-Semitic trope as old as time. At best, Trump’s remarks were moronic. At worst, they were anti-Semitic. In reality, they probably reflect how Trump feels about all demographics: He likes or dislikes them entirely based on how beneficial they are to him, personally.
Any of the above explanations are totally believable and totally damning of Trump. Beto, however, decided to take it a mile and a half further, likening the remarks to the Third Reich.
“I can think of nothing more un-American, more resonant with what you might see in the Third Reich, than what the president said. And if we’re unwilling to see this for what it is…then we’re going to lose this country,” O’Rourke says of Pres. Trump’s comments on disloyalty pic.twitter.com/pZ5X3IfQOk
— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 22, 2019
Robert Francis O’Rourke is why Trump wins.
This is the playbook: Trump says something bad, some conservatives condemn it, liberals then equate him to literally Hitler, and then conservatives have to defend him. Because, even at his worst, he’s not literally Hitler. Almost no one on the planet is.
This isn’t the first time this week that Beto’s likened Trump to the Third Reich. While discussing Trump referring to our illegal immigration influx as an “infestation,” the former congressman said that he’d “expect human beings being described as an infestation in the Third Reich,” rather than in America. But saying that a word choice would be more appropriate used by a genocidal regime is still a step less beyond the pale than claiming he’s intentionally “resonant” of the Third Reich. Both are bad, but the latter is worse. (See how scaling and nuance works!)
If you’re bored with Beto’s antics, too bad. Thanks to the DNC’s rules, he’s secured his place on the debate stage through October. A lesser man would realize that his single-digit and sinking poll numbers mean he’s never going to win this thing, but just remember: You didn’t burn through billions to lose to Ted Cruz and decide it was a sign that you should run for president.
