Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is certain that President-elect Trump is not Adolf Hitler, but that didn’t stop him from comparing him to the Nazi leader in a Monday night op-ed.
Cohen wrote that Trump is “manifestly” not an anti-Semite and is not “another Hitler.” Then he proceeded to say that under Trump, America may become another Weimar, the German state that preceded Nazi Germany.
“Now, ask yourself what might happen if there were a huge terrorist incident on American soil,” he said. “Might this man of little knowledge and no restraint attempt to suspend civil liberties? … I have too much faith in America and its institutions to think that Weimar is the future. It is, however, a warning, not something that shouldn’t be discussed, but something that should be mulled.”
In September, Cohen drew another non-parallel between Trump and Hitler.
“I realize that the name Hitler has the distractive quality of pornography and so I cite it only with reluctance,” he wrote at the time. “Hitler, however, was not a fictional creation but a real man who was legally chosen to be Germany’s chancellor, and while Trump is neither an anti-Semite nor does he have designs on neighboring countries, he is Hitlerian in his thinking.”
