Donald Trump Jr. just played the Nazi card.
“You see the Nazi platform from the early 1930s,” the son of the president told One America News late Wednesday night, “and you look at it compared to the DNC platform of today, you’re saying, ‘Man, those things are awfully similar’ to a point where it’s actually scary.”
Except no, the modern Democratic Party is not at all like those Nationalist Socialists who seized control of Germany, who raped Europe, and who systematically slaughtered six million Jews and another nine million other “undesirables.”
The unfortunate equivocation came when Trump Jr. was walking the red carpet ahead of a screening of Dinesh D’Souza’s new film “Death of Nation.” In that revisionist masterstroke, D’Souza argues, among other things, that Adolf Hitler was somehow a liberal, that Democrats are the intellectual heirs of his murderous ideology, and that President Trump represents the second-coming of Abraham Lincoln here to save the country from a second Civil War.
Of course Donald Jr. loved all of it.
“You have a bunch of kids in dreadlocks running around screaming about fascism and all these things,” he continued, “you’re like, ‘Wait a second, have you actually taken a history class?’” But one wonders about the education of the eldest Trump because his comparison isn’t just ham-fisted, it is incredibly dangerous.
It is true that the favorite ad hominem of the Left is the revisionist kind. Rather than argue, many slander by dismissing conservatives as fascists or Nazis or whatever historical bad actor comes to mind. It is also true that fascism hews closer to modern liberalism on the tree of political philosophy. Plenty on the Right, Jonah Goldberg foremost among them, have detailed the roots of liberal fascism.
None of this dismisses the rhetoric coming from Trump Jr.’s mouth. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is the furthest thing from a Fuhrer and, while the newest crop of democratic socialists want to nationalize entire industries, no one at the DNC is hell-bent on world domination. Under a microscope, it may be possible to trace liberal and fascist DNA. Sure. Fine. Whatever. But that doesn’t make it less of a slander to compare any American party of today to the mass murders of yesterday.
What Trump Jr. doesn’t even realize is that his ad hominem attacks are no better than those of the Left. By aping their alarmism, he encourages his supporters to see opponents as enemies to be destroyed, not to be persuaded.
