There is a viciousness in comparing former President Donald Trump to Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Two assassination attempts have been made on Trump’s life, on July 13 and Sept. 15. On Sept. 4, less than a couple of months after the first attempt on Trump’s life, that comparison turned up again in a convoluted and foolish 30-second ad as part of a $1 million effort by the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) to convince Jewish voters to cast their ballots for the Democrats in the U.S. elections in November.
Overlain with a looping, addled voice of self-importance and stultifying music that bursts in and out, the video jolts from scene to scene, first of Hitler, then marching Nazis, then Hitler, then Trump, Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong Un, pans to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, then to Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance and so on.
Splice and dice as they have, the video producers cut and pasted images and quotes together that are so incongruously out of context that the 30-second by-product might have embarrassed one or two of the hardiest of the plagiarist professors unable to define antisemitism.
“Vote,” the viewer is … ordered? The word appears on screen in a yellow tone reminiscent of the yellow star, followed by the words, “Before it’s too late.”
The Jewish ad producers could instead have watched pertinent, intact videos on Hitler, Nazism, fascism and tyranny by authentic professors such as Thomas Sowell. They could also have scoped Prager University on these subjects. And all for free, with no essays or exams.
The JDCA would then have been faced with the dilemma of returning the ad costs from their $1 million budget to the donors, who could have reallocated the funds, for example, to campaigning for the fast-diminishing rights of Jewish students running the gauntlets of hatred each day on their way to lectures and trying to leave university libraries without being assaulted.
Having watched some of the videos and learned a bit about who Hitler and the Nazis actually were and what fascism and tyranny are, this is what the JDCA ad producers and donors should know when they next try running false parallels of Trump and Hitler.
Hitler ruled for 12 years in his brutally imposed dictatorship. Trump was in office for a single, four-year term in a historic democracy.
Hitler raided, divested and siphoned off financial institutions and had his personal accountant take violent possession of works of art for Hitler’s private ownership. Trump gave away his presidential salary and his personal wealth dropped by the time he left office.
Hitler practiced the occult, which involved tearing babies and children apart. Trump brought Christmas back to the White House.
Hitler ranted and raved in speeches full of bile, venom and seething hatred. In his speeches, Trump details policies, analyses, considers, poeticizes, empathizes and listens to the crowd.
Hitler’s rage at any slight was terrifying and his revenge swift and cruel, usually resulting in the offender’s death. In America during Trump’s presidency, people could be seen wearing T-shirts of Trump as Hitler, and the wearers all returned home from their shopping.
Hitler met disagreement and dissent with summary torture and execution. Trump either reassigned or dismissed those who disagreed with him and his policies.
Hitler brought total war and ruination to the world, with millions of people being murdered, killed and maimed, the Holocaust forever scarring human history. There were no new wars during Trump’s administration. A phased withdrawal from Afghanistan was prepared. The momentous Abraham Accords were agreed upon, ending decades of stoked-up hostilities between the Israeli and Arab signatories, and Sudan, which was just beginning to recover from its genocidal wars, was sufficiently stable, enabling it to participate in the process.
Hitler tyrannized, then militarized and then devastated the economy. Trump opened up the economy and developed it until it flourished.
Hitler bridged a continuum with Europe’s dark past of antisemitism and added the Holocaust to its murderous ledger of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, all of them underlain with specifically formulated laws. The Jewish people had their villages, businesses, properties and possessions attacked, burnt down, confiscated or stolen. Millions were enslaved and sent to death camps on an industrial scale. Germany methodically and systematically exported organized, fascist Nazi ideological antisemitism to the Arab world and the rest of the world.
Trump’s family had a long history of supporting the Jewish people and the Jewish state. His father, Fred Trump, unwaveringly supported the Jews during the Second World War. He bought Israel Bonds. In 1952 he donated a plot of land and funds enabling Rabbi Israel Wagner, a Polish Holocaust survivor, to build a synagogue and community center, the Beach Haven Jewish Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., to serve the neighborhood full of Holocaust survivors and U.S. Army veterans. Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, married an Orthodox Jewish man, Jared Kushner, and converted to Judaism. Kushner was appointed by Trump to conduct the Abraham Accords. In one of his greatest acts, Trump relocated the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, its rightful place in the capital of Israel.
Hitler’s obsession with “race polluting” drove his persecution of blacks and people of mixed race, whom he murdered, beginning with their forced sterilization. Trump forged business alliances with the black communities and black unemployment fell to its lowest in the history of America. He made a government commitment of $255 million in annual funding for historically black colleges and universities so they could not only get by, but also thrive.
When Hitler’s personal fiber was tested, he is said to have shot himself. After Trump was shot and wounded, he immediately stood up and shouted to the crowd, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” After the second assassination attempt, Trump vowed, “I’ll never surrender!”
This is not about whether a person would vote for or against Trump. If Hitler had been like Trump, the world would be very different today. Instead, an intense and lethal form of antisemitism and hatred has spread far and wide and seeped deep into many people’s psyche as the Jewish world is, once again, at war for survival. The producers of that election campaign ad would not have worn the T-shirt in Hitler’s Europe or, indeed, anywhere else. Of course, as its Jewish producers well know, this malicious ad should not have been made.
