Trump or Hitler: Who Said It Better?

Want to play a game? 

On Saturday, former President of the United States and professional defendant Donald Trump addressed a rally in the critical battleground state of New Hampshire, with a speech that took the form of a single run-on sentence that is quite possibly still going on somewhere now, almost 48 hours later.

Immediately following this surreal but typical display, Trump critics lit up the news cycle with alarmed comments comparing his anti-immigrant rhetoric to that of Adolf Hitler–specifically in Hitler’s 1925 political memoir Mein Khampf, which the future dictator wrote while imprisoned for attempting to overthrow the government, noted for its unvarnished antisemitism and racism, and for its constantly aggrieved tone, as Hitler portrayed himself as a martyr for the abuses supposedly heaped on the German state by external and internal enemies.

Sound familiar? Horrifyingly familiar?

That’s because Trump’s rhetoric frequently mirrors Hitler’s, assuming of course we grade on a curb allowing for the fact that Trump speaks in any way coherently. Just this one nearly 90-minute Durham address echoed, or in some cases just plain paraphrased sentiments straight out of Hitler’s ’25 tome.

But you don’t have to take our word for it… here are his words for it instead. Let’s play the darkest game of “Who Said it Best.” Also, please vote, no matter how you feel about President Joe Biden we CANNOT do this again.

Trump: They’re poisoning the blood of our country.

Hitler: The poison of foreign races was eating into the body of our people.

Hitler employs this “poison” metaphor dozens of times in the text, and Trump has repeated the sentiment in a variety of forums during this campaign. Fun!

Trump: Our country is not a great country anymore, our country is a mess. You remember KAG, keep america great, I couldn't use it, I said America's not great now.

Hitler: The collapse of our people was overwhelming, and the efforts to put an end to so much misery must also be overwhelming. It would be a bitter and grave error to believe that our people could be made strong again simply by means of our present bourgeois.

Mussolini premised his fascist ideology on the conceit of a once-great nation fallen on hard times, which could be restored to its past greatness through authoritarianism. Hitler employed this message to even greater success, and nearly a century later, Trump translated it into the most consequential political slogan of the 21st century. Cute!

Trump: The handlers are making the banks rich and the banks discriminate against conservatives. [...] Nobody knows the banking industry better than me and I’m not going to let them take advantage of you.

Hitler: Their sole task is to break the national backbone of the people, thus preparing the nation to become the slaves of international finance.

Unsurprisingly, Hitler was critical of banks and “finance” as alleged tools of Jewish conspiracy. Trump tends to emphasize financial conspiracies in more general terms. This is truly the worst timeline. Y'all we can't go through this again.

Trump: RINOs [...] will betray you just like they betrayed me.

Hitler: I intensely loathed the whole gang of miserable party politicians who had betrayed the people.

Fundamental to the appeal of Hitler’s message was the presumption that other politicians had betrayed the national trust. Also, this is basically plagiarism at this point.

Trump: New Hampshire is going to weed out the insincere RINOs.

Hitler: When the individual is no longer burdened with his own consciousness of blame in this regard, then and only then will he have that inner tranquillity and outer force to cut off drastically and ruthlessly all the parasite growth and root out the weeds.

Along with extermination, weeding is a (pardon the term) evergreen metaphor among eliminationist thinkers. Yeah, give this guy the nuke codes, that's a great idea!

Trump: Joe Biden and the Democrat party are incapable of solving any problem, they haven't solved anything, they've only created problems.

Hitler: The blame for this must be attributed to those utterly incompetent people who have no natural endowments to qualify them for statesmanship and yet have been governing our nation.

Trump: We will make America powerful again; we will make America wealthy again; we will make America strong again.

Hitler: Our task to-day is to make our nation powerful once again by re-establishing a strong and independent State.

Trump: We will once again have peace through strength.

Hitler: All those through whose veins kindred blood is flowing will find peace and rest in their common REICH.

Trump is probably quoting Reagan with his “peace through strength” comment, for the record. Gross.