ONE MONTH AFTER CAMPAIGN’S FINAL CONVULSION, A MOMENT OF PEACE. It seems like years, but it was just one month ago that the media effort to stop President-elect Donald Trump reached its final, most desperate phase in the closing days of the 2024 campaign. The Atlantic published an article quoting two unnamed sources who said they heard Trump say, some time during his first term in office, that “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” That led the virulently anti-Trump publication to speculate about what it called Trump’s “evident desire to wield military power, and power over the military, in the manner of Hitler and other dictators.”

The article set off days of fevered Trump/Hitler speculation in some media outlets. And then, the Hitler talk broadened with the discussion of Trump’s rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, scheduled a few days later on Oct. 27. Many commentators compared the event to the infamous Nazi rally held at the Garden in 1939. For example, after calling Trump a fascist, former rival Hillary Clinton said Trump would be “reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.”